THE TROJAN WAR

Source of Information: Principally the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems by blind Homer, the greatest poet of classical antiquity and the greatest war correspondent of all time.

Date of Conflict: About 1100 B.C. Battlefield: The plains before the city of Troy, also known as Ilium, rediscovered in 1872 by the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann at the site of the modern Hissarlik on the River Scamander in northwest Turkey, just south of the Aegean entrance to the Dardanelles.

Belligerents: A league of Greek feudalities, led by Agamemnon of Mycenae ("King of Men"), v. the Trojans and their allies, led by Priam and.his 50 sons.

Causes: Some divine, some all too human. The goddess Athena, angered because Prince Paris had awarded her half-sister Aphrodite the prize for beauty, decided to stir up the Greeks against the Trojans. It was not hard to do. Troy was rich in tribute taken from Greek merchants. Moreover, Paris himself was the young spark that fell into this tinder box. His rape of Helen, Queen of Sparta, whom he carried off to Troy in a fast galley, brought the Greeks to the shores of Asia Minor in 1186 ships.

Heroes: Hector for the Trojans, Achilles for the Greeks. Hector, whose parents were merely human, had human virtues: tenderness, loyalty, bravery. Achilles, whose mother was a sea nymph, had the vices of the superman: cruelty, arrogance, self-indulgence. However, he was invulnerable, except in his heel. His mother had dipped him, as a child, in the River Styx, but had neglected to submerge the heel she held him by.

Principal Events: Ten years of stalemate had set Greek nerves on edge, and Hero Achilles quarreled at last with King Agamemnon over a slave girl. Thereafter, while his countrymen lost battle after battle, Achilles sulked in his tent. Disaster threatened. Patroclus, the hero's friend, drove the Trojans back to their gates, but was killed by Hector, who then led a charge that nearly hurled the frightened Greeks into the sea. Forth then Achilles to avenge his friend. The heroes met, and Hector was killed. Achilles himself died at the hand of Paris, whose arrow found his heel, and the war was ended by a trick: Ulysses' famed stratagem of the wooden horse.

Results: Destruction of Troy. However, the Trojans got their revenge: Aeneas, with the help of Aphrodite, his mother, escaped from falling Troy with his father, the blind Anchises, on his back. He sailed to Italy, and there, according to Virgil's Aeneid, founded the city of Rome, which in turn conquered Greece.

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