How long did trojan war last

How did Helen of Troy die? According to a variant of the story, Helen, in widowhood, was driven out by her stepsons and fled to Rhodes, where she was hanged by the Rhodian queen Polyxo in revenge for the death of her husband, Tlepolemus, in the Trojan War. Why did the Trojan War last 10 years? Trojan War War between the Greeks and Trojans, lasting 10 years.

When the Trojans refused to return her, the Greeks formed an army, led by Agamemnon, including Achilles, Odysseus and the two Ajaxes. Who started the Trojan War? From classical sources, it can be said that the Trojan War started after the elopement or abduction of the queen of Sparta, Helen by Paris, the Trojan prince.

The jilted husband of Helen, Menelaus, persuaded his brother, Agamemnon, to lead a voyage to find her. Who was the hero of the Trojan War? Who is the greatest warrior of the Greeks but refuses to fight against the Trojans? However, the leader of the Greek army, Agamemnon, became angry with Achilles and took Briseis from him. Achilles became depressed and refused to fight. With Achilles not fighting, the Greeks began to lose the battle. She demanded the King sacrifice his own daughter, Iphigenia.

With the sacrifice made, the Greek forces sailed again and landed on the beaches near Troy. They did not spend a decade besieging the city, however.

They raided up and down the coast and only really settled in to the all-out attack on Troy in the tenth year since they had first left Aulis, as the soothsayers had said. There are two elements then to understand about the Iliad and the larger story of the Greek campaign against Troy. The first is that Homer was, in many ways, more interested in the human and divine interactions in and around the pressure-cooker of the battlefield at Troy than about the war itself.

Paris wanted to be heroic, but lacked courage to defend his siblings and city. Hector deeply loved his wife, child and city, but as a man of courage and honour could not ignore the call to defend his home to the death. All the warriors fought for their communities and their own personal glory — glory they hoped would be spoken about for all time.

At the same time, the gods were portrayed not as benevolent and just overlords, but as having human tendencies. They fought, they argued, they plotted, they felt jealousy, and they showed support to particular sides. The Iliad tells the tale of the painful and glorious overlapping of these divine and human worlds, leaving no character completely without fault — even the heroic Hector ignored clear warnings from the gods — and no character completely without our sympathy either.

Readers of the Iliad are confronted with a rich, complex, difficult and murky world in which there is no clear right or wrong. It is this tension that makes the Iliad one of the greatest works of world literature.

The second element to understand is the extent to which Homer based his tale on fact. Was there really a Trojan War?

The legacy of the war certainly remained present in Greek lives. One region, Locris, continued throughout antiquity to send some of their women each year to act as priestesses of the Temple of Athena at Troy, supposedly to atone for a wrong done by their ancestors during the attacks to take the city.

Even a millennium later, Alexander the Great made sure to visit the remains of Troy on his way to conquer Asia, and supposedly picked up Greek armour left there from the time of the war. The Romans, too, were fascinated with the story. In their own epic tales, their progenitor was a surviving Trojan warrior named Aeneas who made his way to Italy.

Modern scholarship has, on the whole, been more sceptical. In the 19th century, the site of what is now believed to be Troy was discovered a the mound of Hisarlik in modern-day Turkey. Yet subsequent excavations and historical enquiry have shown that, while the site is almost definitely Troy, it is not of the size recounted by Homer. The city does show signs of destruction — although archaeological efforts were complicated by the existence of multiple settlements laying on top of one another — and clear signs of connection with the Mycenaean world of the Greeks.

In reality, what the site probably indicates is a raid by Mycenaean Greek states on the territory and citadel of Troy in the 13th century BC, which formed nothing more than part of the ongoing military to and fro of the ancient Mediterranean world at the time. They sought war after Helen, queen of Sparta, was taken away from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta, by Paris of Troy.

This war has been documented in a number of works of Greek literature. After Menelaus demanded that his wife be returned to Sparta, the Trojans refused to do so. Full of anger, Menelaus got his brother, Agamemnon, to build an army and have them fight against Troy. Ships were then gathered. Agamemnon then sacrificed Iphigenia, his daughter, to Artemis so that he would have favorable winds for his fleet.

However, Troy was so well protected that it could not be taken down. As a final attempt to penetrate the citadel, the Greeks built the Trojan Horse. This horse was made out of hollow wood and carried a small number of soldiers inside it. The Trojans then debated if they should accept the gift, burn it, or roll it down the hillside. Eventually, they decided to bring the horse into their city. That night, the soldiers jumped out of the horse and killed the guards. The other Greek soldiers were then able to sneak into the city easily.

The gods were extremely interested in the war and took sides, trying to influence the winner. The ancient Greeks believed that the city of Troy was located near the Dardanelles. The Dardanelles is a strait in northwestern Turkey, and it makes up part of the border between Asia and Europe.

For centuries, it was believed that the Trojan War was indeed a historical event and took place around the 12th century BCE.

However, by the s, most people believed that the war, as well as the city, were not real. It is hard to imagine a war taking place on quite the scale the poet described, and lasting as long as 10 years when the citadel was fairly compact, as archaeologists have discovered.

There would have been no gods influencing the course of action on a Bronze Age battlefield, but men who found themselves overwhelmed in a bloody fray could well have imagined there were, as the tide turned against them.

Homer captured timeless truths in even the most fantastical moments of the poem. The Greeks found in the legacy of the Trojan War an explanation for the bloody and inferior world in which they lived. Achilles and Odysseus had inhabited an age of heroes. Their age had now died, leaving behind it all the bloodthirstiness, but none of the heroism or martial excellence, of the Trojan War.

Even the immediate aftermath of the war was full of violence. Regardless of how connected it is to fact, The Trojan War myth had a lasting impact on the Greeks and on us. Whether it was inspired by a war waged long ago, or was simply an ingenious invention, it left its mark on the world, and remains as such of monumental historic importance.

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