Myth, History and the Trojan War

Ancient writers already tried. Euhemerus argued that the gods were once great humans later worshipped; Herodotus weighed traditions and often doubted them; Roman antiquarians built their city's earliest history from legend.

The habit persists. A myth can preserve a memory of migration, disaster or a real place, even after gods and heroes have been folded in.

In the 1870s Heinrich Schliemann excavated a mound at Hisarlik in western Turkey and declared it Troy. He was partly right: the site has nine major settlement layers, one of which — Troy VI or VIIa — was destroyed around 1180 BCE, close to the traditional date of the war.

Later work by Wilhelm Dörpfeld, Carl Blegen and Manfred Korfmann refined the picture and revealed a substantial citadel with a lower town. A Hittite tablet names a place called Wilusa, widely identified with Ilios, Troy's other name.

The Greek side of the story fits a real age. Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos were fortified palace centres with bureaucracies, weapons and trade links across the Mediterranean. The Linear B tablets record Greek-speaking administrators, not Homeric kings, but they prove the world the epics imagine existed.

When those palaces collapsed around 1200 BCE, the memory of a wealthy, warring age survived in song — and was eventually written down as epic.

For Rome the question was political. The Aeneid made Aeneas, a Trojan survivor, the ancestor of Romulus, giving Rome a heroic origin independent of Greece and a divine mandate from Venus and Jupiter.

Myth here is not failed history. It is usable history: a story a society tells to explain itself, and one that archaeology can illuminate without ever proving.