Trojan War

The Trojan War, the greatest war of Greek legend, saw a Greek coalition besiege the city of Troy in northwestern Asia Minor for ten years. It began with the golden apple of discord: the Trojan prince Paris judged Aphrodite the fairest of the goddesses and received Helen, queen of Sparta, as his reward, carrying her home to Troy; Agamemnon of Mycenae gathered a fleet of a thousand ships in answer. The Iliad covers some fifty days of the tenth year: Achilles withdraws from battle over a seized captive, his companion Patroclus fights in his armor and is killed by Hector, and Achilles returns to slay Hector and drags his body behind his chariot, yielding it at last to old King Priam, who comes by night to beg for his son.

The city fell to the wooden horse: the Greeks feigned departure, leaving a huge horse with soldiers hidden in its belly, and the Trojans hauled it inside over the priest Laocoon's warning; that night the men opened the gates and Troy burned. A bard sings the episode in the Odyssey, and the second book of Virgil's Aeneid tells it in full. In the 1870s Heinrich Schliemann excavated a stratified citadel at Hisarlik in Turkey, whose late Bronze Age layers are generally linked with the Troy of the legend.