Fact or Fiction: The Truth Behind the Trojan War

1372 Words6 Pages
A story is told of a man, Achilles, a warrior, unlike any seen before; he fights in a war that ends in his tragic death and the downfall of a city of greatness which finally perished in fire. The city is named Troy and the war includes a 10 year siege laid by the Greeks over a conflict that began with a woman and her love for a man. Not just any man but a Prince Paris of Troy. The legends were originally thought to be almost entirely fiction, but over time historians have collected enough evidence to create doubt about how much of the tale is more than just myth. The saga has been retold for hundreds of years and has become even harder to trace back to truth because of the many views on the account mainly by Homer’s take on the event in his fictions The Odyssey and The Iliad. His versions both contain gods and portray Achilles as immortal except for the heel of his foot. The movie Troy, aside from a bit of dramatization and a few minor twists in the tale, is probably more accurate than not. The main question that has been posed is if Troy really existed. Manfred Korfmann, a German archeologist, has led excavations on the site believed to be Troy told of by legends for the past 16 years. He has said that if he were to meet someone who expressed belief that the Trojan War had happened in the site that his response would be, “why not” (Korfman 4)? Some of the results of the excavation have corresponded to the supposed date of the destruction of Troy. Evidence, for example skeletons and piles of sling bullets, support a possible conflagration. An issue brought up with accepting the city as Troy is that the town was “wholly insignificant” and “not a place worth fighting over” in the day in age associated with the war (Korfman 2). Beatty concludes that if historians “mentioned the fall of Troy” and it had also “existed at roughly the same time… with a lot of

More about Fact or Fiction: The Truth Behind the Trojan War

Open Document