We are sure you have heard about the Trojan War. It was fought between the early Greeks and the people of Troy (now in Turkey). The scene of this great battle was the city of Troy in about 1230 BC. The war lasted for 10 years.
According to the legend, the war started in about 1240 BC. When Paris, the prince of Troy, fell in love with Helen, the beautiful wife of King Menelaus of Sparta and carried her off to Troy with him. Menelau’s brother, the great king Agamemnon of Argos, summoned all the kings of the other Greek cities, and set off with a thousand ships to bring Helen back. For a number of years the Greeks besieged Troy without success. Then they devised an ingenious scheme to defeat the enemy.
They built a great wooden horse which was called the Trojan horse. The horse was built by Epeius, a master carpenter and pugilist. The Greeks concealed a raiding party inside it and left it outside the city walls. The Greeks, pretending to retreat, sailed to the nearby Island of Tenedos. They left behind Sinon, who persuaded the Trojans to believe that the horse was an offering to Athena to make Troy impregnable. The Trojans brought the horse inside the city walls. What they did not know then was that the horse was full of Greek soldiers. In the middle of the night, they came out of the horse, opened the city gates and let in the rest of the Greek army. They killed all the Trojans they could find, and set fire to the city. It was completely destroyed.
The legend of the Trojan War has been the subject of a famous epic called ‘The Iliad’ by the blind Greek poet, Homer, written Ilium is another name for Troy. The story is told at length in the 2nd book of Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ and is also touched upon in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’.
No one knows if the story is true. However, a German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, discovered the site of the city in 1871-94.