Troy, siege of (mythical?). According to legend, Paris, prince of Troy—or Ilium (Ilion) as it was also called—carried off Helen, wife of Menelaus of Sparta, whereupon a confederation led by Menelaus' brother, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, was formed to recover her, and over a thousand ships assembled to carry the heroes to Troy. But the siege dragged on for nine years, and in the tenth, after quarrelling with Agamemnon, Achilles, the greatest Greek hero, withdrew from the fight. In his absence, the Trojans, led by Paris' brother, Hector, carried all before them, at one point even threatening to burn the Greek ships. But Achilles returned to the fray when Hector killed his friend Patroclus, and took his revenge. Achilles himself was later killed by Paris, but Troy was eventually taken by a trick. The Greeks pretended to abandon the siege, but left behind a wooden horse containing a force of men who emerged at night to open the gates, after the Trojans had dragged the horse into the city as a trophy.
The Greeks accepted this as history, and from at latest about 700 bc located Troy/Ilium at a hill now called Hisarlik, in north-west Anatolia. Excavation of the site has revealed a series of settlements dating from the early Bronze Age to Roman times, including an extensive lower town. Troy VI, destroyed in c.1270, is the favoured candidate for the ‘Homeric’ Troy. Archaeology has revealed that it was in contact with Greece, where a flourishing and warlike civilization existed, centred on Mycenae, and including most of the places from which the heroes supposedly came. Hittite records also possibly suggest an involvement of these people in western Anatolia at about the right time.
But although epic tales tend to have a kernel of historical truth, they also distort and exaggerate historical events beyond recognition—compare, for example, the Chanson de Roland and the battle of Ronceval. In the case of the Trojan war, it is a far cry from the archaeological evidence to believing in a ten-year war, involving over 100, 000 Bronze Age Greeks led by men called Agamemnon and Achilles, and the Trojan war should not be regarded as on a par with, for example, the Graeco-Persian wars, even if Troy VI really was destroyed by contemporary Greeks.
Bibliography
- Hope Simpson, R., and Lazenby, J. F., The Catalogue of the Ships in Homer's Iliad (Oxford, 1970).
- Wood, Michael, In Search of the Trojan War (rev. edn., London, 1996)
— John Lazenby
