Was the Trojan War real? Myth and archaeology

The Greek myths tell of a war between the Greeks and the city of Troy, also called Ilion, Ἴλιον. Paris, a prince of Troy, took Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, home with him. Menelaus’s brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, gathered a huge army and fleet, and the Greeks besieged Troy for ten years. Great heroes, ἥρωες, fought on both sides: Achilles for the Greeks, Hector for the Trojans.

In the end the clever Odysseus had an idea. The Greeks built a big wooden horse, hid their best soldiers inside it and pretended to sail away. The Trojans pulled the horse into their city, thinking it was a gift, a δῶρον. At night the soldiers climbed out, opened the gates, and Troy fell. Is this a true story? Partly, perhaps. Troy was a real city, but the gods, the horse and many of the heroes belong to myth, μῦθος.

Our oldest sources are two epic poems attributed to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, usually dated to the 8th or 7th century BC (scholars disagree on the exact date), centuries after the events they describe. The Iliad does not tell the whole war: it covers a few weeks in the tenth year, the anger of Achilles, and ends with the funeral of Hector. The wooden horse is not in it. It appears in the Odyssey (8.492–520), where a singer tells how Epeius built the horse with Athena’s help and how Odysseus brought it, full of warriors, into the citadel.

The best-known telling of the horse story is Roman: Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid, written in the 1st century BC. There the priest Laocoön warns the Trojans not to trust the horse (2.48–49).

The Greeks themselves treated the war as history. Thucydides (1.10) accepts that it happened, but thinks that Homer, as a poet, made it bigger than it was, for example with his 1,200 ships. Later scholars tried to date it: Eratosthenes placed the fall of Troy in 1184 BC.

Archaeologists place Troy at Hisarlık, a mound in north-western Turkey, 4.8 km from the entrance to the Dardanelles. Frank Calvert dug there in 1863, and Heinrich Schliemann began large excavations in 1870. Schliemann found gold jewellery and called it “Priam’s treasure”, after the king of Troy in the myth. But it comes from Troy II, around 2550–2300 BC, more than a thousand years too early.

The mound holds nine cities, one on top of the other, labelled Troy I to Troy IX. The best candidate for Homer’s Troy is Troy VI (about 1750–1300 BC), with stone walls, τείχη, 5 metres thick and up to 8 metres high, and a lower town that reached about 30 hectares. Bronze arrowheads and spear points from around 1250 BC suggest fighting. The next city, Troy VIIa, was destroyed by fire around 1180 BC.

Texts of the Hittites, the great power of Anatolia, also help. They mention a land called Wilusa, which many scholars link with Ilios, and a people called Ahhiyawa, probably the Mycenaean Greeks, and they describe unrest and rivalry in the region.

Historians do not agree. Many think that behind the legend lies a real memory: one war, or several smaller conflicts, between Mycenaean Greeks and the people of Troy in the 13th or 12th century BC. UNESCO’s description of the site speaks of a siege, a πολιορκία, of Troy by Mycenaean warriors in that period. Others are more cautious. No inscription found so far names Agamemnon, Achilles or Helen, and a city can burn for many reasons: enemies, accidents or an earthquake.

Homer’s poems were sung for generations before they were written down, so they mix memories of the Bronze Age with details from the poets’ own time. A fair answer is this: Troy was real, and war in the region is likely, but the ten-year siege, the heroes and the horse, as we read them, are the work of poets. The horse is almost certainly a myth, yet it lives on in Modern Greek: δούρειος ίππος, “the wooden horse”, also means a trick hidden inside a gift, and it is the Greek name for a Trojan virus on a computer.