The Ancient World’s Most Legendary Siege
The Iliad, Homer’s epic poem, is set in and around Troy, and recounts the final year of the Trojan War, which was fought sometime in the thirteenth century BC. As told by Homer, the city of Troy was subjected to a ten year siege by a Greek coalition led by Mycenae’s High King Agamemnon. Their goal was to recover Helen, the wife of Sparta’s king and Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus, after she had been seduced by Paris, the son of Troy’s King Priam.
The epic poem features plenty of rollicking adventures, a surfeit of graphic and gory combat, and numerous plot twists and turns from humans and gods. In the end, the city falls when the wily Odysseus tricks the Trojans and gets them to let in a huge wooden horse, hollow on the inside and packed with Greek warriors. As a story, the Iliad was awesome. As history, however, Troy and the Trojan War were dismissed for centuries as pure myth and legendary tales. Then archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann overturned those assumptions.
