Around the 17th century BCE, a new civilisation arose on the Greek mainland: the Mycenaean culture. It subsequently expanded to the Cyclades, Crete and the southwestern fringe of Anatolia around Miletus and Rhodes. This culture used an Indo-European language which would eventually evolve into the Classical Ancient Greek. Mycenaean societies were characterized by the key role of their palaces as administrative and economic centers. The signature stonework of their fortifications, built from massive boulders, would impress later cultures who would dub it 'cyclopean'. Modern archaeologists call this era the 'Late Helladic' period.

In the northwestern corner of Anatolia stood the settlement of Troia or Ilios (which we'll simply call Troy for the rest of this guide). The site, on a low hill dominating a plain in the vicinity of the Hellespont, had been inhabited since at least 3.500 BCE. In the Late Bronze Age it hosted a thriving walled city engaged in cultural and commercial relationships with the Mycenaean world to the west and the Luwian-speaking lands to the south. Like the Luwian province of Arzawa, Troy may have been a vassal state (under the names Taruisa or Wilusa) of the Hittite Empire which ruled from central Anatolia. The language spoken in Troy at that time remains unknown, though it is expected to belong to the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family.


All these societies - Mycenaean, Troyan, Arzawan, Hittite - disintegrated in the early 12th century BCE, along with other contemporary states in the Eastern Mediterranean world. Multiple hypotheses have been advanced for the causes of this phenomenon: large-scale famines caused by prolonged droughts, earthquakes, epidemics, iron smelting and other technological innovations upsetting the balance of power, migrations of Dorians, Thracians or the enigmatic Sea Peoples mentioned by Egyptian texts, or a conjunction of several of these factors into a 'perfect storm'. Whatever the causes, archeological evidence shows the destruction of most cities in the first half of the century, followed by a demographic crash and a steep decline in regional trade.

Troy had already been severely weakened by an earthquake around 1300. It was attacked and burnt by unknown foes around 1180 which left the settlement with only a shadow of its former population and wealth. Further East, the Hittite capital of Hattusa was sacked by Kaskians, erstwhile vassals turned rebels. The old empire crumbled into pieces. New states emerged in Anatolia: freed from the Hittite rule, Luwians eventually established the kingdom of Maeonia (Lydia), while the Thracians who had crossed the Hellespont founded Phrygia and Bithynia.

The general collapse marked the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the so-called Dark Ages of Greece. The disruption of regional trade networks, especially copper and tin, led to the abandonment of the linear B script used by the Mycenaeans. The recording of the volumes of harvested, stored and exchanged resources had been a leading impulse in the development of writing systems ever since the Sumerian and Akkadian scripts of the 3rd millenium BCE. Literacy only returned to Greece during its early Archaic period (around 800-750 BCE) when the Aegean trade grew back and a new alphabet inspired by the Phoenician system was developed.


The Mycenaean culture left behind the monumental palaces and chamber tombs of its royal dynasties. To the poor and isolated communities of the Dark Ages, these ruins were evocative of a bygone era where weathly rulers would shield their subjects from famine and violence.

Even though their names and characteristics had been forgotten, these leadership figures became the subjects of local worship. Libations and animal sacrifices were carried to please the buried heroes and earn their protection. A new mythology flourished as stories were created to give specific identities to these personages. Shrines (heroa) were built upon their supposed tombs, for instance a shrine to Agamemnon in Mycenae and a shrine to Menelaus and Helen near Sparta.


This new mythology divided time in five ages described in Hesiod's Works and Days. The merry Age of Gold was followed by the more violent Ages of Silver and Bronze, the Heroic Age and finally the miserable Iron Age. During the Heroic Age, bands of superhuman warriors accomplished prestigious feats such as the Calydonian boar hunt, the Argonautic expedition and the sieges of Thebes and Troy.

