How is the Trojan War told in the ancient sources?

The Trojan War

No ancient work tells the whole Trojan War. Homer’s Iliad covers a few weeks late in the tenth year and the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, and ends before Troy falls. The start of the war, the wooden horse, the sack and the journeys home survive only in the Epic Cycle, six more epics known through a prose summary by the scholar Proclus. Where the Cycle can be checked against Homer, as on the quarrel that splits the fleet, the two agree.

In short

The Iliad opens in the tenth year of the siege and closes before Troy falls. Aristotle, in the Poetics, praised Homer for not telling the Trojan War “as a whole.”
Six more epics filled the gaps: the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Iliou Persis, Nostoi and Telegony. They were attributed to different poets and are known chiefly through a prose summary by Proclus.
Aristotle noted that out of an Iliad or an Odyssey only one or two tragedies can be made, “whereas several have been made out of the Cypria, and out of the Little Iliad more than eight.”
In Proclus’s summary of the Nostoi, Athena splits the Achaean fleet as it leaves Troy. Diomedes and Nestor sail home safely, while others are wrecked or murdered.
In the Odyssey, Homer gives Nestor his own account of that voyage: a sacrifice at Tenedos, an argument over the sea route past Chios, and a fair wind home to “the well-built citadel of Neleus.”
The palace that archaeologists identify as Nestor’s, at Ano Englianos above the Bay of Navarino, was identified in 1939 and then excavated. It stood from about 1300 to 1200 BC.

What the Iliad tells

No single ancient work tells the whole Trojan War. The Iliad, the epic poem of Homer, tells only one part of it.

In the Iliad, the Greek commander Agamemnon takes the woman Briseis from the hero Achilles. Achilles withdraws from the fighting. The Achaean army, as Homer calls the Greeks, begins to pay for the quarrel between its leaders. The poem enters the war at this point, late in the tenth year, and follows only a few weeks. It ends with the burial of Hector. Troy has not yet fallen.

The ancient writer Aristotle saw this choice as Homer’s main piece of judgement. The war has a beginning and an end, but Homer does not try to tell the whole of it. A complete account would be too long, or too crowded with events.

Other poets tried anyway. Aristotle measures the difference by how many tragedies, or serious plays for the stage, each poem could supply. Only one or two can be made from an Iliad or an Odyssey. More than eight came from the Little Iliad alone.

The lost epics of the Epic Cycle

The poems Aristotle means belong to the Epic Cycle. These are six more epics: the Cypria, the Aethiopis, the Little Iliad, the Iliou Persis, the Nostoi and the Telegony. Ancient scholars attributed them to different poets, most of them obscure, and the poems themselves are lost. What survives of their contents is mainly a prose summary by a scholar named Proclus. It was copied into medieval manuscripts of Homer.

The summary tells the rest of the war. In the Aethiopis, the Amazon Penthesileia comes to Troy to fight for the Trojans, and Achilles kills her. He then kills Memnon, king of the Ethiopians, before he himself falls to Paris and the god Apollo. The Little Iliad tells of the contest for the armour of Achilles, the madness and suicide of Ajax, and the building of the wooden horse. In the Iliou Persis, the Trojans take the horse into the city, and the poem ends with the death of Priam and the sacrifice of Polyxena. None of this comes from Homer.

The fleet splits after the sack

The summary of the Nostoi begins after the sack of Troy with a quarrel. The goddess Athena is angry at the way the Achaeans behaved in taking the city, and she “causes a quarrel between Agamemnon and Menelaos about the voyage from Troy.” The fleet leaves in stages. Diomedes and Nestor sail home safely. The Locrian Ajax is destroyed at sea. Agamemnon is murdered when he gets home.

Homer tells the same quarrel from the inside, through Nestor himself in the Odyssey. After the sack, Nestor says, “in no wise prudent or just were all.” Zeus then planned a hard homecoming for the army, because the goddess “caused strife between the two sons of Atreus.”

One account is a two-line summary and the other a memory told 40 years later. They agree on the shape of what happened.

Nestor’s voyage home

Nestor tells his visitor Telemachus the rest as something he lived through, not something he heard. At the island of Tenedos the fleet stopped to make sacrifices. Odysseus turned back to rejoin Agamemnon, while Nestor sailed on with Diomedes.

Off the island of Chios, the captains argued about their route. They could pass Chios on the seaward side, by Psyra, or on the landward side, past windy Mimas. They asked a god for a sign and were sent straight across the open sea to Euboea. The ships “ran swiftly over the teeming ways” and put in that night at Geraestus. From there a wind that “was not once quenched” carried them home without a pause, to what Homer calls “Pylos, the well-built citadel of Neleus.”

The palace at the end of the voyage

The palace that archaeologists identify as Nestor’s stands at Ano Englianos, a low ridge above the Bay of Navarino in Messenia. The site was identified in 1939 and then fully excavated. The palace flourished from about 1300 to 1200 BC. A great fire destroyed it at the end of the thirteenth century BC or the start of the twelfth.

The burned palace cannot prove that Nestor’s speech is true, and it cannot turn the epic into a record of a real campaign. What it gives is a real centre of the Late Bronze Age at the place Homer names. The poems scatter the victors after Troy. At Ano Englianos, the ruins tie one of those homecomings to a citadel that did not outlast its own age.

Places to visit

Pylos

Peloponnese

In the stories of the war, Nestor’s is the one easy return: in the Odyssey he describes a sacrifice at Tenedos, a debated route past Chios, and a fair wind home to “the well-built citadel of Neleus,” and in the summary of the lost Nostoi he and Diomedes reach home safely while the Locrian Ajax is wrecked and Agamemnon is murdered. The palace that archaeologists identify as his, at Ano Englianos above the Bay of Navarino, was found in 1939 and stood from about 1300 to 1200 BC until a fire destroyed it.
Pylos