Trojan War - 1192-1183 BC

The siege of Troy forms the subject of Homer's sublime poem, the Iliad, in which the real events of the war are intermingled with many fictitious and supernatural incidents. At this period, in the north-western part of Asia Minor, on the shores of the Hellespont and the AEgean seas, there existed a kingdom, the capital of "which was a large and well-fortified city, named Troy, or Ilium.

Before the Trojan war there is no indication of any common action in Hellas, nor indeed of the universal prevalence of the name; on the contrary, before the time of Hellen, son of Deucalion, no such appellation existed, but the country went by the names of the different tribes, in particular of the Pelasgian. It was not till Hellen and his sons grew strong in Phthiotis, and were invited as allies into the other cities, that one by one they gradually acquired from the connection the name of Hellenes; though a long time elapsed before that name could fasten itself upon all.

Priam, the King of Troy, had a son whose name was Paris; and this young chief, in the course of a visit to Greece, resided for a time in Sparta at the court of Menelaus, who gave the Asiatic stranger a very friendly reception. Charmed with Helen's beauty, Paris employed the opportunity afforded by a temporary absence of her husband, to gain her affections, and persuade her to elope with him to Troy. It was not, according to the old poets, to his personal attractions, great as they were, that Paris owed his success in winning the affections of Helen, but, according to the custom of the age, they imputed it to the influence of Venus, the goddess of love, whose favor he had won by assigning to her the palm of beauty, on an occasion when he was contested between her and two other female deities [the Judgement of Paris].

When Menelaus returned home, he was of course indignant at finding his hospitality so shamefully abused, and, after having in vain endeavored, both by remonstrances and threats, to induce the Trojans to send him back his queen, he applied to the princes who had formerly been Helen's lovers, and called upon them to aid him, according to their oaths, in recovering her from her seducer.

They obeyed the summons; and all Greece being angry at the insult offered Menelaus, a general muster of the forces of the various states took place at Aulis, a seaport town of Boeotia, preparatory to their crossing the AEgean to the Trojan shore. This is supposed to have happened about the year 1194 BC.

Of the chiefs assembled on this occasion, the most celebrated were, Agamemnon, King of Mycenae; Menelaus, King of Sparta; Ulysses, King of Ithaca; Nestor, King of Pylos , Achilles, son of the King of Thessaly; Ajax, of Salamis ; Diomedes, of ^Etolia; and Idomeneus, of Crete. Agamemnon, the brother of the injured Menelaus, was elected commander-in-chief of the confederated Greeks.

According to some ancient authors, this general sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia, to induce the gods to send a favoring gale to the Grecian fleet when it was detained by contrary winds in the port of Aulis; but as the earliest writers respecting the Trojan war make no mention of this unnatural act, it may be hoped that it was never performed.

The Grecian armament consisted of about twelve hundred vessels, with from fifty to one hundred and twenty men in each, and the army which warred against Troy is supposed to have amounted altogether to about one hundred thousand men. The Trojans, although reinforced by auxiliary bands from Assyria, Thrace, and Asia Minor, were unable to withstand the Greeks in the open coun try, and they therefore soon retired within the walls of their city.

The number of those who sailed will appear inconsiderable, representing, as they did, the whole force of Hellas. And this was due not so much to scarcity of men as of money. Difficulty of subsistence made the invaders reduce the numbers of the army to a point at which it might live on the country during the prosecution of the war. Even after the victory they obtained on their arrival -- and a victory there must have been, or the fortifications of the naval camp could never have been built -- there is no indication of their whole force having been employed; on the contrary, they seem to have turned to cultivation of the Chersonese and to piracy from want of supplies.

This was what really enabled the Trojans to keep the field for ten years against them; the dispersion of the enemy making them always a match for the detachment left behind. If they had brought plenty of supplies with them, and had persevered in the war without scattering for piracy and agriculture, they would have easily defeated the Trojans in the field, since they could hold their own against them with the division on service. In short, if they had stuck to the siege, the capture of Troy would have cost them less time and less trouble. But as want of money proved the weakness of earlier expeditions, so from the same cause even the one in question, more famous than its predecessors, may be pronounced on the evidence of what it effected to have been inferior to its renown and to the current opinion about it formed under the tuition of the poets.

In those early times men were unskilled in the art of reducing fortified places, and the Greeks knew of no speedier way of taking Troy than blockading it till the inhabitants should be competled by famine to surrender. But here a new difficulty arose. No arrangements had been made for supplying the invaders with provisions during a lengthened siege; and after they had plundered and laid waste the surrounding country, they began to be in as great danger of starvation as the besieged.

