The Trojan War, fought between the city of Troy under its king Priam and the Greek cities led by Agamemnon of Mycenae, was the most famous war of antiquity – but did it really happen, and did Troy actually exist?
Many poems, other literature and much art that survives from the ancient world deal with various aspects of the Trojan War as their principal subject. Two of the most famous poems in the ancient world, the Iliad by the Greek poet Homer and the Aeneid of the Roman poet Virgil, begin with the idea that they will sing their tale. The Iliad begins: ‘sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles’ and the Aeneid with: ‘I sing of arms and the man.’ Homer’s other famous poem, the Odyssey, tells of the aftermath of the war and the ten-year journey home of its hero, Odysseus (or Ulysses in Latin). There are many other poems, plays and writings that deal with or touch on the events and personalities of the Trojan War. But these are poems, not history. However, Homer’s poems especially became the handbooks for all manner of subjects for the ancients: Greek, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine. If you wanted to know how to perform a task or think about a subject, any subject, all the insights you needed were contained in Homer’s verses. His poems also became the building blocks of education well into the 20th century. For millennia we can find authors showing off their knowledge of Homer and their ability to make his statements applicable to any contemporary situation. Even a recent former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom falls into this category. A relatively surprising major question, then, is whether the subject of these poems ever really happened, and did Troy actually exist?
For the majority of people alive in the ancient world, the answer to that question was definitely yes, although even in antiquity there were those who challenged the existence of the events as described by Homer and other authors. The historian Thucydides (writing at the end of the fifth century BCE) questioned it, as did many others. The geographer Strabo,
