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Originally Posted by Sailor Steve
To add to Frau K's post, and partially disagree with it, we only have Homer's word that the war lasted ten years, and we don't know for certain that it happened at all, which makes this a case of the movie varying from the book, not from history.
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Oh, absolutely. I was referring to the story as it has been passed down since the time that it was committed to writing primarily in the Iliad/Odyssey, which most people would agree is the definitive literary version. The actual history involved is a matter for the archaelogists to sort out as best they can. In that respect, we do know that there was a major city in the "right" spot at the "right" time and that it was sacked/burnt/destroyed/suffered some catastrophe and was rebuilt many times over during its long history. IIRC though the jury is still out on which "Troy" is the likeliest candidate for the Homeric one, i.e., the one that
could have been besieged and sacked by a Bronze Age army from the Greek mainland.
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I highly recommend Michael Woods' documentary In Search Of The Trojan War. Excellent show, and very enlightening. It starts with Heinrich Schliemann and works backwards, discussing everything that's known.
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Yep, I hadn't even read that far when I started to reply to the first part of your post and that doc was gonna be the next thing I mentioned.
Oddly enough my Grecophilia (is that a word?) started with Schliemann and grew from there. When I was around 6 or 7 years old I found a little book in the children's section of the local library called "Great Stories Of Archaeology" or something like that. Funny how those things stick with you - I can still see the cover in my mind, bright yellow clothbound with a picture of the famous King Tut sarcophagus staring right out at you. But it was the story of Schliemann's search for a real, historical Troy that sucked me in. From there I went to the card catalog and looked up "Troy" and "Trojan War" and I never looked back.
