The Trojan War was fought over a woman, Helen. She was the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, and she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris, a shepherd from Troy and the son of Priam, king of Troy, kidnapped her from Sparta and brought her back home to Troy. Menelaus and a large group of allies went to Troy to get her back. After ten years of fighting, they succeeded. Why did Paris kidnap Helen? He'd been promised her as a prize. When the sea-goddess Thetis was marrying Peleus (see Catullus 64), all the other gods and goddesses were invited to the wedding except Eris (Discord). She was jealous, so she took a golden apple, wrote on it "For the fairest," and tossed it into the wedding banquet. Naturally all the goddesses started squabbling over it. The main contenders were Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. They looked for an impartial judge and settled on Paris. Then they each offered him a bribe: power, wisdom, or the most beautiful woman in the world, respectively. Paris accepted Aphrodite's bribe, and she therefore helped him capture Helen. Menelaus could call on many allies because all Helen's suitors had sworn to help her husband, if he ever needed them. Helen had been very popular before her marriage, and the men who wanted to marry her all agreed not to let jealousy come between them when she finally picked one to marry. The leader of Menelaus's coalition was his brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae. Agamemnon was married to Helen's sister Clytemnestra. Helen and Clytemnestra were the daughters of Leda. They had two brothers by the same mother, Castor and Polydeuces (called Pollux in Latin). Although all four of them were born at once, they had two different fathers: Clytemnestra and Castor were the children of Leda's husband Tyndareus, but Helen and Polydeuces were the children of Zeus, who came to Leda in the form of a swan. Pindar tells the story (Nemean 10) that when Castor was killed in a fight, Polydeuces pleaded with Zeus to take him instead. They compromised on shared mortality: Castor and Polydeuces would be alive (as gods) on alternate days, dead (as mortals) on the others. They are therefore called the Dioscuri, "sons of Zeus." Helen and the Dioscuri are often pictured together, as on the sculpture shown at right. At this time, Greece was not a single, unified country. The area we now call Greece was divided up into many separate smaller territories, each with its own king. (In fact, this continued to be the situation throughout the classical period.) The army led by Agamemnon and Menelaus was thus not a single country's force but a collection of troops from various allied countries. Agamemnon needed to convince the other leaders to go along with anything he wanted the army to do. The name "Greek" is a Latinism; the Greeks fighting in the Trojan War called themselves Achaeans or Danaans. (The modern name, Hellas for the country and Hellenes for the people, was the name of a very small kingdom that was not yet significant.) The greatest warrior on the Greek side was Achilles. He was the son of Peleus and Thetis. An oracle had stated that Thetis would have a son who would be stronger than his father (see Isthmian 8). Although Zeus and Poseidon were both infatuated with Thetis, they decided it would be prudent to marry her off to a mortal, and chose Peleus. Achilles, the son, was indeed stronger than Peleus, and stronger than most other men as well. It is said that when he was born, Thetis took him to the river Styx, the boundary of the underworld, and dipped him in, to make him immortal. She kept hold of one of his feet, however, and as a result he was vulnerable at the back of his heel (and to this day we call the tendon between the heel and the calf muscle the "Achilles tendon"). Achilles was educated by Chiron the centaur (as described, for example, in Pindar's Third Nemean Ode). Achilles had one son, called Neoptolemus. Odysseus was the smartest of the Greeks. Some sources present him as very wise, others as tricky and under-handed. The picture shows an incident from the latter part of the war, in which Odysseus and Diomedes went on a spy mission to the Trojan camp and ran into a spy sent from the Trojan side; this is described in Iliad 10. Menelaus and Agamemnon collected Achilles, Odysseus, and their other allies at Aulis on the Boeotian coast before sailing to Troy. While they were waiting for everyone to arrive and the wind to become favorable, Agamemnon went out hunting, and killed a deer sacred to Artemis. (In another version, two eagles are seen killing a pregnant rabbit. Artemis is offended by this attack on a defenseless female.) Artemis demands in return the sacrifice of Agamemnon's eldest daughter Iphigeneia. Although he is not happy about it, Agamemnon does indeed kill his