This inspiring era was the common setting of the poems of the Epic Cycle or Trojan Cycle, a collection of eight epic poems chronicling episodes of the Trojan War, its origins or its aftermath. These pieces were formulaic oral compositions which bards (aoidoi) transmitted to each other, memorized and declaimed in public. Their contents were eventually written down by anonymous scholars of the historical Archaic Age. Most of these poems have been lost to time and never reached us. The limited knowledge we have of them come from references in other ancient sources. The Iliad and the Odyssey fared better and were repeated and copied again and again for nearly three millenia.


Composed of over 15.000 lines, this epic poem is composed of a multitude of stories involving dozens of characters. It directly covers only a handful of weeks in the last year of the siege of Troy, but also includes allusions to past events and prophecies of future events.

Unfortunately the original written version is long lost. Our modern text is mostly based on medieval manuscripts from the 10th century and later, plus older but poorly preserved fragments of papyrus and wooden boards. We can only guess at the changes introduced accidentally (e.g. translation errors) or intentionally over the centuries. Several anachronistic elements, such as mentions of the phalanx formation, are considered post-Homerian additions to the Iliad.


Who was Homer? Despite his artistic legacy we know nearly nothing of him. The Iliad and the Odyssey, if indeed they were composed by the same man, would represent his only surviving records. The ancient accounts of his life have all been conclusively revealed as later forgeries. However some traditions from Classical Greece advanced that Homer may have been a contemporary of Hesiod and/or Arctinus of Miletus, both being epic poets uncertainly placed in the 8th or 7th century BCE.

Sculptors of the Hellenistic and Roman eras often portrayed Homer as a blind old man with locks, though these features aren't based on any evidence or earlier accounts.

Thanks to the detailed nature and literary quality of his work, Homer was regarded by most Greeks of the Classical and Hellenistic periods as an authority on the matter of the past eras.


The Iliad was considered a relevant and accurate source to resolve territorial disputes. The most prominent example of this use is the argument of Solon, a major Athenian statesman, during the long struggle between Athens and Megara for the control of Salamis in the 6th century BCE.

The island's key position overlooked the harbors of both city-states. Sparta offered its services as an arbiter in the conflict. To support the Athenian territorial claim, Solon quoted the Catalogue of Ships included in the Book II of the Iliad. This catalogue was then considered as a comprehensive listing of the leaders, ships and men sent by each Achean city-state to Troy. At the lines 557-558 it indeed mentions the contributions of Athens (fifty ships led by Menestheus) and Salamis: "Ajax brought twelve ships from Salamis, and stationed them alongside those of the Athenians."

Solon interpreted this passage as a proof that Salamis had been subordinated to Athens, and therefore should remain so. However the Megaran envoys objected to this reasoning. They questioned neither the existence of Ajax, great-grandson of Zeus, nor the historical accuracy of the Iliad. What Megara brought up was a distortion by Solon of the original text to make it more favorable to the Athenian claim. The Spartan arbitrators eventually ruled in favor of Athens, supported by Delphi.


While taken for granted, the events as well as their timing were debated by the Ancient Greeks who attempted to calculate their dates by combining various references, including the Olympiads, astronomical chronologies and genealogies of Greek, Persian and Egyptian dynasties. The destruction of Troy was dated to 1184 BCE by the mathematician Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276-195 BCE).

The historian and geographer Herodotus of Halicarnassus (circa 484-425 BCE) considered in his Histories that most of the events of the Trojan War were authentic. He calculated that these events had happened 800 years before him, i.e. during the 13th century, and that Homer had lived "not more than 400 years before our own time", i.e. the 7th century.

Interestingly, Herodotus developed a critical stance against Homer's storytelling and poetic license which had led him away from the facts, starting with the inconsistency between the casus belli advanced by the poet (the rapt of Helen) and the scale of the consequences (a Panhellenic coalition and a ten-year conflict). It seemed far-fetched to Herodotus that "the Greeks, for the sake of a single Lacedaemonian woman, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam."

