Latest / The History of Greece: Philosophy, Empire, and Endless Reinvention — Fexingo History / The True Story Behind the Trojan War: History vs Myth
Transcript
- Lucas: So Luna, we've covered a lot of ground in this series — the Peloponnesian War, Athenian democracy, Spartan society. But there's one story that looms over all of Greek history, even though it happened centuries before the classical period: the Trojan War. The question is, did it actually happen? Luna: Wait — you mean the whole thing with Helen, the wooden horse, Achilles? That's not just a myth? Lucas: Well, it's complicated. For a long time, most scholars treated the Trojan War as pure legend — a poetic invention by Homer. But then, in the 1870s, a German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann decided to prove the sceptics wrong. He went to a mound in northwestern Turkey called Hisarlik and started digging. And he found a city, with multiple layers of destruction. Luna: He actually found Troy? Lucas: He found something. Schliemann's methods were, let's say, aggressive — he dug massive trenches straight through the mound, destroying a lot of archaeological context in the process. But he uncovered a series of cities built on top of each other, spanning from the early Bronze Age to the Roman period. He declared that one of these layers — which he called Troy II — was the Troy of King Priam. We now know he was wrong about that. The city he found was much older, from around 2500 BCE, not 1200 BCE. But the site itself was genuine. Luna: So how do we know which layer is the right one? Lucas: That's where later archaeology comes in. After Schliemann, other excavators — like Wilhelm Dörpfeld and Carl Blegen — refined the chronology. They identified Troy VI and Troy VIIa as the most likely candidates for Homer's city. Troy VI was a prosperous, well-fortified citadel with impressive walls, destroyed around 1300 BCE by a major earthquake. Troy VIIa was built on top of it, with cramped houses and storage jars sunk into the floors — signs of a city under siege — and it was destroyed by fire around 1190 BCE. That destruction date lines up pretty well with the traditional date for the Trojan War, around 1184 BCE by Eratosthenes' calculation. Luna: That's exactly when the Bronze Age collapse was happening, right? Lucas: Exactly. And that's one of the reasons the Trojan War story is so compelling — it sits right at the end of the Mycenaean world. But the real breakthrough for connecting Troy to Greek myth came not from archaeology, but from Hittite texts. In the early 20th century, clay tablets from the Hittite capital Hattusa in central Anatolia were deciphered. They described a kingdom called Wilusa — which scholars think is the Hittite name for Troy — and a people called the Ahhiyawa, who are almost certainly the Achaeans, the Homeric Greeks. Luna: So the Hittites had diplomatic correspondence about the Greeks? Lucas: They did. One of the most famous documents is the so-called 'Tawagalawa Letter,' written by a Hittite king, probably Hattusili III, to the king of Ahhiyawa around 1250 BCE. The letter complains about a Hittite vassal named Piyamaradu who's been raiding Hittite territory, and who seems to have operated with Ahhiyawan support. More importantly, the letter mentions the city of Wilusa. Another treaty, the Alaksandu Treaty, names a king of Wilusa — and 'Alaksandu' is almost certainly the Hittite version of 'Alexandros,' which is another name for Paris, the Trojan prince. Luna: So Paris might have been a real king? That's wild. Lucas: It suggests that the names and some of the political relationships in the epic cycle have a historical core. The Hittites also refer to a god Apaliunas — which sounds a lot like Apollo, who was a major patron of Troy in the Iliad. So the evidence is circumstantial but strong: there was a real city of Troy, a real conflict between Mycenaean Greeks and Anatolian powers, and it likely involved the city of Wilusa in the late 13th century BCE. Luna: And we know you as a listener support this show without ads. If this kind of deep dive is your thing, you can help keep it going at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small way to say you value ad-free history. Lucas: Yeah, we don't run ads, and that's a choice we make because we want these conversations to be purely about the story. So if you've ever gotten something out of this show, that link is a simple way to support it. Anyway — back to Troy. So we have a real city, a real war, but what about the details? The ten-year siege, the wooden horse, the heroes? Luna: Are any of those details historically plausible? Lucas: A few. The ten-year duration is probably poetic license — most Bronze Age sieges would have been resolved in months, not years. But the Greeks did have a tradition of protracted conflicts, and the Mycenaean citadels themselves were built to withstand long blockades. The wooden horse? That's almost certainly a myth, though some scholars have suggested it could be a memory of a siege engine or a battering ram shaped like a horse, or even a metaphor for a ship — the horse being a symbol of Poseidon, god of the sea. Luna: But the core of the story — a Greek expedition to Troy — that's real? Lucas: That seems to be. We have evidence of Mycenaean warfare: the Linear B tablets mention chariots, armor, weapons. We know the Mycenaeans were active in the eastern Mediterranean, trading and sometimes raiding as far as the Levant. The Hittite texts show that Ahhiyawa was a major power that the Hittites had to deal with. So a large-scale raid or campaign against a wealthy Anatolian city like Wilusa fits what we know about Mycenaean behaviour. The real cause was probably economic — control of trade routes, access to resources like tin and copper — not a stolen queen. Luna: So Helen might have been a fiction, but the war behind her story was real. Lucas: Exactly. The Iliad was composed centuries after the events it describes, probably in the 8th century BCE, by which time the Mycenaean world had collapsed and the Dark Age had come and gone. Homer was singing about a heroic past that his audience already revered. He wove together genuine memories — the names of places like Troy, the use of chariots, the types of armor — with later inventions and epic flourishes. The result is a poem that's both history and myth. Luna: How do archaeologists distinguish between those layers of memory? Lucas: It's a painstaking process. For example, Homer describes Ajax carrying a tower shield, a massive body shield that was used in the Mycenaean period but had fallen out of use by Homer's time. That's a genuine memory. But he also describes cremation burials, which were common in the Dark Age but not in the Mycenaean period, where they used inhumation. So the poem is a palimpsest — layers of different eras superimposed. The catalogue of ships in Book 2 of the Iliad lists over 200 place names, many of which were real Mycenaean settlements that were abandoned by the classical period. That catalogue is probably a very old, authentic document that Homer incorporated. Luna: So the poem itself is like an archaeological site. Lucas: That's a great way to put it. And the Trojan War story didn't end with the Bronze Age. It continued to be retold, reshaped, and politicized for centuries. The Athenians used it to claim lineage from the heroes. The Romans claimed descent from the Trojan prince Aeneas. In the medieval period, the story of Troy was considered true history, and it influenced chivalric romances. Even today, the idea of Troy resonates — it's the archetypal siege, the ultimate clash of civilizations. Luna: It's amazing how one war could have such a long shadow. Lucas: It is. And what's so fascinating is that the more we learn, the more the historical core seems to hold up. We may never know exactly what happened at Troy, but the evidence shows that something did happen — something big enough to echo through three thousand years of storytelling. And that's what makes history so compelling: it's not just facts, it's the stories we tell about ourselves.