Troy

Troy in Myth and Epic

Troy is best known as the city attacked by the Greeks to regain Helen, the wife of the Achaean king Menelaos, after she was kidnapped by a Trojan prince. The Iliad tells the story of the last ten days of the battle for Troy, or Ilion—hence “Iliad”—and the decisive battle between another Trojan prince, Hector, and his Achaean or Greek counterpart, Achilles. The Odysseyretells the story of the return home of one of the other warriors,Odysseus. The story of the preliminaries to the conquest and the return of Odysseus are set in a timeless world, thought to provide a much-retold and therefore not very accurate description of early Bronze Age Greece, when writing, to our knowledge, was not used to transmit historical events. If the Iliad andOdyssey tell of true events, the poems must have been transmitted orally over a long period of time. The investigation of their oral origins during the late 18th century marks the beginning of philological research on “orality,” laying the foundation for modern research on orality, oral performance, social memory, and the role of oral transmission among nonliterate populations.

Troy in Antiquity

Troy, also known under its modern name of Hissarlik (or Hisarlik),and sometimes identified with the city called “Wilusa” by the Hittites, is situated in northwest Turkey, or Anatolia. During the second millennium BCE, Troy was about a mile away from the coast and provided protection for trading ships sailing into the Black Sea. The south wind, necessary to sail into the Black Sea, only blows during the spring and the fall, forcing ships to wait. Homer calls the city “Windy Troy.” It was only around the first century BCE that sailors learned to sail ships against the wind. A land trading route linking Asia Minor with Europe also led through Troy. Throughout time, Troy was an important site for visitors who exploited its fame for their own purposes.

The Greeks believed that the Trojan War, as told in the Homeric epics, really did take place. The poems were performed and reperformed, and Greek literature borrowed its heroes, plots, and language. The Greek historian Herodotus (late fifth century BCE)explained the Persian wars as a continuation of the east/west conflict that had existed since Homeric times, a trope that was borrowed again and again. When Alexander the Great, who considered himself a descendant of Achilles, set off to conquer the East ca.335 BCE, he stopped at Troy and made offerings at the temple of Athena. In 192 BCE, Antiochus III, the Seleucid king of Asia Minor, stopped at the same temple before attempting his invasion of Greece.

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