The Trojans

The Trojan side is not one people but a coalition. The Trojans proper are led by Priam and Hector, and they are joined by Dardanians under Aeneas, Lycians under Sarpedon and Glaucus, Thracians, Mysians, and other populations of the Troad and Asia Minor. The Catalogue in Iliad II lists their leaders and contingents.

The poem gives the Trojans a civic and domestic life that the Achaeans largely lack. We see the palace, the temple of Athena, the walls, the streets, and the families. This is one of the Iliad’s great achievements: the enemy is not an anonymous mass but a city of people who will lose.

Hector is the centre of the defence, and his death in Book XXII is the poem’s turning point. The Iliad ends with his funeral and a truce, before the city falls. The Odyssey and later tradition tell the rest: the deaths of Achilles and Paris, the wooden horse, the sack, and the enslavement or killing of the survivors.

The Trojans’ defeat is never in doubt, but the poem refuses to treat them as mere obstacles. Their courage, their bad decisions, and their love for the city make the war’s cost visible on both sides.