The Trojan War

At a Glance

• Central figures: Helen of Sparta, whose abduction ignited the war; Paris, prince of Troy, who took her; Menelaus, her husband; Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and commander of the Greek forces; Achilles, greatest of Greek warriors; Hector, champion of Troy; and Odysseus, architect of the war’s end.
• Setting: Ancient Greece and the city of Troy, spanning the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis, the courts of Sparta and Troy, and ten years of siege on the Trojan plain.
• The turn: The goddess Eris, uninvited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, throws a golden apple inscribed “For the Fairest” among the guests, setting off a contest between Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite that ends with Paris’s judgment - and his abduction of Helen.
• The outcome: Troy is sacked, burned, its men slaughtered and its women enslaved; Helen is returned to Menelaus; Achilles and Hector, the two greatest warriors of the war, are both dead before the city falls.
• The legacy: The war left behind the Trojan Horse as a byword for clever deception, and the ruins of a city that had stood for ten years against the assembled might of Greece.

Eris was not invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. The snub was deliberate - she was the goddess of discord, and the couple wanted no discord at their feast. So she came anyway, briefly, and threw a single golden apple onto the table. Inscribed on it: For the Fairest. Hera reached for it. Athena reached for it. Aphrodite reached for it. None would yield, and Zeus, who had the sense not to judge between them himself, sent them to Paris.

Paris was a prince of Troy, young and handsome, tending his flocks on Mount Ida. Each goddess offered him a bribe. Hera offered dominion over kingdoms. Athena offered skill and glory in war. Aphrodite offered him Helen - the most beautiful woman alive, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. Paris chose Aphrodite.

The Apple and the Empty Throne

Aphrodite made good on her promise. Paris traveled to Sparta under the laws of xenia - the sacred bond of host and guest - accepted Menelaus’s hospitality, and then, while his host was away in Crete, sailed home to Troy with Helen. Whether she went willingly is a question the poets never fully settled. What is not in question is what she left behind: a furious husband, an empty throne, and a pretext for war that Agamemnon of Mycenae had perhaps been waiting for.

Menelaus called in every oath. Years before, when the kings of Greece had competed for Helen’s hand, her father Tyndareus had made all the suitors swear that whoever won her would be defended by the rest if any man ever took her away. They had sworn. Now Menelaus held them to it. Ships were gathered from across Greece - a thousand of them, according to the poets - and the army that assembled at Aulis was the greatest Greece had ever put to sea.

The Ships at Aulis

Among the warriors who sailed were names that would outlast Troy itself: swift-footed Achilles, half-mortal son of the sea-nymph Thetis, who had been given the choice between a long quiet life and a short glorious one, and had chosen glory; great Ajax of Salamis; Diomedes of Argos; and Odysseus of Ithaca, who came reluctantly and would pay for it with ten more years of wandering after the war was done. Agamemnon commanded them all, not always well.

The gods divided themselves accordingly. Hera and grey-eyed Athena favored the Greeks - Hera still burning from Paris’s judgment, Athena still stung by his preference. Aphrodite favored Troy, and Apollo beside her. For ten years the siege went on, the walls of Ilium holding firm, the armies grinding against each other on the plain below, neither side able to force a conclusion.

The Rage of Achilles

It was in the tenth year that Achilles’ menis - his rage - nearly destroyed the Greek cause from within. Agamemnon had been forced to give up a captive woman, Chryseis, to appease Apollo’s priest, and in compensation took Briseis from Achilles. A war prize. A matter of honor. Achilles withdrew from the fighting entirely, sat in his tent, and let the Greeks bleed without him.

They bled badly. Hector, the greatest of the Trojans and the eldest son of King Priam, drove the Greeks back to their ships. It was Patroclus, Achilles’ closest companion, who could no longer bear to watch the slaughter. He borrowed Achilles’ armor, put on the plumes and the bronze that every Trojan feared, and led the Myrmidons back into battle. He drove Hector’s men from the ships. And then Hector killed him.

Achilles came back to the war then. What replaced his rage at Agamemnon was something colder and more absolute: grief for Patroclus, and the need to find Hector. His divine mother Thetis brought him new armor, hammered out by Hephaestus himself. He walked onto the plain and the Trojans ran. Hector alone stood to face him, outside the Scaean Gates, and alone Hector fell - a spear through the throat. Achilles dragged the body behind his chariot three times around the walls of Troy, while Hector’s father and mother watched from the ramparts above.

The Wooden Horse

After Achilles himself died - shot in the heel by Paris, with Apollo guiding the arrow - and after Ajax and many others fell, the walls of Troy still stood. It was Odysseus who devised the end of it. The Greeks built an enormous wooden horse, hollow, large enough to hold a company of armed men inside. They beached it on the shore before the city, then sailed their fleet just out of sight, as if they were leaving.

A Greek named Sinon, left behind, told the Trojans the horse was a sacred offering to Athena, too large to fit through the city gates by design - because if it ever entered Troy, the city would become unconquerable. The Trojans debated. The priest Laocoon warned them. Cassandra warned them. Neither was believed. They knocked down a section of wall and hauled the horse inside.

That night, when Troy slept, Odysseus and his men dropped from the horse’s belly, opened the gates, and let the army in. The city burned before dawn. Priam died at his own altar. The Trojan men were killed, the women and children taken as slaves. Menelaus found Helen and took her back to the ship. What had begun with a golden apple and a choice on a mountainside ended in ash.