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With Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey set for release in a few months, and certain to storm the box office whatever its merits (having seen the theatre-only trailer, I can say that that, at least, appears stunningly mediocre), it’s a good time to look at the story which launched it: the Trojan War.
Now, most Good Oil readers, being of a certain age, you’ll no doubt know the bare bones of the story. Indeed, just a generation or so ago, all even moderately educated people knew the stories of The Iliad and The Odyssey, foundational works of the Western imagination. For the record, Hector was always my favourite character, next to Odysseus himself.
One big question, though (acquiring more currency as wokeists try to defend Nolan’s casting choices, with, ‘It’s just fiction!’): was the Trojan War all just a myth?
We’ve known since the late 19th century that Troy was indeed a real city, and some of the Anzacs record seeing its ruins just across the Dardanelles Straits. The city occupied a strategic hill overlooking the plain between the Aegean Sea and the Dardanelles, and this location gave it control over numerous Bronze Age maritime trade routes (indeed, the Gallipoli campaign showed its continuing strategic importance).
The site not only corresponds well with Homer’s descriptions, but shows evidence of brutal destruction around roughly the traditional Homeric dating of 1180 BC. Was this the war of a Greek alliance as depicted by Homer?
Some scholars believe that Homer’s epic tales may preserve memories of actual Bronze Age conflicts, heavily mythologized and combined with fictional elements over centuries of oral tradition.
That said, in recent years, archaeologists have uncovered more and more signs of ancient violence, destruction, and warfare in Troy. Evidence like fire damage, weaponry, and hastily buried skeletons shows that whatever conflict or conflicts took place there were very violent. Notably, in July 2025, archaeologists announced the discovery of numerous Late Bronze Age artifacts at the site, including 3,500-year-old sling stones that show clear signs of both offensive and defensive use in battle.
Some experts have said that might be the most convincing evidence yet that the Trojan War – or an important war like it – was indeed real.
The catalyst for the war, in Homer’s account, was when Paris, a Trojan prince, abducted Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. Menelaus appealed to his brother Agamemnon, the Mycenaean ‘King of Men’, and the two assembled a coalition of Greek kingdoms to make retaliatory war on Troy. Historians today suspect that something more prosaic, such as trade disputes, sparked the real war.
Does this mean that Helen never existed?
There’s no historical evidence confirming Helen’s existence as an actual person. She appears exclusively in Greek mythology and literature.
Sometimes dubbed “the face that launched a thousand ships” since it was her absence that sparked the Trojan War in mythology, Helen may represent a legendary or symbolic figure rather than a real woman.
Some scholars suggest she might be a composite character, a divine figure adapted into human form, or a literary creation representing the ultimate “prize” worth fighting for. As a character, Helen clearly represented certain themes of beauty, desire, loyalty, and the devastating costs of war.
Similarly, the 10-year timeline of the war (followed by Odysseus’ 10 years of wandering, trying fruitlessly to get home to Ithaca) is likely symbolic or poetically exaggerated. It should be noted that Homer’s epic only covers a few weeks of the final year of the war. The rest is told by implication in the poem, or reconstructed via the many related traditions in Greek literature.
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are the most famous sources describing the Trojan War, though the Iliad covers only a small part of the war and the Odyssey focuses on Odysseus’ journey home after the conflict.
The Epic Cycle – now mostly lost epics, including the Cypria, Aethiopis, and Sack of Troy – helped fill in the complete narrative of the myth.
Later works include Virgil’s Aeneid, which revealed more about the Trojan side of the war, Sophocles’ and Euripides’ tragedies about war-related events, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ancient historians like Herodotus also discussed Troy, attempting to separate actual history from myth – a task that proved, evidently, to be more difficult than expected.
Especially when modern Hollywood, with its racial obsessions, gets involved.
