Homer’s first audience already knew this story. Treat the dates below as traditional and approximate, not certain.
Tap any point on the timeline to read about it.
The legend, in order
Ancient writers who treated the war as real placed it around 1194–1184 BCE (the dates of the scholar Eratosthenes). The sequence runs like this:
A quarrel among the gods
At a wedding, a golden apple marked “for the fairest” is claimed by three goddesses. The Trojan prince Paris is made to judge between them and picks Aphrodite, who has promised him the most beautiful woman in the world.
Helen is taken
That woman is Helen, already the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. Paris carries her home to Troy, a walled city in what is now northwestern Turkey.
The Greeks sail
Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon raise a coalition of Greek kings (among them Achilles and Odysseus) and sail a thousand ships to win her back.
Ten years of siege
Troy holds out for a decade. Homer’s other poem, the Iliad, covers only a few weeks late in that final year — the rage of Achilles, the death of the Trojan champion Hector.
The wooden horse
The Greeks take the city at last by a trick of Odysseus’s: a hollow wooden horse left as a false gift, soldiers hidden inside. Troy is sacked and burned.
The homecomings
The victorious kings scatter across the sea. Some reach home quickly; some are wrecked; Agamemnon arrives only to be murdered. This is where the Odyssey opens.
Odysseus’s ten-year journey
The voyage that should take weeks takes another decade — the Cyclops, Circe’s island (a full year), the land of the dead, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, then seven years held on Calypso’s island, and finally the Phaeacians, who carry him home.
Home to Ithaca
Twenty years after he first sailed for Troy, Odysseus reaches his own house in disguise and takes it back. The Odyssey ends here.
The history behind it
For a long time the war was assumed to be pure invention. Then, in the 1870s, excavations at a mound called Hisarlik in northwestern Turkey uncovered a real city, built and rebuilt in many layers, that most archaeologists now accept as Homer’s Troy.
Bronze Age Troy
A wealthy, strategically placed city controlling the sea route between the Aegean and the Black Sea. The layer known as Troy VII shows signs of war and was destroyed by fire around 1180 BCE.
The Mycenaean Greeks
The “Greeks” of the legend were the Mycenaeans, a Late Bronze Age civilization of warrior-kingdoms: the real world behind Agamemnon’s coalition.
The Bronze Age collapse
Across the eastern Mediterranean, palaces and cities fell within a few generations. A real conflict at Troy fits this violent period, and if there was one, it was likely about trade, plunder, and power, not a stolen wife.
Homer
The Iliad and Odyssey were composed roughly four to five centuries after the events they describe, at the end of a long tradition of poetry sung from memory. To Homer’s first listeners, Troy was already the distant, legendary past.
So the Odyssey runs on two clocks at once: a mythic story set just after the fall of Troy around 1180 BCE, told by a poet who lived centuries later and was already looking back, as we do, on a world half-turned to legend.