How is the Trojan War told in the ancient sources?

The Trojan War

No single ancient work tells the Trojan War whole. Homer's Iliad covers a few weeks late in the tenth year, the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, and ends before Troy falls; the war's beginning, the wooden horse, the sack of the city and the scattered journeys home survive only in the Epic Cycle, six further epics known today mainly through a prose summary made by the scholar Proclus. Where the Cycle can be checked against Homer, as in the quarrel that splits the Achaean fleet at Troy, 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 dramatizing the Trojan War "as a whole."
Six further epics filled the gaps — the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Iliou Persis, Nostoi and Telegony — attributed to different poets and 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."
Proclus's summary of the Nostoi has Athena split the Achaean fleet at departure from Troy: Diomedes and Nestor sail home safely while others are wrecked or murdered.
Homer gives Nestor his own account of that voyage in the Odyssey — a sacrifice at Tenedos, a debated sea route past Chios, and a fair wind home to "the well-built citadel of Neleus."
The palace archaeologists identify as Nestor's, at Ano Englianos above the Bay of Navarino, was identified in 1939 and excavated by Carl Blegen; it stood from about 1300 to 1200 BC.

Achilles refuses to fight before Troy can fall

Achilles withdraws from battle after Agamemnon takes Briseis from him, and the Achaean army begins paying for their commanders’ quarrel. The Iliad enters the Trojan War at that decision, late in the tenth year, and follows only a few weeks. It closes with Hector’s burial; Troy has not yet fallen.

Aristotle made this omission Homer’s chief piece of judgement. Even though the war has a beginning and an end, Homer refuses to dramatise the whole. A complete account would be too long or too crowded with incidents. Other poets tried anyway, and Aristotle measures the difference by adaptation: only one or two tragedies can be made from an Iliad or Odyssey, but more than eight came from the Little Iliad alone.

The lost epics, and Proclus’s summary

The poems Aristotle means are the Epic Cycle: the Cypria, the Aethiopis, the Little Iliad, the Iliou Persis, the Nostoi and the Telegony, six further epics that ancient scholars attributed to different, mostly obscure poets and that are themselves lost. What survives of their contents is chiefly a prose digest made by a scholar named Proclus, copied into medieval manuscripts of Homer. It records that the Aethiopis brought the Amazon Penthesileia to Troy as a Trojan ally and had Achilles kill her, then had him kill the Ethiopian king Memnon before he himself fell to Paris and Apollo; that the Little Iliad staged the contest for Achilles’ armour, Ajax’s madness and suicide, and the building of the wooden horse; and that the Iliou Persis took the horse into the city and ended with the death of Priam and the sacrifice of Polyxena. None of it is Homer’s.

The fleet that splits at Troy

Proclus’s summary of the Nostoi opens the sack’s aftermath with a quarrel: Athena, angry at the Achaeans’ conduct in taking the city, “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 on his return. Homer tells the same quarrel from inside it, through Nestor’s own mouth in the Odyssey: after the sack, he says, “in no wise prudent or just were all,” and Zeus planned a hard homecoming for the army because the goddess “caused strife between the two sons of Atreus.” The two accounts, one a two-line digest and one a memory given forty years on, agree on the shape of it.

Nestor’s own account of getting home

Nestor tells Telemachus the rest as something he lived through rather than heard. At Tenedos the fleet stopped to sacrifice; Odysseus turned back to rejoin Agamemnon, while Nestor sailed on with Diomedes. Off Chios the captains argued whether to pass the island to seaward, by Psyra, or to landward, past windy Mimas; they asked a god for a sign and were sent straight across open water 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 check, to what Homer calls “Pylos, the well-built citadel of Neleus.”

The palace at the end of the voyage

The palace archaeologists identify as Nestor’s stands at Ano Englianos, a low ridge above the Bay of Navarino in Messenia. Konstantinos Kourouniotis identified the site in 1939, and the excavation was completed by the American archaeologist Carl Blegen. It flourished from about 1300 to 1200 BC and was destroyed by a major fire at the end of the thirteenth century BC or the start of the twelfth.

That burned palace cannot verify Nestor’s speech or turn epic into a campaign record. It supplies a real Late Bronze Age centre at the destination Homer names. The poems scatter the victors after Troy; at Ano Englianos, destruction fixes one homecoming story to a citadel that did not survive the age it evokes.

Where to stand

Pylos

Peloponnese

Nestor's is the one return the war's cycle tells as easy: Homer has him recount, in the Odyssey, a sacrifice at Tenedos, a debated route past Chios, and a fair wind home to 'the well-built citadel of Neleus,' while Proclus's summary of the lost Nostoi has him and Diomedes reach home safely as the Locrian Ajax is wrecked and Agamemnon is murdered. The palace archaeologists identify as his, at Ano Englianos above the Bay of Navarino, was found in 1939 and stood from about 1300 to 1200 BC before a fire destroyed it.
Pylos