I have an adventure story to tell you. You have perhaps been reading, or at least hearing about, Homer's Iliad, Odyssey or other works which in some way recall one of the most influential and famous events from Greek mythology: the Trojan War.  In the middle of keeping various characters straight before they're cut down at the greaves and darkness covers their eyes, you might have wondered whether any of these people really lived, if they actually fought these battles, and just who all these Greeks and Trojans really were. Maybe you have even talked about these questions a little with teachers, classmates, and friends. If so, you've joined a vast, prestigious line of fans, readers, scholars, scientists, researchers, and enthusiasts who have looked into and speculated about the historical reality behind the Iliad. What follows here is a brief illustrated survey of the successes, failures, and efforts of these people over the last 3,000 years. It is in many ways the story of people and events as captivating as the mythological stories themselves.

Who was Homer?
Today we might be inclined to think of an author, especially a poet, as a creative individual genius who labored long and hard to write such massive, complex, and stunning works such as the Iliad and the Odyssey.  It is common, moreoever, to represent him as a noble, classical Greek, such as you see in the famous portrait bust above on the left.  As it turns out, however, we know very little about Homer and how the poems were created.  We can be quite sure, however, that, the Iliad and the Odyssey are not the product of a single man sitting down and composing a long epic poem out of his imagination. If there ever was an individual named Homer involved in the creation of these epic poems, he more likely resembled the singer crudely portrayed on the right.  Over the last century, scholars have come to believe the Homeric poems represent examples, or collections, of songs performed by singer/composers the 8th century BC in Greece.  Scholars have gained insight into the process primarily through the pioneering work of Milman Perry in the 1920's and 1930's.  Perry traveled to the lands which would have been on the northern edge of ancient Greece (Yugoslavia in Perry's time; Kosovo now).  There Perry discovered, interviewed, and taped a number of local singer/composers called guslars.
 
 

Hear an example of a guslar performing: RealAudio mp3

Guslars helped scholars understand Homeric poetry for a number of reasons.  First, the guslars were non-literate (not that they could not read, but they had never learned how, nor had a need to).  Since the Homeric poems were handed down orally for centuries, the guslars show how such transmission could have worked.  Next, the guslars composed using poetic formulae reminiscent of the Homeric poems.  All readers of Homer quickly become familiar with set phrases like "swift-footed Achilles" or "cow-eyed Hera."  Guslars used analogous formulaic expressions, too, and in part it was how they could sing and compose songs continually.  They memorized such formulas, sequences, and events, so they could compose lines and always stay in song, rather than have to compose word-by-word, line-by-line.  The Homeric poems seem to have been composed likewise.

Mysteries remain about the making of the Iliad and Odyssey
The guslars could compose lengthy song stories as they went along, without ever writing a word, or even knowing an alphabet.  In ancient Greece, performers known as aoidoi seem to have worked similarly.  Guslars constantly changed and modified their songs when they did them (as Perry discovered by taping them, although the guslars themselves would frequently say they always performed a song the same).  They were never known to produce something quite like the Iliad or Odyssey, however, so mysteries remain.  The Iliad, for example, could take as long as twenty-four straight hours to perform!  And if the ancient Greek bards could not write, how did the Homeric poems get written down?  It seems likely the Homeric poems are compiled to some degree from shorter songs, but they were certainly arranged to tell one unified story.  How or why they were written down is a topic constantly debated by scholars today, and there is more in the section on writing in the Dark Age.  Did a "Homer" write down the poems?  Do we have what "Homer" wrote?  It seems the poems were first written down in the 8th century BC.  Progressively, the aoidoi died out (much as Yugoslavian guslars disappeared in the decades following Perry's work), but other singers called rhapsodes performed the Homeric poems.  Rhapsodes, however, learned from a written script and performed the texts as they learned them, rather than creating them as they went along.  So somehow the texts of the Homeric poems survived, and indeed were very popular, but we have no copies this old.  We know that centuries later, in the third century BC, the scholars at the famous library of Alexandria first divided the poems into the twenty-four books we still use to divide the poems today.  We also know these same scholars faced different versions of the poems, but we know little about the differences.  How much did the poems change during those five hundred years?  We cannot be sure, but Greeks during those middle years, such as Pericles, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Gorgias, Plato, and Aristotle and so many others, may have read a somewhat different Homer than what we read now.

The places are real...
The Iliad as we have it, then, represents the culmination, the final form of a tradition of singing poets over multiple generations. All the bards who contributed to the Iliad lived and died, saw and experienced the real world of antiquity. And so, they sang and, in the later stages wrote, poetry about the world they knew as well as the world they had heard about from others. And indeed much of the world portrayed in the Iliad is quite real. Many places, for example: cities like Sparta and Athens, rivers like the Scamander, islands like Sicily, more exotic locales like Ethiopia, even Mount Olympus itself, are all very real. Some are inhabited to this day. Some still even retain the same name they had in the time of the Iliad. Other elements fall clearly into the realm of the creative imagination. Few people believe that horses ever spoke Greek to human beings, as happens at one point in the Iliad (19.404-417). So we come to the question again: how MUCH of the Iliad is real? Did these Greeks and Trojans live and fight this war this way?

but did the Trojan War happen?
People in antiquity, living in times and places much closer to those of the Iliad, often believed quite a lot of it was real. Not everyone believed all of it happened, of course. But those who believed in the Olympian gods might very well believe their exploits as told by  Homer. Inhabitants of the places where various warriors were from might especially believe in the existence and exploits of the hero from their hometown. And in general, for well over a thousand years people believed the Trojan War happened basically as described in the Iliad.

Ancient Archaeology
Even the famous Greek historian Thucydides, centuries after the Iliad, accepted the fundamental historicity of the Trojan War and even attempted to compare the economic and military forces in the Iliad with those of his own day (1.10). He is also one of the earliest people we know of to use archaeological evidence to reconstruct the early history of Greece (1.8). Others put the the archaeological interest in the Trojan War to more mundane ends.

left: ruins at New Ilium  right: plan of New Ilium
(click on plan to see it at its original size)

Troy, the Ancient Tourist Trap
Settlers in the vicinity where the Trojan War was supposed to have occurred named their little town Troy ("Ilion" in ancient Greek) and set up a tourist attraction. Troy the tourist trap flourished. Among the more famous visitors to the site were the Persian king Xerxes, on his way to invade Greece, Alexander the Great on his way to invade Persia, and Julian the Apostate, the Roman Emperor who succeeded Constantine and who worked to reinstate paganism after Constantine legitimized Christianity. Julian visited this Troy and reportedly took great pleasure in seeing the site still thriving.

Later Beliefs about the Trojan War
The interest and belief in the Trojan War could take unusual forms. In later antiquity and on into the Middle Ages, the supposed works of Dares and Dictys were popular versions of the Trojan War. These were supposedly translations of diaries written by minor characters in the Iliad. Now, today we would call these novels of historical fiction, but for centuries these were taken as genuine historical documents and even more reliable than the Iliad, since they gave rational accounts of the war which omitted the actions of the Greek gods.

Continually for centuries people read the Iliad and other versions of the Trojan War and visited the Trojan plain, often believing that the tourist version of Troy or a city to the south known as Alexandria Troas was the Troy of Homer. Within the last 200 years, however, our knowledge and understanding of the historical world behind the Iliad has changed dramatically and looks only to improve in the coming years.