The Trojan War was supposedly fought over the city of Troy in today's Turkey in the 12th century BC, and inspired several great epics, in particular, the Iliad and Odyssey and the Aeneid. While historians debate whether the Trojan War happened, it is among the best-known stories of the ancient Mediterranean and part of the founding myth of both ancient Greece and the Roman Empire.
Understand
[edit]| “ | Why cover the same ground again? ... It goes against my grain to repeat a tale told once, and told so clearly. | ” |
| Odyssey | ||
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The Iliad and the Odyssey, written in the 9th century BC and attributed to Homer, are among the oldest surviving pieces of literature from ancient Greece, and are often considered the beginning of European literary canon. The stories contain supernatural elements such as gods and monsters, but also realistic details about warfare and daily life in pre-classical Greece.
The Iliad describes the Achaeans' ten-year siege of Troy, omitting both the beginning and the conclusion of the war. The Odyssey describes Odysseus' (Ulysses in Latin) disastrous ten-year journey back to his hometown Ithaca, making landfall at many places around the Mediterranean. Some of those locations can be identified in the real world, but in Hellenistic Greece, others were either forgotten or dismissed as fictional. Some famous tropes of the Trojan War, such as the abduction of Helen the Fair and the Trojan horse, are absent from the Iliad, and mentioned briefly in the Odyssey.
The Aeneid, written by Virgil in the 1st century BC, retells the war through the Trojan hero Aeneas and describes him migrating to Italy, becoming an ancestor of the Romans.
The epics describe the abduction of Helen, wife of Menelaus the king of Sparta, by Paris, a Trojan prince, sparked enmity between the Trojans and the Achaeans from across the Aegean Sea. Having been unable to break into the defensive walls of the city, the Achaeans decided to set up a trick—they offered a huge wooden horse as a gift to the Trojans, as amends for the bother they caused with their war galleys on the city's beach. The Trojans accepted the offer sincerely, but this resulted in them losing their city, as inside of the horse were of Achaean soldiers, ready to fight, and now right in the centre of the city.
Legacy
[edit]The Trojan War has inspired countless pieces of art (including early modern European art), prose, theatre and motion pictures until today.
Destinations
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- 1 Troy (Turkey). The city besieged in the Iliad. Troy has been inhabited since at least 3000 BC, deserted and re-settled many times, but never forgotten. Excavated since the 19th century.
- 2 Aeolian Islands (Italy). Island of Aeolus of the Odyssey.
- 3 Erice (Sicily). Ancient Eryx (Eρυξ) is today a gorgeous hilltop destination, where less than 500 people live close to a mediaeval fortification ("Venus Castle", built on the foundations of a temple to Aphrodite) on top of the 715 m high Mount Eryx. Local tradition places the lair of cyclops Polyphemus, Ulysses' foe in the Odyssey, on the side of this mountain.
- 4 Ithaca (Greece). Odysseus' home island, according to Homer. 21st century research suggest neighboring islands as Odysseus' home.
- 5 Corfu (Corcyra, Korkyra). An island bound up with the history of Greece from the beginnings of Greek mythology. The beach where Ulysses is said to have met Nausicaa (Odyssey) is still a very popular tourist attraction.
- 6 Mycenae (Peloponnese). Royal seat of Agamemnon, High King of the Greeks and undisputed leader of the anti-Trojan coalition, according to the Iliad. Its prominence from about 1600 BC to about 1100 BC was such that it lends its name to this period of Greek history, habitually referred to as "Mycenaean". Its acropolis, continuously inhabited from the Early Neolithic onwards, in Roman times had already become a tourist attraction.
- 7 Nafplio (Peloponnese). Said to have been founded by and named after the Argonaut Nauplios, father of Palamidis who fought in the Trojan War, this town is a good base to head out to the numerous archeological sites surrounding it. UNESCO World Heritage sites Epidaurus, Tiryns the Mighty-Walled (Homer's words), and Mycenae are just some of them.
- 8 Pylos (Peloponnese). The "Sandy Pylos" mentioned very often in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, home to King Nestor, eldest of Agamemnon's advisers. The remains of the so-called "Palace of Nestor" have been excavated nearby.
- 9 Trapani (Sicily). Founded as early as the 13th century BC, as Drepanon (Δρέπανον), by the same Greeks who called themselves the Elymian people and also founded Erice and Segesta. Recent scholarship formulates the hypothesis that princess Nausicaa, a highlighted character of the Odyssey, is the real author of the epic poem, and was born and raised in Drepanon - refer to Homeric translator Samuel Butler's The Authoress of the Odyssey and novelist Robert Graves' Homer's Daughter for further details.
- 1 Trojan Horse (Çanakkale, Turkey). The one that was used in the movie Troy was donated to the city. Free.
- 2 Cave of Nestor (south of bay of Voidokilia, Pylos, Greece).
- 3 Mount Circeo (Italy). A 541 m (1,775 ft) high promontory connected with the Greek myth of Circe, the goddess of magical potions mentioned in Homer's Odyssey.
See also
[edit]- Exodus of Moses, another legendary journey at the Mediterranean, supposed to have happened around 1400 BC, a few centuries before the Iliad