As Herodotus before him, the Athenian statesman and historian Thucydides (circa 460-400 BCE) also accepted the Trojan War as a historical event. However in his Archaeology he proceeded to rationalize the war by excluding any interventions of the gods, explaining the power relationship between Agamemnon and his vassals, and justifying the extraordinary length of the war by the substantial logistical efforts required to maintain the Achean expeditionary force.

The Romans adopted much of the Greek myths, tweaking and expanding them to fit their taste or political needs. The popular figures of the Trojan War were recycled as well. Here are two notable examples.


After the establishment of the Empire in 27 BCE, Augustus used propaganda to gather support for the new regime. At his bidding the poet Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BCE), also known as Virgil in modern English, established a symbolic link between the destruction of Troy and the violent end of the Roman Republic, doubled with a more positive genealogical link between Aeneas and Augustus.

The Greek mythology character Aeneas was a Trojan prince born from the union of the goddess Aphrodite and Anchises, a cousin of Priam. Inspired by the Iliad and the Odyssey, Virgil created an epic poem, the Aeneid, depicting the fate of Aeneas after the fall of Troy and the death of his wife Creusa. According to Virgil the prince led a group of Trojan exiles through the Mediterranean. After adventures in Carthage, Drepanum (Sicily) and Cumae (Campania), he arrived in Latium, defeated the Etruscans and founded Rome with Lavinia, daughter of the king of the Latins.

And so was Aeneas added to the myth of the foundation of Rome as the father or grandfather of Romulus and Remus. House Julia claimed him as its ancestor, growing the prestige of its members such as Julius Caesar and his adopted son Augustus. Furthermore, the Phrygian goddess Cybele, considered by Virgil and the Roman mythographers as the patron of Troy, was imported into the Roman pantheon under the name of Magna Mater with the full support of Augustus.


The Roman poet Publius Papinius Statius (45-96 CE) developped a lesser known adventure of Achilles in the two tomes of his epic poem Achilleid.

The first tome relates the endeavors of the nymph Thetis, Achilles' mother, to prevent his son from joining the Achean expedition against Troy as she feared - correctly so - that he wouldn't survive it. After Neptune/Poseidon's refusal to abort the war, she resolved to hide Achilles at the court of King Lycomedes on the island of Skyros. Achilles was subjugated by the beauty of Deidamia, one of the daughters of Lycomedes, and agreed to disguise himself as a maiden in order to stay hidden at the court. He eventually raped Deidamia, though she forgave him and gave him a son. Odysseus and Diomedes then arrived at Skyros looking for Achilles. After crafty Odysseus tricked him into dropping his disguise, Achilles married Deidamia before sailing away with the Acheans.

The second tome tells of the longing of Achilles for Deidamia and the attempts of his two companions to lift his mood. Odysseus explained how Paris had abducted Helen, and Diomedes asked Achilles to recount his fostering by the centaur Chiron.

Statius died before he could complete his Achilleid. This story would however know great fame during the European Renaissance (see below).

The theme of the Trojan War enjoyed a continued popularity with the educated elites of the following eras. However the decline in their understanding of the Greek language limited them to Latin sources such as Virgil, Statius, Dares Phrygius (De Excidio Trojae Historia), Dictys Cretensis (Ephemeris Belli Trojani) or Publius Baebius Italicus (Ilias Latina).

In turn the medieval scholars created a new corpus of mythographies in Latin, French, Italian and English, often introducing severe anachronisms and inconsistencies in the original material. The ancient legends found themselves remodeled to the taste of the medieval audiences and wrapped in contemporary themes such as the chivalric code, courtly love, feudalism, medieval warfare and the translatio imperii - the idea that imperial "legitimacy" would pass on from Alexander and Rome to Western European realms such as Charlemagne's.


