Did the Trojan War actually happen?
Did the Trojan War really happen? This ancient Greek conflict was once considered fact and later myth, but Sky HISTORY’s Troy Story sheds some new light.
Image: A replica of the legendary Trojan Horse, built to be used in the 2004 movie 'Troy', now stands in Canakkale, Turkey | Digilog / Shuttertstock.com
The ancient Greek story of the Trojan War is one of history’s most famous. After the Trojan prince Paris takes the beautiful (but already married) Helen of Sparta as his lover, her husband Menelaus seeks revenge.
Fortunately for him, he’s the powerful king of the Greek city-state Sparta, so he’s got plenty of cards to play with. He plays them well, too, assembling a coalition of Greek states to launch a naval bombardment against the coastal city of Troy.
The Trojan War continues for a decade before the Greeks finally break the deadlock by pretending to give up the fight. However, the wooden horse they leave just outside Troy as an apparent goodwill gift turns out to contain Greek soldiers who subsequently ransack the city.
These narrative details have been parsed from ancient sources - but did the Trojan War really happen? As the new Sky HISTORY series Troy Story reveals, it’s far from a foregone conclusion. Let’s look beyond the fables to scrutinise the facts.
The origin of the Trojan War legend
If we can’t be certain that the Trojan War did happen, where did the story originally come from? Mainly the ancient Greek poet Homer’s magnum opus, the Iliad. However, this epic poem is generally thought to have been written around the 8th century BC.
According to Homer, the Trojan War erupted towards the end of the Late Bronze Age — more specifically, in the early 12th century BC. So, Homer was writing about these events several centuries after they reputedly took place.
Some gaps linger in the long-established tale of the Trojan War — and other ancient accounts thought to have once filled them are now lost. On the plus side, other traces of the story do survive in Homer’s Odyssey as well as ancient Greek poems of the ‘Epic Cycle’.
How perceptions of the Trojan War changed
For centuries, the Trojan War was generally regarded as historical fact, despite accusations that Homer had taken liberties with some of the specifics. The tale became part of the Roman Empire’s cultural fabric, even in Roman-occupied Britain.
In the early 2020s, a unique Roman mosaic depicting scenes from the Trojan War was found buried deep in Rutland farmland. Sky HISTORY presenter Professor Alice Roberts got the chance to help unearth the mosaic in the ninth season of Digging for Britain.
By the 19th century, both the Trojan War and the city of Troy were widely deemed mythical. However, Frank Calvert, an English immigrant who owned land at Hisarlık in modern-day Turkey, was convinced that Troy’s remains lay under his feet. This led him to team up with archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann to find out for definite.
Schliemann’s archeological discovery of Troy
In the 1870s, Schliemann extensively excavated Hisarlık, the location of which appeared to match the Troy of Homeric legend. Schliemann found multiple damaged ‘layers’ of an ancient city, revealing it to have been repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt over centuries.
Schliemann singled out one particular layer for special attention, declaring it the version of Troy that stood at the time of the Trojan War. Subsequent archeological research has proved him wrong on this point, indicating the layer to be hundreds of years older than Schliemann had believed.
Schliemann did still uncover a version of Troy aligning with descriptions of the city in ancient literary sources. So, if this is taken as evidence of Troy’s historical existence, did the Trojan War really happen, too? Well, despite the noticeable damage to Troy, there’s no way to be certain that this resulted from a war rather than, say, an earthquake.
So, did the Trojan War really happen?
In traditional retellings of the Trojan War story, it all starts with Paris striving to settle a dispute between the goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Paris proclaims Aphrodite the ‘fairest’ of the three, and she rewards him by making Helen fall in love with him.
The goddesses are also said to take sides during the Trojan War. Given their reputed involvement, we can safely say that early versions of the Trojan War story can’t be seen as entirely accurate.
All the same, modern historians have theorised that ancient writers like Homer could have based their stories on a real-life military conflict - or several. Archaeological finds at Hisarlık tentatively support this hypothesis.
Did the Trojan War really happen? The enduring mystery is fascinating in itself — and the ideal starting point to learning more about ancient Greek history. Embark on your educational journey with us by subscribing to the Sky HISTORY Newsletter.
