What is your opinion about the war between the Greeks and
the Trojans?
Answers
The story of the Trojan War—the Bronze Age conflict between the kingdoms of Troy and Mycenaean Greece–straddles the history and mythology of ancient Greece and inspired the greatest writers of antiquity, from Homer, Herodotus and Sophocles to Virgil. Since the 19th-century rediscovery of the site of Troy in what is now western Turkey, archaeologists have uncovered increasing evidence of a kingdom that peaked and may have been destroyed around 1,180 B.C.—perhaps forming the basis for the tales recounted by Homer some 400 years later in the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.”
Little is known about the historical Homer. Historians date the completion of the “Iliad” to about 750 B.C., and the “Odyssey” to about 725. Both began within the oral tradition, and were first transcribed decades or centuries after their composition. Many of the most familiar episodes of the war, from the abduction of Helen to the Trojan Horse and the sack of Troy, come from the so-called “Epic Cycle” of narratives assembled in the sixth century B.C. from older oral traditions.