Troy

Troy is not simply a target. The Iliad spends a great deal of time inside it: in the palace of Priam, in the temple of Athena, at the Scaean Gate where Hector talks with Andromache, and on the walls where Helen and Priam watch the battle. The city has a royal family, a council, religious ceremonies, and ordinary domestic life. The poem makes the reader care about the people who will lose.

The city is protected by its walls and by its allies, but its defence depends on Hector and on the gods who favour it. When Hector falls, the poem stops before the fall of the city. The Iliad ends with a funeral inside Troy, not with the sack.

The Odyssey and later tradition tell what the Iliad leaves out: the deaths of Achilles and Paris, the wooden horse, the sack of Troy, and the killing or enslavement of its people. The Odyssey’s proem refers to Odysseus as the man who sacked the sacred citadel of Troy, and the poem repeatedly measures its characters by their relation to that event.

Historically, the site of Hisarlik in modern Turkey has been identified with Troy since the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann in the nineteenth century. The archaeological city and the Homeric city are not the same thing, but the poems’ Troy is one of the most powerful imaginative cities in European literature.