The supplies which arrived from Greece were scanty and irregular, and it became necessary to detach a part of the forces to cultivate the plains of the Chersonesus, a peninsula of Thrace, in order to raise crops for the support of themselves and their brethren in arms. The Grecian army being thus weakened, the Trojans were encouraged to make frequent sallies, in which they were led generally by the valiant Hector, Priam's eldest and noblest son. Many skirmishes took place, and innumerable deeds of individual heroism were performed, which, however, led to no important result, for the opposing armies were so equally matched, that neither could obtain any decisive advantage over the other.

The gods and goddesses took a deep interest in the affair, and had a large share in deciding the fate of the parties. The heroes boasted and blustered in the fashion of our Indian warriors of the wesi and their degree of refinement may be inferred from the fact, that Hector, the bravest of the Trojans, being slain by Achilles, the bravest of the Greeks, his dead body, attached to the chariot of Achilles, was dragged in triumph over the ground.

The Iliad

In Homer's Iliad, everything is painted with the poet's power. According to this, the occasion displayed a singular mixture of brutality and heroism, of coarseness and simplicity. Nothing, comparatively speaking, is of any account in the Iliad besides Achilles, and his story. Concentration of interest is of the essence of the scope of epic, a principle which is nowhere Iliad. better illustrated than in Homer. Achilles is at once pathetic and magnificent, and his character is displayed in a plot which contains a deep and sustained interest. On the whole the development of the plot demands that in the absence of Achilles - the Trojans are highly successful, even to the point of attacking the ships of his own followers, the Myrmidons, with fire.

The story opens with the famous quarrel between Achilles and his chief, a quarrel which, while it signifies the passionate nature of the hero, also leads directly to the further development of the plot. In revenge for Agamemnon's high-handed conduct towards Achilles, he refuses to fight against the Trojans, and at once retires sullenly to his tent to watch the discomfiture which he foresees will overtake the ungrateful Achaeans, his countrymen. Never will he come to their aid unless they are brought to such a pass that the very existence of the army is in immediate danger. When things become critical, and even an important embassy comes to placate his wrath, he remains obdurate.

At length his comrade and dearest friend Patroclus implores to be allowed to charge the Trojans in Achilles' own armor, to which arrangement he with difficulty consents. His affection for Patroclus is as intense as his other emotions, but it is one of the noblest and most dignified of all the features of his lofty but truly human character. Foreseeing that the enemy will be routed, he commands Patroclus not to pursue them far enough to bring his own life into danger. The young champion, however, disobeys his chief, and alas! pays for his temerity with his life-blood, falling supernaturally a prey to Hector, the chieftain of Troy.

The loss of his loved friend moves Achilles to wrath afresh and yet more majestically, this time against his lawful enemies. The word used for Achilles' wrath, mênis, is otherwise used only of divine wrath at the human violation of an essential rule or transgression of a boundary. His armor is gone, but through the influence of his mother who is divine, the Fire-god forges him a new panoply and he marches forth to avenge Patroclus' death. Being now in his turn assisted by heaven he slays the slayer, who in vain beseeches of the conqueror that his corse may be respected, for Achilles shows himself once more ironhearted. In his passionate longing for revenge he outrages the body of the Trojan—and yet in the end he relents when the aged Priam comes to his tent to implore the surrender of his son's dead body. Such is the outline of the main plot of the Iliad, a story which is unexcelled in the literature of the world.

The celestial counterplot is of vital importance to the story. The favor of the gods is divided between the two sides in the human combat, so that the divine action accompanies and even controls the human, lending it a majesty and an awfulness not quite its own. The division of opinion among the gods is very artfully contrived. Hera, queen of heaven, and Athena, a peculiarly Greek conception of female divinity, are of course consistently on the Achaean side. So is Poseidon, who had a very special and personal grudge against Troy. Quite naturally Ares and his paramour Aphrodite — whose cult had been imported among the Achaeans probably from the East—take the adversaries' side. Apollo joins them, at least under the special circumstances of the plot, and this is accounted for at the outset of the poem by an insult offered to his priest. He is, however, in a most particular way associated with Zeus, and is chosen to carry out the behests of the Father of the gods.

The really interesting problem is the attitude of Zeus. He cannot be painted as frankly un-Greek. Patriotism would forbid it, and morality — for the cause of the Achaeans is a just one, vengeance for a dishonoured wife. But Zeus holds the balance of power; like Apollo, he wavers in his allegiance to the Greeks, and for special reasons even favours Troy. His sympathies are with Hector for his piety, — and with Achilles as outraged by the Achaean Over-lord, Agamemnon. Lastly, this great god has one very human trait; he is most susceptible to the subtle influences of Aphrodite, and the firm attachment of his spouse Hera to the cause of the Achaeans tends to put him on the opposite side. So that during the poem Zeus is continually befriending Hector and the Trojans; yet he is fully aware and even determined that in the end Hector, and by implication Troy, must fall, and thus the righteous get their own. Meanwhile this Trojan sympathy of the chief divinity helps to secure that another man, the injured hero of the poem, may continue to enforce his personal claim to justice.

