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Beware of Greeks..... - Page 2

© Anita Stratos

Paris immediately departed for Greece to win the love of Helen, the beautiful wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. Aphrodite put a spell on Helen to help Paris in his pursuit, and sure enough, Paris and Helen eloped and went back to Troy. Menelaus had been away, but when he returned to Sparta and realized Helen was gone, he rounded up an enormous army comprised of Helen's former suitors from all over Greece, and they set sail for Troy. This, by the way, is why Helen is referred to as "the face that launched a thousand ships".

Although the Greeks outnumbered the Trojans, once barricaded inside the stone walls of Troy, the Trojans were undefeatable. So the Greeks came up with another plan. They retreated to the water's edge, where they set up camp just long enough to build a giant wooden horse large enough to hide an army of men inside. This Trojan Horse was placed outside the walls of Troy, and although the Trojans had been warned against accepting gifts from Greeks, a messenger convinced them that the Greeks had retreated because they had offended Athena, goddess of wisdom. The horse was their gift to Athena, and a Greek "prophet" (actually a member of the Greek army) had told them that if the Trojans would take the horse into Troy, the Trojans would be victorious against the Greeks.

That night while the Trojans celebrated with the wooden horse inside their walls, the Greek army emerged from the horse and opened the gates for their comrades who had been waiting just outside. The Greek invaders killed the men and boys and took the women and young girls as slaves, burning the city as they fled.

This story has many more twists, turns, and conflicts, but for the sake of space provided here, that's the gist of it. Now we can turn to the historical proof that has been uncovered to date. The first written mention of Troy and its legendary battle came from the blind Greek poet Homer in his epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, which were written about 500 years after the Trojan War. Some experts believe that Homer's writings were distorted in order to justify the Greeks' attack on Troy and to glorify their history. Many feel that there were numerous Trojan Wars (because of Troy's strategic location) which, when combined, served as a basis for the epics. Others go even further, casting doubt upon the very existence of a poet named Homer, suggesting that the name "Homer" may have been the name of a group of writings or writers of the time, since very little is known about the poet himself.

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