Trojan War

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

THE, a legendary war which forms the theme of the "Iliad" of Homer. The story briefly told is that Paris (Alexander), son of Priam, King of Troy, carried off Helen, wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta; that the Achæan princes, under the command of Menelaus brother, Agamemnon, King of Mycenæ, undertook to recover Helen; that the Achæans, having besieged Troy for nine years, eventually sacked the city and recovered Helen. These events were regarded as historical not only by the Greeks themselves, but by the moderns as late as the first half of the 19th century, and a date (1184 B. c.) was assigned with as much precision and confidence to the fall of Troy as to the fall of man. But the remarkable revolution in the views of scholars about mythology, and begun by Lobeck in 1829, and by brothers Grimm, led to the belief that the war was legendary. Many of the incidents were shown to be myths common to most Indo-European nations at least. The account of which Homer left to us of the struggle to avenge the wrongs and woes of Helen is essentially a story in which the main chain of causation is superhuman, in which the gods mingle visibly with men, and the heroes themselves are the sons or husbands of immortal beings. The legend of Troy was a favorite subject of the poets of the Middle Ages and took varied forms differing from the Greek version of the event an and dwelling on the heros descended from the exiled Trojans. The excavations of Dr. Schliemann reawakened the question of a historical basis for the Trojan War. See TROY.