The Fall of Troy — The War That Ended the Heroic Age

On the windswept coast of Northwest Asia Minor, where the land meets the cold waters of the Aegean, there stood a city that had never bowed to any empire, not even to the mighty Hittites at the height of their power. That city was Troy. For nearly 2,000 years it had endured, burning, crumbling, and rising again and again, layer upon layer, like a phoenix of stone. Its kings had built walls to keep out the greed of the world beyond, walls that had withstood the storms of both men and time. By the age of Pharaoh Ramses II and King Hattusili III, Troy had entered its seventh life, what archaeologists now call Troy 7a, a city prosperous, self-sufficient, and proud. It was a wealthy city without much need of imported food or goods. Trojan wealth was built on the rich agricultural land in the surrounding area. Troy stood on a plain with plenty of fertile farmland. There were fish in the nearby waters, and sheep in the meadows, and Troy was famous for its herds of horses which ate its surplus grain. Its people had little need for foreign grain or gold. Their fields were rich, their herds abundant, and their horses, sleek and swift, were famous across the land. The sea fed them, the plains sustained them, and the high walls of Troy promised safety. But sometime between 1260 and 1230 BC, that promise was broken. Fire swept through its streets, its gates were torn down, the bones of its people lay unburied in the dust. The story of the war's beginning was set down 500 years later by a blind poet named Homer, who would take that ruin and give it life again. From his voice came the Iliad. Peeled away from the skeleton of divine hostilities, the meat of the tale is straightforward enough. The tale begins in Sparta, where King Menelaus ruled beside his wife, Helen, the most beautiful woman in Greece. This princess, Helen, attracted the roving eye of Paris, son of the king of Troy, a brave enough warrior, but a relentless womanizer. This did not boost his reputation for masculinity among his own countrymen, one way in which the Trojans differed from our own time. Paris, you pretty boy, his own brother shouts at him, you woman-struck seducer. But the vain prince of Troy saw her, he desired her, and what Paris desired, he took. Paris seduced Helen and then carried her off to Troy. Helen's husband Menelaus, determined to have his revenge, recruited his brother Agamemnon to help him attack Troy. Agamemnon was the high king of the Greeks, and so he called all of the Greek cities to join their forces together and sail in a united fleet towards Troy to avenge the insult to his brother. From Mycenae, Pylos, Thebes and Athens, kings gathered their warriors and sailed east, a host united under one banner. They arrived on the shores of Asia Minor, but found themselves stymied by the valour of the There they sat, besieging the city. For ten long years they fought beneath those walls, ten years of blood, disease and despair. The siege is only the setting for the central drama of the Iliad, which is the heroics of the great warrior Achilles, who hailed from Thessaly, a mountainous region on the northern Greek peninsula. He was the mightiest of warriors, born of both man and goddess. He was strength and fury made flesh, and his pride burned hotter than his sword. The Iliad tells us not of Troy's fall, but of Achilles' wrath, his defiance, his grief and his doom. By the poem's end, King Priam still sits upon Troy's throne and the city's walls still stand. The great war remains unresolved. The war itself takes place off stage. By the beginning of the companion epic, The Odyssey, the siege has ended, Troy has been sacked and the Greeks are on their long way home. The tale of Troy's actual fall to the besieging Greek forces is told in its most complete form much later, in the second book of the Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil. Broken in war and foiled by fate, with so many years already slipping away, the Greek staff constructed a horse. It was high as a hill, and its ribs were made from planks of pine wood. Choosing warriors by lot, they secretly put them in on the blind side of the horse, until its vast and cavernous belly was crammed with a party of armed men. When the Greeks noisily and obviously departed, the Trojans, taking the horse as an offering to the war goddess Minerva, hauled it into the city while ignoring the many obvious evil omens. They feasted in triumph, fell asleep dead drunk, and the Greek warriors climbed out of the horse's belly. They broke out over a city drowned in drunken sleep. They killed the sentries and then threw open the gates, admitting their main body, and joined in the peer-arranged plan of attack. The city was set on fire, the people slaughtered or driven out. Virgil writes, the Greeks were masters there. Troy, the city that had stood for centuries, was gone by dawn. What drove the Greeks to destroy Troy remains a mystery. The quarrel may indeed have involved a captive princess. Diplomatic marriages took place all over the ancient world. A great deal of pride was involved in the delicate negotiations. Those who sent princesses were considered inferior and those who accepted them more powerful. Herodotus tells the story of Helen's abduction by the son of Priam. In his histories, he claims to have heard the tale from an independent source, the Persians, who think that the Greeks overreacted. The Persians, he says, had their own version. It is foolish, they said, to wage war over women. For if they were taken, it is because they wished to go. Herodotus goes on to say that this war became the seed of an ancient hatred. This observation leads Herodotus into a further explanation of the ongoing hostility between Greeks and Persians. The Persians, he writes, marked that moment, the fall of Ilium, the Greek name for Troy as the beginning of their enmity with the West. Historically, of course, Persia would not exist for another six centuries. Still, it shows that the cities of the Greek Peninsula and those in Asia Minor had hated each other for a long time. However it began, the Mycenaeans won the struggle and Troy fell. But victory had come at a very high cost. For even as their ships sailed home, the Mycenaeans began a long slide downward. The same kings who had conquered Troy returned to find chaos waiting for them at home. Mutiny, famine, betrayal. Odysseus wandered the seas for years, tormented by gods and ghosts. Agamemnon was murdered in his bath by his own wife. Menelaus found Helen again, but love turned to ash. Their cities fell into civil war, their palaces rotted, crops failed, the people turned on their kings. The war with Troy possibly had begun even before the siege. Thucydides, the great historian of Greece, later wrote that the war had lasted for so many years that the Mycenaeans didn't have enough money to supply themselves properly. Their armies had to spend much of their time growing food and making piratical raids into the Aegean rather than fighting non-stop. The war with Troy just accelerated the decline. The Odyssey carries the weight of this sorrow. The triumph over Troy was the sort of victory to which the later King Pyrrhus of Epirus would lend his name. A victory that damaged the winner almost as much as the vanquished. A Pyrrhic victory. In the words of King of Pylos, even though the Mycenaeans won, their story is one of sorrow. This is the story of the woe we endured in that land, we sons of the Achaeans, unrestrained in fury and of all that we bore. There the best of us were slain, and many other ills we suffered beside these, after we had sacked the steep city of Priam and had departed in our ships. Even then, Zeus was fashioning for us a ruinous doom. The war that made them legends also destroyed them. The world that had produced Achilles, Agamemnon and Helen faded into history, but the story endured. It lived on in the words of great poets like Homer and Virgil, and in the ruins of Troy. It became not just myth, it became a symbol of love and betrayal, of pride and ruin. Every age retold it, reshaped it and claimed it. For the Greeks, it was the birth of heroism and the spirit that would ignite its classical age. For the Romans, it was the story of their origin. In Virgil's Aeneid, the lone survivor Aeneas flees the burning city of Troy to found a new one, Rome.