Much of it is no doubt fantasy. There is, for example, no evidence that Achilles or even Helen existed. But most scholars agree that Troy itself was no imaginary Shangri-la but a real city, and that the Trojan War indeed happened.
Thus Troy is captured; all the inhabitants are either slain or carried into slavery, and the city is destroyed. The only survivors of the royal house are Helenus, Aeneas, Hector's wife Andromache, and Cassandra, who is taken as a war prize by Agamemnon.
The Archaeological Site of Troy has 4,000 years of history. Its extensive remains are the most significant and substantial evidence of the first contact between the civilizations of Anatolia and the burgeoning Mediterranean world.
Most of us think he was a mythologic Greek hero (Figure 1). The truth is that there may well have been a real Thessalian warrior, later mythologized by his semi-literate people. The story goes that his mother, Thetis, made him invulnerable by dipping him in the River Styx while he was still an infant.
Menelaus and Helen then returned to Sparta, where they lived happily until their deaths. According to a variant of the story, Helen, in widowhood, was driven out by her stepsons and fled to Rhodes, where she was hanged by the Rhodian queen Polyxo in revenge for the death of her husband, Tlepolemus, in the Trojan War.
Achilles chased Hector back to Troy, slaughtering Trojans all the way. When they got to the city walls, Hector tried to reason with his pursuer, but Achilles was not interested. He stabbed Hector in the throat, killing him.
According to the Roman epic poet Virgil, the Trojans were defeated after the Greeks left behind a large wooden horse and pretended to sail for home. Unbeknown to the Trojans, the wooden horse was filled with Greek warriors. They sacked Troy after the Trojans brought the horse inside the city walls.
This doomed city at the heart of the Trojan War was lost for thousands of years until a team of German archaeologists uncovered the ancient site. Heinrich Schliemann, the German archaeologist, was in Turkey in the late 19th century on an eccentric quest.
The ancient city of Troy was located along the northwest coast of Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey.
Paris himself, soon after, received a fatal wound from an arrow shot by the rival archer Philoctetes.
Ultimately, Paris was killed in action, and in Homer's account Helen was reunited with Menelaus, though other versions of the legend recount her ascending to Olympus instead. A cult associated with her developed in Hellenistic Laconia, both at Sparta and elsewhere; at Therapne she shared a shrine with Menelaus.
The Trojans were an ancient people who are thought to have been based in modern-day Turkey. Historians are unsure if they were descendants of Greeks or from elsewhere, most of what we know comes from Greeks written much later, such as the famous Greek writer, Homer.
Perhaps somewhat confusingly, the modern site of Troy is known in Turkey as Hisarlik, but the local Turks will understand what you mean by Troy - although they spell it as Troja. Troy is around 19 miles from Canakkale and around 4 miles from the Aegean Sea as well as the Dardanelles.
How does Achilles die? Achilles is killed by an arrow, shot by the Trojan prince Paris. In most versions of the story, the god Apollo is said to have guided the arrow into his vulnerable spot, his heel. In one version of the myth Achilles is scaling the walls of Troy and about to sack the city when he is shot.
Thanks to archaeologists, a German businessman turned archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann to be specific, we now know that Troy was a real place and is located on the northwest coast of Turkey. Today, the place is called Hisarlik.
In the Homeric account of the Trojan War, Antenor advised the Trojans to return Helen to her husband and otherwise proved sympathetic to a negotiated peace with the Greeks. In later developments of the myths, particularly per Dares and Dictys, Antenor was made an open traitor, unsealing the city gates to the enemy.
What did Helen look like? Today's movies and paintings make her a blonde, but ancient Greek paintings show her as a brunette. Homer merely tells us she was “white-armed, long robed, and richly tressed,” leaving the rest up to our imagination.
Little is known about the language spoken in Troy. Some researchers suspect it was Luvian, others that it was Lydian. Kloekhorst concluded that the original language of Troy was possibly a precursor of Etruscan. To this day there have been no archaeological finds that can provide any evidence in the matter.
The more common version, however, made Aeneas the leader of the Trojan survivors after Troy was taken by the Greeks. In any case, Aeneas survived the war, and his figure was thus available to compilers of Roman myth.
But was it just a myth? Probably, says Oxford University classicist Dr Armand D'Angour: 'Archaeological evidence shows that Troy was indeed burned down; but the wooden horse is an imaginative fable, perhaps inspired by the way ancient siege-engines were clothed with damp horse-hides to stop them being set alight. '
A replica of the Trojan Horse stands today in Turkey, the modern day location of the city of Troy.
The one-on-one combat ends with Achilles killing Hector. Still pulsing with anger and needing to satisfy his revenge and grief for having lost Patroclus, Achilles allows Achaean soldiers to stab and mutilate Hector's corpse.
In other accounts, Achilles marries the Trojan princess Polyxena and supposedly negotiates an end to the war when Paris fires the shot that kills him. According to other ancient authors, after his death, Achilles is cremated, and his ashes are mixed with those of his dear friend, Patroclus.
After the events of the Iliad, when the Greeks finally sack the city of Troy, Hector's son Astyanax is thrown from the walls the city. Andromache becomes the concubine of the man who kills Astyanax: Neoptolemus, Achilles' son.
Sparta (Greek: Σπάρτη Spárti [ˈsparti]) is a city and municipality in Laconia, Peloponnese, Greece. It lies at the site of ancient Sparta.