At length, after a siege of no less than ten long years. in the course of which some of the most distinguished leaders on both sides were slain, Troy was taken, its inhabitants slaughtered, and its edifices burnt to the ground. According to the poets, it was by a stratagem that this famous city was at last overcome. They tell us that the Greeks constructed a wooden horse of prodigious size, in the Vidy of which they concealed a number rf armed men, and then retired towards the sea-shore to induce the enemy to believe that the besiegers had given up the enter prise, and were about to return home.

Deceived by this maneuver, the Trojans brought the gigantic horse into the city, and the men who had been concealed within it, stealing out in the night-time, unbarred the gates and admitted the Grecian army within the walls.

The Odyssey

The Greek princes discovered that their triumph over Troy was dearly paid for by their subsequent sufferings, and the disorganizatioc of their kingdoms at home. Ulysses, according to the poets, spent ten years in wandering over seas and lands before arriving at his island kingdom of Ithaca.

The plot of the Odyssey is, in its way, very absorbing and is worked out with consummate skill. Indeed there is felt to be an artistic finish in the Odyssey which is wanting to the longer and more loosely-compacted Illiad. The terrestrial action opens with the travels and adventures of Telemachus in search of his father, who should be on his return from Troy. Later on we are introduced to Odysseus himself, detained a prisoner by Calypso, and then to his own adventures chiefly told by himself. When at last he succeeds in getting back to Ithaca, we have only reached the middle of the poem, and the plot thickens for the hero has still to reckon with his enemies at home. These are the suitors of Penelope, who has been driven to the last extremity in resisting their overtures, and in vainly endeavouring to control their unbridled insolence. A series of recognition-scenes and finally the destruction of the suitors brings about a happy ending; but the d6nouement is over-elaborated, nor are the later portions of the poem by any means equal in sustained and varied interest to the earlier adventures of Odysseus.

There is a divine action in the Odyssey influencing the course of events, but the interference is not on the same scale of grandeur as in the Iliad. Some of the divinities, notably Poseidon, exhibit strong hostility to Odysseus, and in fact delay his return home, besides destroying all his companions. But the chief interest in the celestial plot (if it can be so called), hangs upon the patron-goddess and guardian of the hero, the ever-watchful Athena. This is interesting, inasmuch as the attributes of Athena are closely allied to the character of Odysseus. She is the very personation of intelligence and practical wisdom, being in fact by far the most spiritual of all the Homeric conceptions of divinity. Odysseus was, as it were, inspired as well as exteriorly protected by her, and the element of craft in his prudence is directly traceable to the influence of his tutelary deity.

Others of the leaders died or were shipwrecked on their way home, and several of those who succeeded in reaching their own dominions found their thrones occupied by usurpers, and were compelled to return to their vessels, and seek in distant lands a place of rest and security for their declining years. But the fate of Agamemnon, the renowned general of the Greeks, was the most deplorable of all. On his return to Argos, he was assassinated by his wife Clytemenestra, who had formed an attachment, during his absence, to another person. Agamemnon's son Orestes was driven into exile, but afterwards returned to Argos, and, putting his mother and her accomplices to death established himself upon the throne.

The Aeneid

The Aeneid occupies a peculiar position in the history of the world's best literature. Much of Homer has been absorbed by Virgil [ Publius Vergilius Maro ], and in his turn Virgil has exerted incalculable influence on mediaeval and modern literature. In 27 BC the title of Augustus was conferred on Octavius, and in the following year the emperor wrote entreating, almost threatening, letters from Spain, begging the poet to send him either the first draft or at least some portion of the new work. After spending eleven years on the composition of the Aeneid, Virgil set out in 19 BC for Greece and Asia, where he intended to spend the next three years putting the finishing touches to his epic. At Athens, however, meeting Augustus on his homeward journey from the East, he was induced to return with the emperor to Italy. A fever, contracted at Megara, grew worse during the voyage, and ended in his death at Brundisium, a few days after landing, in the fifty first year of his age. His successors in Latin literature, Martial, Juvenal, Tacitus, Seneca, and the rest, were all nurtured on Virgil. The authority of Virgil was supreme, and his poetry was, so to speak, the Bible of the ancients; it was the first of all scholastic books, and was always in everybody's hands.

