Throughout ancient times, warlords such as Xerxes of Persia and Alexander the Great of Macedonia visited Troy to pay homage to Achilles at a time when the city’s ruins were still visible. The location of the city of Troywas identiied by these ruins, as well as through tradition and legend. However, these ruins gradually disappeared, removing visible evidence of the city’s existence by modern times.


In the 19th Century, archaeologists began looking for proof of the existence of theworld Homer describes. The irst archaeologist to seriously take on this task was a German named Heinrich Schliemann. Beginning in 1868, Schliemann excavated the traditional site of Troy on the eastern coast of Turkey and found the ruins of a city dating back well before Classical Greek civilization. Over the next century, many levels of ruined city were excavated and archeologists attempted to identify which of these was the Troy of the Trojan War. In these efforts, Homer’s text acted as the primary source of comparative information, used to verify the city’s layout and relationship to geographic features. Today, scholars agree that the latest built part of the sixth level of the city, which dates to about 1250BC andwas destroyed by ire, is themost likely match for Priam’s Troy. Archeological evidence of a war coinciding with this destruction has also been found,most notably in the formof a burial ground fromaround the


“In Homer’s day, the ruins of


what had once been the well-built walls of Troy, on their commanding site overlooking the Hellespont, as the Dardanelle Straits were then known, were visible to any traveler... Thewar, then,was real,notmythic, to Homer and to his audience… Knowledge of Troy and Troy’s time has been advanced by archaeology. The Trojan War itself, however, the terrible conlagrationthat unmoored whole nations, remainsmysterious.”


- Caroline Alexander, TheWar that Killed Achilles


same time, which contains pottery and other artifacts from the contemporary Greek civilization.


But was the TrojanWar fought for the love of a beautiful woman, or for more pragmatic reasons? A lack of historical record and the existence of alternative stories havemade this dificult to ascertain. Scholars, both ancient and modern, have long debated, some pointing out that wars were indeed fought to retrieve stolen citizens of one civilization from another, while others argue for more mundane motivations, such as disputed ishing rights. While archeologists and scholars have been able to build more in- depth portraits of what life in Troy may have been like, it is likely thatwithout the discovery of some previously hidden ancient record,we will never know if Helen, Paris, Hector and Achilles, or individuals uponwhose lives their igureswere based, ever existed.


Map of the Ancient City of Troy


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www.bc.edu


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