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The Town That Got Away With Murder and Other Largely Forgotten Historic Events

Khalid Elhassan November 23, 2019 33 min

8. There Really Was a Homeric Troy

Achilles dragging the corpse of the slain Hektor around the walls of Troy. Wikimedia

As told by Homer, a Mycenaean Greek coalition led by the High King Agamemnon besieged Troy for ten years. Their goal was to recover Helen, 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 into letting in a huge wooden horse, packed with Greek warriors. As a story, the Iliad was awesome, but as history, Troy and the Trojan War were dismissed for centuries as pure myth. However, German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann was convinced that there was actual truth in the Iliad, and set out to prove it.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.