The Aeneid is an epic in twelve books, the first half dealing with the hero's wanderings from his old home of Troy, and the second half with his wars, in making a new home for his people. The poem thus becomes at once an Odyssey and an Iliad. Suetonius wrote that some critics of Virgil reproached him for taking too freely from Homer. The poet retorted by declaring that if they would try to do what he had done, they would find it easier to take the club from Hercules than a verse from Homer.

Aeneas is a character in Homer's Iliad. Aeneas tells the thrilling story of the capture and destruction of Troy by the Greeks, the subsequent massacre, and the escape from the city of himself with his father Anchises and young son lulus (or Ascanius), together with a small band of citizens. The Aeneid tells the story of the Trojan hero Aeneas’s perilous flight from Troy to Italy, where Aeneas’s descendents would go on to found Rome. The story opens, in true epic fashion, not with the beginning of the hero's wanderings, but in the seventh year after the fall of Troy. The subject is briefly stated, and then we have "a view of the supernatural machinery by which it is to be worked out." While sailing from Sicily, the Trojans encounter a storm raised by Aeolus (god of the winds) at the request of Juno, who, in her hatred of the Trojan race, would gladly destroy its last remnants and so prevent the founding of Rome.

The settlement of Aeneas and the Trojans in Italy and their connection with the foundation of Rome entered the written tradition centuries after Homer, at the end of the third century BC. The Aeneid is primarily a work of fiction. No Trojans or Greeks settled in Latium (the region of Italy where Rome is located) in the 12th century BC. In the epic, Virgil repeatedly foreshadows the coming of Augustus, perhaps to silence critics who claimed that he achieved power through violence and treachery. The Aeneid served to legitimize the rule of Augustus.

The Historical Troy

The actual time of writing of Homer's epics cannot be determined accurately and the exact date is still a subject of historical research. Homer is traditionally believed to be the author of the ancient Greek epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. The exact composition dates of these works cannot be determined with accuracy. Today the hymns are considered to be later works, but many still regard Homer as the author of the epics. The ancient Greeks generally believed that Homer was a historical individual, but some modern scholars are more sceptical about this theory: G.S. Kirk commented that “Antiquity knew nothing definite about the life and personality of Homer”. The historian Herodotus said that Homer lived 400 years before his own time, which would place him at around 850 BC. According to the classicist and cultural historian Barbara Graziosi, other ancient sources gave dates much closer to the supposed time of the Trojan War. It is now thought that Homer worked some time between 725 and 675 BC, when the alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians was coming into use among the Greeks. It seems likely that writing helped Homer in collecting and composing. Writing out the long epics of Troy could well have been the work of a lifetime.

To alter an ancient legend, with a view to bring it into historical shape; to clip, mutilate, or compress any story, with a view to make it coherent, and then to present the same as a true narrative, is a perfectly arbitrary and unwarrantable proceeding; because even should it be the case that the legend in question is but the poetic and exaggerated version of a real fact, it is impossible for the modern reader to know this, or at least to know what portion of the legend is the fact and what the mere poetic wrappage and garnishment. To narrate, for example, the war of Troy, as hundreds of writers have done, giving the skeleton of the story as it is found in Homer, and omitting only what is called 'the supernatural machinery' of the poem — that is, the interpositions and battles of the gods — is to show not only a profound ignorance of the ancient spirit, according to which these battles and interpositions were no mere literary vagaries, but the most real and essential parts of the transaction, but also a mind totally untrained in the art of historical investigation.

Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) was a self-made man with a remarkable aptitude for language and an excellent business mind. He was also the founder of Aegean archeology, providing a factual base for the writings of Homer, which until then had been considered merely a collection of mythologic poems. Although the city of Troy was a tourist attraction in Greek and Roman times, by the 1800s its location was lost, and many believed the story was only a myth. Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann thought otherwise, and in the 1870s began excavating an earthen mound in western Turkey, near the Dardanelles. The site did indeed turn out to be the legendary city of Troy, and much more. Different layers—each corresponding to a different city—revealed evidence of a sequence (progression) of human habitation stretching back almost 5000 years.

The lower fortifications of Troy VI belong to the period of the clash between the Hittites and the Mycenaeans. They are designed to protect against chariot attack. Archaeologists have found that there are many destruction levels from the period 1300-950 BC. Those who believe that the stories of the Trojan War derive from a specific historical conflict usually date it to the twelfth or eleventh centuries BC, often preferring the dates given by Eratosthenes, 1194–1184 BC, which roughly corresponds with archaeological evidence of a catastrophic burning of Troy VIIa.