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success against the Greek forces by breaking through their fortifications and
burning their ships. Among the battles was the famous showdown between
Achilles and Hector outside the walls of Troy. Achilles won, attached the corpse
to his chariot and dragged it away. Later, Priam went to the Greek encamp-
ments, pleading for the return of Hector's body and Achilles returned it to
Priam for a ransom.
The background of Achilles now comes into play. When he was an infant,
his mother bathed him in the waters of the river Styx, which according to
myth, resulted in his invulnerability to any weapon. However, his heel, which
the waters did not touch since his mother held him by one foot, was his one
vulnerable spot. In the tenth year of the war, Paris, with the help of Apollo,
killed Achilles with an arrow that pierced his heel. Later, Philoctetes, a leader
of a contingent of Greek ships, was able to kill Paris with an arrow shot from
the bow of Hercules.
There are many other battle stories, but the ultimate tells of the Greeks
contriving the scheme of building a wooden horse that they filled with armed
warriors. (In a sense, this was a steganographic technique!) To make it appear
that they were abandoning the war, the Greek army withdrew. To celebrate
their victory, the Trojans tore down part of their wall and dragged the horse
into the city. Later that night, when the Trojans had fallen asleep, the hidden
Greek soldiers emerged from within the horse, opened the gates, and signalled
the main army, which was in hiding. King Priam was slaughtered at the alter
by Achilles's son Neoptolemus; Hector's infant son, Astyanax, was thrown off
the walls; and the women, Hecuba, and Cassandra, the daughter of Priam, and
Andromache, the wife of Hector, were taken as prisoners.
After the war, the gods considered the sacking of Troy (the best account of
which is in Virgil's
Aeneid
) a sacrilege, particularly in view of the desecration of
the temples. Thus, they punished many of the Greeks. For example, Menelaus'
ships wandered the seas for seven years, while Agamemnon returned to Argos
only to be murdered by his wife, Clytaemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. Of
particular importance (as we will see below) is that Odysseus (known as Ulysses
to the Romans) was forced to wander the seas for ten years before returning
home to Ithaca, alone. Poseidon had been so angered by Odysseus' putting
out the eye of Polyphemus, the cannibal cyclops, and son of Poseidon, that all
his ships and all his men were lost on the voyage back to Ithaca. In Ithaca,
he disguised himself and killed the princes who were trying to seduce his wife,
Penelope, into marrying one of them, and trying to kill his son, Telemachus.
After so long an absence, Odysseus had to prove his identity by being able to
string the famous
bow of Odysseus
, which was a task no other man had been
able to accomplish. Moreover, he was able to tell Penelope the secret tale of
their marriage bed, which Odysseus had built around an olive tree. Numerous
other tales spring from the Trojan War, and it can legitimately be argued that
few stories in our culture have been the inspiration of so many artists, writers,
sculptors, and playwrights. It also inspired one particular archaeologist.
One person who believed that Troy was not myth made it his life's goal to
prove it, and the story of Troy in the
Iliad
inspired him. Heinrich Schliemann
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