Troy And The Iliad

Troy (or Ilium), situated on the west coast of modern day Turkey, was a city-kingdom with, at the time of the events described in the Iliad (an epic poem attributed to Homer), Priam as its king.

Homer was a blind, Greek poet who lived around the 8th century B.C. He is very famous as he wrote two of the most famous poems of all times. These poems were called the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer never mentioned himself in any of his writings, though scholars suspect that he was a farmer or artisan because he makes many references to this class of people. Homer’s writings were very much respected in ancient Greece and he was so influential that he inspired Shakespeare.

The Iliad was the first of these poems and it deals with the tenth and final year of the Trojan war. The war started when the son of the king of Troy, Paris, kidnapped the wife of the king of Sparta, Helen. The Iliad is divided into 24 books which This story is supposedly the oldest surviving piece of ancient Greek literature. It is mainly based on the hero Achilles, who is the best soldier for the Greek army, held under the control of Agamemnon. Another very famous character from both the Iliad and the odyssey is Odysseus, king of Ithaca. He, with the help of Athena, comes up with a plan to leave a giant wooden horse filled with 100 soldiers as ‘a gift.’ This plan worked as when the horse was taken inside, the soldiers came out and won the battle.

The Odyssey is the sequel poem to the Iliad. In this poem, Odysseus is the main character and it is about his journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Though this would usually be quite a short trip, the Gods had decided to make it ten years before he arrived home. This poem shows all of the perilous adventures he went on...

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...s killed Atreus and Thyestes seized the throne of Mycenae and eventually, Aegisthus killed Agamemnon.

Heinrich Schliemann was a famous archaeologist in the 19th century. As a child, his father told him the stories of the Iliad and the Odysseus and at the age of eight, Schliemann vowed to himself that he would find the city of Troy. He eventually succeeded and dug up the suspected city of Troy and also Mycenae. He was not very skilled, careful or scrupulous with his work and many other archaeologists complained that he was destroying many things that should be preserved. He claimed he and seen the face of Agamemnon because he dug up a set of tombs. There was one that had a body covered in gold and the face was covered by a golden mask. Schliemann took off the mask and the face stayed intact for three seconds. From that, he believed he had seen the face of Agamemnon.