Trojan War

Introduction

The legend of the Trojan War is today the best-known story from Greek myth. Amazingly rich in its many characters and events, the Trojan War legend describes how the allied Greeks—under the command of King Agamemnon of Mycenae—sailed from Greece and laid siege to the non-Greek city of Troy (also called Ilion or Ilium), located outside the mouth of the Hellespont sea channel, in northwest Asia Minor. The Greeks had come at Agamemnon's behest to avenge the abduction of the beautiful Helen—wife of Agamemnon's brother Menelaus—by the Trojan prince Paris. The Trojans, then sheltering Paris and the compliant Helen within their walls, had refused the Greeks' demand for Helen's return. This was the official reason for the war, although the Greeks also craved Troy's wealth (Powell, 56 - 67).

The siege, consisting mainly of battlefield fighting on the plains outside the city, lasted for 10 years and saw the death of many heroes on both sides, including the Trojan prince Hector and the Greek champion Achilles. Finally Troy fell to a stratagem devised by the wily Greek hero Odysseus. Pretending to abandon the siege, the Greeks sailed away, leaving behind a huge wooden horse they had constructed—the so-called Trojan Horse. Hidden within this hollow monument was a picked force of Greek soldiers, but the unsuspecting Trojans believed the horse to be a Greek offering to the gods and brought it into the city. After nightfall, the Greeks emerged from the horse and opened Troy's gates to the waiting Greek army (which had hurried back under cover of darkness). Destruction of the rich and proud city followed, with the inhabitants all massacred or captured as slaves. The Greeks' arrogant and impious behavior at the sack of Troy however, angered the gods, who decreed that many of the surviving Greek heroes would be killed on the voyage home (Harrison, 45 - 56).

Discussion

The immense saga—of which Homer's Iliad and Odyssey present only a portion—was the product of Greek oral poetic tradition over several centuries, approximately 1200-550 BCE. The legend produced a body of epic poetry, describing major episodes of the war. The earliest and greatest of the heroic epics were the two poems written down around 750BCE and ascribed to the poet Homer—namely, the Iliad, or Tale of Ilium, recounting the "passion" of the Greek hero Achilles during the war's 10th year; and the Odyssey, describing the homecoming of the Greek hero Odysseus, with several back references to the last days of the war.

These two Homeric poems, however, were not the only epic poems dealing with the Trojan War. The classical Greeks (400s BCE) knew at least six other Trojan-related epics, not ascribed to Homer. These poems did not survive antiquity, but their story plots are summarized by later writers. The lost Trojan War epics were: (1) the Cypria ("Tales from Cyprus"), describing the war's causes and outset; (2) the Aethiopis, recounting Achilles' slaying of the Ethiopian king Memnon (a Trojan ally) and Achilles' own death in battle; (3) The Little Iliad, describing the ...