daughter, and Artemis then provides a favorable wind for the voyage to Troy. At last the fleet arrived at Troy, 1000 ships strong. The first warrior to disembark was Protesilaus, who was also the first one killed in the ensuing battle. Ovid tells his story from his wife's point of view in Heroides 13. The war went on for ten years. The Trojans, besieged in their city, held out valiantly, and the Greeks just couldn't seem to finish them off. In the tenth year Agamemnon made a major mistake. He treated Achilles with disrespect, making the warrior so angry that he withdrew from the fighting for several weeks. This incident forms the plot of the Iliad. While Achilles was out of action, Hector and the Trojans scored many great successes. Ultimately, Hector killed Patroclus, who was very close to Achilles. Achilles returned to the fighting to avenge Patroclus's death. Hector was no match for Achilles. His death is described in Iliad 22. All the women of Troy, including his mother Hecuba, his wife Andromache, and even Helen, mourned for him. Priam, his father, went to the Greek camp to claim his body from Achilles. Achilles knew he would not live much longer than Hector, and indeed he did not. He was killed by Paris, using a bow from a distance rather than fighting hand-to-hand with swords. The figure shows the supposed tomb of Achilles, near Troy. The Scamander river is in the background. Achilles had divine armor, made by Hephaestus. (The figure shows Thetis giving the armor to her son.) When he died, these weapons were to be awarded to the most worthy of the Greeks. Instead of having the candidates fight for them, the Greeks decided to elect the winner of the arms, and allowed the candidates to debate first. Odysseus, a facile speaker, came off much better than Ajax, and was awarded the arms; Ajax was distraught and killed himself. Ovid tells this story in Metamorphoses, book 13, with a brief introduction in book 12. With Hector dead, no one expected Troy to hold out much longer, but the Greeks were still unable to claim victory. At last they remembered another omen, telling them that Troy would only be taken by the great bow of Heracles. This bow was in the possession of Philoctetes, who was no longer with the army. On the way to Troy, Philoctetes and his contingent had stopped at an island near Lemnos. Philoctetes had entered the temple, where no one may walk, and was as a result bitten by the sacred snake. The wound was so unpleasant that the Greeks left him behind on Lemnos, at that time a deserted island. Now they realized they needed him to capture Troy, so they sent Odysseus and Neoptolemus (Achilles's son) to bring him back. The final victory came with a trick, however. The Greeks built an immense wooden horse, big enough for several dozen warriors to hide inside it. They left this horse at the gate of Troy, apparently as an offering to Athena. Meanwhile, the ships sailed away, just far enough to be invisible from the shore. The Trojan seers were skeptical, but the Trojans opened the gates and brought in the horse. When night fell, the Greeks came out from the horse and took the city from inside. Once they had set the palace on fire, the ships returned with the remainder of the Greek force, and the Trojans were overpowered. Although this incident is mentioned in the Odyssey (4.271 ff, 8.487 ff), the most detailed and most familiar version is in Virgil's Aeneid (Book 2). The Greeks were not noble in their victory. They captured and enslaved most of the women of Troy, and killed most of the men. Hector's son Astyanax was thrown from the city wall. Priam himself was killed by Neoptolemus, Achilles's son, in a temple. Menelaus had Helen back again, and Troy was destroyed. The Greeks returned home. Their return voyages and what happened when they got there (collectively called "nostoi" or "travels home") were another popular subject for poets. Odysseus had the longest, most difficult trip; it took him ten years to get back to Ithaca. His wanderings are described in the Odyssey. Menelaus and Helen returned to Sparta and lived a comfortable domestic life. Agamemnon was killed on his return, by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, who was also Agamemnon's cousin. Very few Trojans survived. Aeneas, a cousin of Hector's, did manage to escape, and wandered for some years before settling in Italy and founding the city of Rome. His journey is the subject of Virgil's Aeneid. The city of Troy really did exist. Although the Trojan War as we know it from literature is probably more legend than history, it is certain that the city was destroyed in about 1200 BC, roughly the traditional date of the war. The stories told by Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, and the rest may have grown from an original kernel of fact.
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