Trojan War....?

Question

Was the Wooden Horse at Troy a work of fiction (Homer's Iliad) or did it actually happen?

Answer 1

Did not happen. Its a pretty story. Sieges happen. Betrayal too.
Cities are sacked, enslaved, or murdered. The 'Rape of Nanking', comes to mind, from contemporary history. The facts
are, in Japan, not something most people want to recall. It
offends a personal comfort level. Invention is sometimes more comfortable. Another pretty story is born.

Answer 2

Actually there are many variations of the Trojan horse.
One is the well known Men hiding in a giant wooden horse after granting the Trojans "victory" then killing most of the army during the night.
Then there is the battering ram that some believe the Horse really was.
Also there is the version where the horse was just a bunch of wood too big for the Trojans to bring through the gates of Troy so they tor a segment of the wall down.
And finally there is the version where an earthquake happened and split the walls of Troy enough to allow the Greek army into Troy and the Greeks built a stone horse in the crack as a thanks to the gods.
It is possible that it happened but we cant be sure until the the remains of Troy are finished being Excavated.

Answer 3

Where to start? There is a long tradition of story telling, and the tales told, being passed down from generation to generation in the Middle East. Story tellers in Iran and Iraq still recount Alexander The Greats conquest of their countries. So why could the tale of the Trojan Wars not also be based on a similar story telling tradition of real events in history. I think it could and probably is. Recent archaeological work at the accepted site of ancient Troy also tends to support this thesis. To quote Manfred Korfmann, director of excavations at Troy and a professor of archaeology at the University of Tübingen, "According to the archaeological and historical findings of the past decade especially, it is now more likely than not that there were several armed conflicts in and around Troy at the end of the Late Bronze Age. At present we do not know whether all or some of these conflicts were distilled in later memory into the "Trojan War" or whether among them there was an especially memorable, single "Trojan War." However, everything currently suggests that Homer should be taken seriously, that his story of a military conflict between Greeks and the inhabitants of Troy is based on a memory of historical events--whatever these may have been. If someone came up to me at the excavation one day and expressed his or her belief that the Trojan War did indeed happen here, my response as an archaeologist working at Troy would be: Why not?"

Visit the web site link. It's very interesting.

Answer 4

The Trojan War was waged, according to legend, against the city of Troy in Asia Minor, by the armies of the Achaeans (Mycenaean Greeks), after Paris of Troy stole Helen from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta. The war is among the most important events in Greek mythology and was narrated in many works of Greek literature, of which the two most famous are the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. The Iliad relates a part of the last year of the siege of Troy, while the Odyssey describes the journey home of Odysseus, one of the Achaean leaders. Other parts of the story were narrated in a cycle of epic poems, which has only survived in fragments. Episodes from the war provided material for Greek tragedy and other works of Greek literature, and Roman poets like Virgil and Ovid.
Ancient Greeks thought the Trojan War to be a historical event. They believed that it took place in the 13th or 12th century BC, and that Troy was located in the vicinity of the Dardanelles, in what is now north-western Turkey. By modern times both the war and the city were widely believed to be non-historical. In 1870, however, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated a site in this area which he believed to be the site of Troy, and at least some archaeologists agree. There remains no certain evidence that Homer's Troy ever existed, still less that any of the events of the Trojan War cycle ever took place. Many scholars would agree that there is a historical core to the tale, though this may simply mean that the Homeric stories are a fusion of various tales of sieges and expeditions by Greeks of the Bronze Age or Mycenean period. Those who believe that the stories of the Trojan War derive from a specific historical conflict usually date it to between 1300 BC and 1200 BC, usually preferring the dates given by Eratosthenes (1194 BC–1184 BC) which roughly correspond with the burning of Troy VIIa.

Answer 5

From what I've read these stories were not written down until five or six hundred years after they were supposed to have happened. Before that time they were passed about by word of mouth. A lot of the ancient Greek myths were morality tales used to educate people in the proper way of thinking and living their lives. The Trojan war story was read with pride by later Greeks as the story of the birth of the their nation the way we read about George Washington today. Some of the characters like Achilles were larger than life. That a man in any time would worry so much about history remembering him is hard to believe.

Answer 6

In England we still hear of the saying: beware of Greeks bearing gifts. The Horse is part of the Epic Cycle so maybe it did happen. But Achilles, who was apparently in the horse, was bathed in water by a goddess and made invincible. And Philoctetes brought the bow of Heracles (Hercules in Latin) to Troy after spending years on an island due to an infected snake bite and fired the arrows that do not miss - thus giving the Greeks victory.

Doses of salt. Mythology and history do not mix. Maybe.

Answer 7

not in the illiad my friend or the oddessy, it's in aeneid by virgil a roman poet

Virgil responded with the Aeneid, the writing of which took up the last ten years of his life. The first six books of the epic tell how the Trojan hero Aeneas escapes from the sacking of Troy and makes his way to Italy. On the voyage, a storm drives him to the coast of Carthage, where the queen, Dido, welcomes him, and under the influence of the gods falls deeply in love with him. Jupiter recalls Aeneas to his duty, however, and he slips away from Carthage, leaving Dido to commit suicide, cursing Aeneas as revenge. On reaching Cumae, in Italy, Aeneas consults the Cumaean Sibyl, who conducts him through the Underworld and reveals his destiny to him. Aeneas is reborn as the creator of Imperial Rome.

Answer 8

Homer's Illiad does not cover that part of the Trojan war, you would need to read Virgil's Aenid to discover the wooden horse.

Answer 9

It would have been impossible. If one of the greeks would have farted then the game would have been over. And how many people can hold a fart for that long.

Answer 10

I think they used a tracking cookie