The myth of Aeneas as developed by Virgil was further exploited in the Middle Ages to support the legitimacy of ruling dynasties. The 7th-century Chronicle of Fredegar forged a mythological origin for the Franks as heirs of Trojan exiles resettled in the Rhinelands. This narrative was expanded in the 8th-century Historia Brittonum which built a family tree for Aeneas and his descendants, featuring Francus, founder of the Frankish Merovingian dynasty, and his brother Brutus, first king of Britain.

These tales designated Aphrodite and her son Aeneas as the ancestors of both Charlemagne and Arthur Pendragon. The large gap in time between Archaic Greece and the Early Middle Ages or the fact that Charlemagne belonged to the Carolingian line (which had overthrown the Merovingians) represent but some of the many historical inconsistencies in this proposal.


The story of Achilles on Skyros told in the first century by Statius was mostly forgotten until the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) mentioned it in the Divine Comedy, his masterpiece poem. This specific episode of the adventures of Achilles would gain further popularity in the following centuries and serve as the main subject of multiple theatre plays, operas and paintings.

Greek mythology provided the subjects of numerous baroque works of art. For instance The Judgment of Paris is a 1528 painting by the German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder showing the Trojan prince with Aphrodite, Athena and Hera as he is about to choose the most beautiful goddess among them, a key event which will trigger the Trojan War. Contemporary elements include the medieval suit of armor worn by Paris and the representation of the Golden Apple of Discord as a glass orb.

The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century and the Enlightenment of the 18th century were marked by the critical review of established dogmas and beliefs. While in astronomy the old model placing Earth at the center of the universe was questioned and discarded, in the field of history emerged the need to sort facts from fiction.


The traditional conception of the Trojan War as an authentic event was maybe first contested by the French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). In a display of 17th century scepticism, he explained in his Thoughts (1660): "These fantasy historians are not contemporary of the events which they write about. Homer produces a fiction and presents it as such; since nobody would expect Troy and Agamemnon to be any more real than the Golden Apple [of Discord]. He has no intention to write history, but only to entertain. (...) Four centuries later, the witnesses are no more, nobody knows any longer if it is a tale or history: they have learned it from their ancestors, it may pass as true."


In his History of Greece (1784), the British historian William Mitford (1744-1827) wrote candidly: "Taking Homer as our faithful guide for the history of this early age, we may conclude that no great revolution, nothing of any extensive consequence, happened in Greece after the troubles ensuing from the Trojan war had subsided to the time when he composed his poems." This statement reflected the still dominant opinion of the time deeming the Iliad a reliable historical account.

Two generations later, another British historian, George Grote (1794-1871), took the opposite view by presenting the Trojan War as only "an interesting fable". His own History of Greece (1846) represented a much more comprehensive and scrupulous chronicle than Mitford's. Grote proceeded to review his rival's work, calling out his multiple datation errors, his general confusion between mythological and historical matters and his political agenda (Mitford's virulent hatred of the French Revolution had fueled a marked bias against the Athenian democracy). Here's his conclusion on the Trojan War: "Taken as a special legendary event, it is indeed of wider and larger interest than any other, but it is a mistake to single it out from the rest [of the Greek myths] as if it rested upon a different and more trustworthy basis." Grote's stance became largely accepted among British academics.

Ancient mythology became a major topic of interest in Europe after the publishing of The History of Ancient Art (1764) from the German pioneer archeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). The Neoclassic and Romantic movements of the 18th and 19th centuries were sparked by this new passion for past civilisations, chief among them the Greek and Roman cultures. The idealisation of the past was a key principle for the Romantics who adopted the Ancient Greek nostalgia of a lost golden age.

Shown here is The Love of Helen and Paris (1788) by Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), a French Neoclassical painter whose art style and themes were heavily influenced by the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann.


