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it outside the walls of Troy. Odysseus and other warriors hide inside the horse while the rest of the Greek army sails away. Although the prophetess Cassandra* and the priest Laocoon warn the Trojans against taking the horse into their city, they are ignored. But a Greek named Sinon, left behind to provide “disinformation,” persuades the Trojans that the horse is a sacred offering, which will bring them the protection of the gods. The Trojans then pull the horse into Troy, and in the night, as the Trojans “sleep off” their victory celebrations, Odysseus and his companions creep out of the horse. The gates of the impregnable Troy are opened, and the Greek army storms the city, having returned from a nearby island where their ships had been hidden. The Greeks wipe out almost all the Trojans, burn Troy, and take back Helen.

And finally, the cause of the war itself comes from ancient myth, not Homer. The real troubles begin with an incident at a divine wedding feast. All the gods and goddesses have been invited except Eris, the goddess of discord. Eris is offended and tries to stir up trouble. She sends a golden apple to the feast, inscribed with the words “For the most beautiful.” Three goddesses—Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite—each claim the apple for herself. Finally the handsome Paris, the son of Troy’s King Priam, is brought in to judge the dispute. While all three goddesses try to bribe him, he awards the apple to Aphrodite, because she promises him Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, the semidivine daughter of Leda and Zeus.

Helen is already married to King Menelaus of Sparta. But when Paris visits her, Aphrodite causes her to fall in love with the Trojan prince, and she flees back to Troy with him. Paris has not only stolen his host’s wife, he has broken a sacred code of being a proper guest. Menelaus and his brother, Agamemnon, organize a large Greek expedition against Troy to win back Helen—and for this she is, in the words of playwright Christopher Marlowe, “the face that launched a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.”

Was there really a Trojan War?

Did it happen? Was Troy real? Did Agamemnon, Helen, and Hector live and breathe? Or did Homer, like Shakespeare in his plays about real kings, embroider a tale that made the mortal immortal?

Since Heinrich Schliemann’s nineteenth-century discovery of Troy, much digging has been done to try and get to the bottom of the Troy question. What Schliemann thought was Troy turned out to be actually a much earlier city, and after more than one hundred years of archaeology, scholars still don’t agree on Troy and the legends of the war. While some think Homer’s epic is an outright fiction, others believe it exaggerates small conflicts involving the Greeks from about 1500 to 1200 BCE. Still others say the legend of Troy is based on one great war between the Mycenaean Greeks and the city of Troy in the mid-1200s BCE. Archaeology and recent scholarship have combined to paint a portrait of this ancient face-off between two regional “superpowers.” Archaeologists have found strong historical evidence in the ruins of Troy and other places that confirms certain events described in the epics.

In an article for the Archaeology Institute of America (May 2004), Manfred Korfmann, a director of excavations at Troy and a professor of archaeology at the University of Tübingen, had this answer to the question of the “real” Trojan war:

“According to the archaeological and historical findings of the past decade especially, it is now more likely than not that there were several armed conflicts in and around Troy at the end of the Late Bronze Age. At present we do not know whether all or some of these conflicts were distilled in later memory into the ‘Trojan War’ or whether among them there was an especially memorable, single ‘Trojan War.’ However, everything currently suggests that Homer should be taken seriously, that his story of a military conflict between Greeks and the inhabitants of Troy is based on a memory of historical events—whatever these may have been.