Siege of Troy

Siege of Troy, (1250 bce). No war has had a more tenacious hold over the Western imagination than that of the Siege of Troy (1250 bce), as related in Homer’s Iliad. It was long assumed to be the stuff of legend, yet it has recently been suggested that it might be a part of history as well.

When Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, promised the most beautiful woman in the world to Prince Paris of Troy, neither worried too much about the fact that she was already married. Paris set sail for Greece, abducted Helen of Sparta, and carried her home with him. He did not fear—or even consider—the consequences, which were to be grave indeed. Helen’s husband, Menelaus, called together all the heroes of Greece’s cities: men such as his brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae; Achilles, all but invulnerable to wounds; and Ajax, invincible in war. Setting off across the Aegean, the Greeks laid siege to Troy. Periodically, Trojan warriors such as Hector emerged to trade defiant speeches with the enemy and engage them in small-scale skirmishes and duels. Finally, despairing of taking the city by storm, the Greeks followed a stratagem proposed by the cunning Odysseus: pretending to withdraw and lift the siege, they left a large wooden horse, apparently as a propitiatory gift for the Trojans. After the horse had been drawn into the city, concealed warriors emerged from its hollow body at night to open the gates to the Greeks—now back in force.

In 1868, German archeologist Heinreich Schliemann claimed to have found the site of Troy on a headland between the Aegean Sea and the Dardanelles at Hisarlik, Turkey. Scholars, long skeptical, now agree that this city may well have been an outpost of the Hittite Empire, and that it could quite easily have come into conflict with the mercantile power of Mycenae.

Losses: Unknown.