Forgotten during the Christianisation of Greece and Anatolia, the exact location of Troy became actively seeked by cartographers and other scholars. In 1822, Charles Maclaren (1782-1866), a Scottish journalist and editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, identified a plain in northwestern Anatolia as a plausible location for the Troy of the Iliad by comparing modern topographic maps with ancient sources such as Homer, Strabo and Demetrius.

The site was bought in 1847 by a family of British expatriates, the Calverts. One of their members, the amateur archaeologist Frank Calvert (1828–1908), was aware of Maclaren's theory. In 1855 he started to perform excavations in the ancient mounds which dominate the site, though limited funds prevented him from digging deep into them.

In 1868 Calvert met the German businessman Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) who shared his passion for Homer and his belief than Troy was located nearby. Schliemann had built a small fortune by selling military supplies to Russia during the Crimean War. Calvert convinced him that Troy was buried in the mound of Hissarlik, on the lands of the Calvert family, and authorized him to continue the excavations.

Central in the motivation of Schliemann were his certitude that Homer had reported authentic events which could be verified by material evidence, and his ambition to find and show that evidence to the world. He gathered new workers and tools for the task. Between 1870 and 1873, Schliemann, Calvert and their men dug a wide trench through nine archaeological layers, occasionally using explosives (!) to speed up the work.


In the spring of 1873 they discovered a cache of metal artefacts: copper weapons, silver and gold drinkware, gold rings and two impressive gold diadems. Schliemann was quick to assume that what he found was what he wanted to find. He designated the collection as "Priam's Treasure", specifying that the diadems had belonged to Helen. In 1875 he claimed that "there can remain no doubt whatever that this is the very city sung by Homer, that this is the very city destroyed by the Greeks, that this is the Ilium of eternal glory." After smuggling the relics out of Anatolia, he went on to dig at Mycenae and unearth what he named the "Mask of Agamemnon".

It turned out however that Schliemann's assertions were erroneous by a large margin. The so-called "Priam's Treasure" didn't belong to the Bronze Age of the 2nd millenium BCE but to the much older Chalcolithic Age of the 4th millenium. A valuable finding in its own right, but impossible to match with any event involving Myceanean Greeks. His datation of the "Mask of Agamemnon" was also incorrect as the item pre-dated the emergence of the Mycenaen civilisation by several centuries.

Scholars of previous centuries considered the authenticy of the Trojan War as a yes-or-no question. In the 20th century emerged a consensus among experts acknowledging the great story as a mix of fiction and historical content.


As modern archeology provided a greater understanding of human activities in the Late Bronze Age, it became apparent that the warfare of that time was essentially limited to raids for booty. The possibility of a wide coalition of Myceanean Greeks projecting an army across the Aegean Sea "for the sake of a single Lacedaemonian woman" in the words of Herodotus, or even for political reasons, was deemed incompatible with the material evidence available. On the other hand, regional piracy for plunder and slaves was a widespread reality in the Eastern Mediterranean and remained so during the Iron Age.

In Folk Tale: Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (1946), the American art historian Rhys Carpenter (1889-1980) stated his critical view of Schliemann's assertions: "There is something wrong either with Schliemann's Troy or with Homer's." He developed his own theory that the narrative of the Trojan War was built from a core of authentic events embellished with a high amount of poetic licence. The original story would have been a larger than usual raid on a non-Mycenaean settlement, possibly the historical Troy, the Anatolian coastal town of Teuthrania mentioned in the Cypria (a lost poem of the Epic Cycle) or even an Egyptian location attacked by the so-called Sea Peoples.


Also critical of Schliemann, the British American historian Moses I. Finley (1912-1986) proceeded to an extensive anthropological analysis of the society portrayed in the Iliad in his The World of Odysseus (1954). His conclusion was that Homer, a man of the Archaic age, had attempted to set his story neither in the Mycenaean era (18th-11th ct.) nor in his own Archaic age (8th-4th ct.), but in-between, in the little known Greek Dark Ages (11th-8th ct.). This argument is supported by multiple clues present in the Iliad:

• Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey describe any building whose architecture would identify it as a Mycenaean palace.
  
