ONE FINAL SIEGE

The Trojan War is commonly considered a coherent ten-year event, but the siege of the city is rather the capstone in a punitive expedition by the assembled Greeks against the inhabitants of the Troad. Homer’s description of the composition of the Greek and Trojan armies, and of the war situation in the Iliad, are suggestive of a wider-scale Greek enterprise equally alluded to in other sources from antiquity.

By Ronald Blankenborg

THE CAPSTONE OF A TEN-YEAR EXPEDITION The Trojan War is best known from its earliest source in Greek literature, Homer’s Iliad (ca.800 BC). Subsequent literary, documentary, and material sources provide evidence of the importance of the war for the Greek sense of mythology, history, and panhellenism in antiquity. Herodotus (ca.485-425 BC) famously states that the Trojan War took place “roughly 800 years” before his own time, thus dating the war as a historical event around 1250-1225 BC. Throughout antiquity, the war and its heroes became the lodestone that everything was measured against. The beginning of history The Trojan War not only starts off Greek ‘history’, but it stands at the beginning of its archaeology as well. The excavation of Troy by Heinrich Schliemann in the 1870s, and of Orchomenus, Mycenae, and Tiryns in the…

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Ancient Warfare (Digital) - 1 Issue, AW XV.3

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