The Trojan War is one of the most famous conflicts in human history, but it resides somewhere within the space between fact and fiction. The myth is just as much a part of the tale as the actual history. So keep watching as we dive deep into the truth behind the Trojan War.
The story of the Trojan War has been told and retold countless times, most famously by Homer in The Iliad. But its historical authenticity wasn't always accepted as fact. In the 17th century, Blaise Pascal wrote,
"Homer produced a story, which he offered as such and was accepted as such: for no one doubted that Troy and Agamemnon had existed any more than the golden apple. He did not think he was making a history of it, merely an entertainment."
But it turns out that there's more truth to Homer's tale than initially thought. In the 19th century, a Prussian businessman named Heinrich Schliemann went to what is now Turkey in an attempt to find the location of the Trojan War. In his excavations, he found numerous archaeological treasures that corresponded to the correct location, if not necessarily the correct time period, of Troy. Modern archaeologists later confirmed that these findings correlated with the existence of a city as well as its destruction. So despite Homer's embellishments, he knew his history.
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