• The Iliad mentions temples dedicated to gods, while the Myceaneans had none. The first shrines and temples appeared in Greece during its Dark Ages.
  
• The society described in the Iliad practiced cremation, as illustrated by the spectacular funerals of Patroclus and Hector. Historically this rite was imported from Phoenicia and became the main funeral rite in Greece from 1050 to 850 BC. During the Mycenaean times, the dead were inhumed in chamber tombs.
  
• Iron tools are mentioned in the poem though iron smelting only appeared after the collapse of the Mycenaean culture.
  
• Homer knew that past generations went to battle on chariots, a weapon introduced in the region by the Hittites. He could not picture their actual combat role as the practice had been abandoned by the Archaic age. Therefore his heroes limited their use of chariots to simple means of transportation between their camp and the battlefield, before discarding them and engaging the enemy on foot.

From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Beowulf and the Saga of Hervör and Heidrek, the main intentions of heroic poems have always been art and entertainment rather than factual accuracy. Their great literary merits are unrelated to their value as historical sources. If anything, they tend to reveal more about the context in which they were produced and less about the events they aim to present.

The Song of Roland was written three centuries after the battle of Roncevaux Pass (778) which it attempted to recount. As a consequence it was reinterpreted with the political and social tenets of the time of its composition, such as feudal vassalage and the crusader ideology. The Basques raiding Charlemagne's baggage train were replaced by Muslim Andalusian soldiers, bizarrely bearing Germanic and Byzantine names. And so the death of a Frankish baron in a rearguard battle of the 8th century was exalted as an inspiring act of Christian martyrdom to the knightly audience of the 11th century courts.

The 12th/13th century Niebelungenlied, sometimes compared to the Iliad for its scale and popularity, provides another example of an epic poem with a confused perception of the events and characters which inspired it. Its narrative telescopes historical figures from different times, including Gundahar, king of Burgundy (?-437), Attila, leader of the Huns (406–453), Brunhilda, queen of Austrasia and Burgundy (543–613), and Piligrim, bishop of Passau (?-991). The protagonist Siegfried isn't so conveniently related to a historical character, though historians have suggested various origins.

In the absence of archeological confirmation, the only argument supporting the authenticity of the Trojan War which concerns us here is the existence of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer was however a brilliant narrator and his stories have been told and repeated for nearly three millenia. The Troy he described, authentic or legendary, lives on it the mind of millions of readers.

• Dissertation on the Topography of the Plain of Troy, Charles Maclaren, 1822
  
• History of Greece, William Mitford, 1784
  
• History of Greece, George Grote, 1846
  
• Tradition and Design in the Iliad, Cecil Maurice Bowra, 1930
  
• Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics, Rhys Carpenter, 1946
  
• The World of Odysseus, Moses I. Finley, 1954
  
• Aspects of Antiquity: Discoveries and Controversies, Moses. I. Finley, 1960
  
• Early Greece, Oswyn Murray, 1978
  
• Atlas of the Greek World, Peter Levi, 1980
  
• 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Eric H. Cline, 2014
  
• Troy, myth and reality[blog.britishmuseum.org], Alexandra Villing, J. Lesley Fitton, Victoria Donnellan and Andrew Shapland (The British Museum), 2019
  
• Ancient Warfare magazine vol XV, issue 3, Karwansaray Publishers, 2022

If you're looking for the Iliad itself, the 16.000 lines of the original text may be challenging to read unless you're passionate about lengthy, rythmic epic poetry. An easier alternative is Alessandro Baricco's abridged version published in 2004 and translated in multiple languages.

I've recently written another guide to present the various peoples, lands and key characters of Total War Pharaoh:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3043204315

If you're interested in roleplaying as an Achean or a Trojan in the standalone expansion Pharaoh Dynasties, here's what you need to know:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3296888726