Trojan War

The war begins with an act of hospitality abused. Paris, a prince of Troy, is a guest in the house of Menelaus in Sparta when he takes Helen, Menelaus’ wife, and a quantity of treasure back to Troy. Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon invoke the oaths that bound Helen’s suitors and assemble a coalition of Achaean kings and their followers. The expedition sails to the Troad and lays siege to Troy.

The Iliad does not narrate the beginning of the war. Its audience knows the story: the judgment of Paris, the abduction of Helen, the gathering at Aulis, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and the long siege. The poem begins in the tenth year, when the war has become a way of life and the combatants are exhausted, angry, and far from home.

Within the Iliad, the war is fought in three spaces: the plain between the city and the Achaean camp, the camp itself, and the city. The poem follows duels, mass battles, night raids, and divine interventions, but its real subject is the pressure that the war puts on honour, friendship, and family. The Trojans are not simply the enemy: Hector, Priam, Andromache, and Helen are given sympathetic interior lives.

The war’s turning point is not a single battle but the death of Patroclus. It brings Achilles back, and Achilles’ return brings Hector’s death. The Iliad ends before the city falls, with Hector’s funeral and the truce that allows it. The war continues beyond the poem’s last line.

Later epic tradition—the poems of the Epic Cycle, the Odyssey, and tragedies such as Euripides’ Trojan Women—tells the rest: the deaths of Achilles and Paris, the contest for Achilles’ armour, the wooden horse, the sack of Troy, and the returns of the surviving heroes. The Odyssey assumes this knowledge and uses it as the background for its own story.

The historical reality behind the war is debated. The site of Hisarlik in north-west Turkey preserves a city that was destroyed and rebuilt many times, and some of its layers plausibly correspond to a Late Bronze Age Troy. The Homeric war is a poetic composition, not a documentary record, but it is one of the most influential stories of war in the Western tradition.