Homer's epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, tell two of the greatest stories of the Bronze Age and have become two of the most important works in literary history.
While the abundance of mythological characters and stories leaves no doubt about the reality of the war, the reality of the events is entirely based on Homer's imagination. We can compare Homer's narrative to Ang Lee's masterpiece, Life of Pi, which we see in the modern world. Homer perhaps embellished a war that took place 500 years before his time with mythological characters and imagination to make it more engaging.
The Iliad tells the story of a chain of events beginning with Paris, the Trojan prince, abducting Helen, the wife of Menelaus, the brother of the Mycenaean king Agamemnon, and how these events escalated into one of the longest wars in history.
Helen was actually a Spartan princess. Because her father, the Spartan king, had no male heir, he wanted to marry Helen to Menelaus, the brother of the Mycenaean king, and Menelaus ascended to the Spartan throne after this marriage. Helen, forced into marriage with Menelaus, lived an unhappy life under her husband's oppression and cruelty. Then, she met Paris, a young and handsome Trojan prince. Helen charmed Paris and had him abducted. Enraged, Menelaus went to his brother Agamemnon and explained the situation. The Mycenaean king, pursuing an expansionist and conquering policy, seized the opportunity to invade Troy, a kingdom he considered a friend and ally, but secretly envied for its wealth. With the armies of other Greek kingdoms he had previously subjugated, he set out for Troy.
Arriving at the shores of Troy with an unprecedented naval fleet, the Greeks fought relentlessly for ten years, but failed to defeat and conquer Troy. During the wars, first the Trojan prince Hector, and then the Greek demigod Achilles, died from a blow to their only weak point: the Achilles tendon. After ten years, realizing they could not defeat Troy, the Greeks, yearning for their homeland and families, decided to return home.
Just then, King Odysseus of Ithaca came up with a cunning plan. He built a giant wooden horse, placed warriors inside, and pretended that the rest of the army had returned to Greece. Rejoicing at the Greeks' departure, the Trojans, to please their gods, brought the wooden horse inside the city walls, and thus lost the battle they had won by brute force, to the cunning and ingenuity of the Trojans.
In short, the Iliad epic tells the story of how the well-meaning, strong, and disciplined Trojans were defeated and erased from history not by brute force or heroism, but by cunning and ingenuity.
The Odyssey epic, on the other hand, focuses on the story of Odysseus, the hero of this cunning plan. Odysseus, as the soldier who enabled the conquest of Troy, which had remained unconquered for ten years, develops a god complex after this success. Believing he could defeat everyone with his intelligence and that he was all-powerful, Odysseus defied and belittled Poseidon, the sea god, who warned him. Poseidon punished him by making it take him ten years to reach his homeland, Ithaca, a journey he could normally make in 1-2 months, overcoming numerous dangers along the way. At that time, power struggles were raging in Ithaca, and his wife, Penelope, was being forced to marry someone else after being told that Odysseus was dead.
Doubts about the veracity of the epics still persist. According to one account, there was never actually a horse. The city of Troy was damaged by an earthquake during the war, its walls were destroyed, and it was subsequently occupied. Poseidon is the god of earthquakes, and since his symbol is the horse, the fall of Troy is symbolized by the horse.
But if we return to Homer, the famous poet tells us in the Iliad how a strong and disciplined state was defeated by a cunning soldier, and in the Odyssey, he describes the suffering and fears this cunning soldier endured because of his arrogance. Thousands of years ago, Homer told us about the world of karma, the justice of karma.
There are also many legends about where the Trojans went after the fall of Troy. According to these legends, some went into the interior of Anatolia, towards Phrygia, while others crossed the Mediterranean, bypassing Greek civilization, and landed in what is now Italy.
There are even rumors that Romulus and Remus, who founded Rome, were descendants of the Trojans. Furthermore, after Augustus destroyed the Roman Republic and transformed it into the Roman Empire, he commissioned the famous poet Virgil to write the Aeneid, the epic of the Roman Empire, and the main character of the Aeneid is a Trojan hero named Aeneas.
Aeneas played a significant role in the defense of Troy, but remained in the shadow of his cousin Hector. Following Hector's death and the fall of Troy, he became the leader of the surviving Trojans and led them to what is now Italy.
The fact that Troy was defeated not by brute force, but by cunning and deceit, disturbed many historical leaders, including Roman Emperor Augustus. Indeed, Augustus, at the height of his power, honored the Roman Empire by basing it on the legacy of Troy.
