The Real Story of Troy

5/12/2026 at 8:06:26 PM

Interesting story. Shame they AI'd it up...though it wasn't until this paragraph that it was obvious, so they probably edited it at least.

> A real city. A real war. A real text — composed four hundred years later, in Greek hexameter, by a poet or poets who had inherited the story without ever seeing the place — whose specifics turned out, in surprising number, to map.

by margalabargala

5/12/2026 at 9:18:28 PM

Yeah, it was composed 800 years later, and Homer was a headmaster of a school of oral poets.

The telling was only a fraction of the “epic cycle”, of which this is only a fragment which remains. There are other fragments which tell of Ephigenia, Agamemnon’s daughter who was human sacrificed for a good wind, as well as the story of the curse of the house of Atreas. Both of which explain the bad luck of Agamemnon’s home coming. Not to spoil that plot, you should just read the the plays of Aeschylus!

by yepyoukno

5/12/2026 at 10:36:08 PM

TFA is correct with about 400 years later.

The current form of the Iliad is estimated to have been composed around the middle of the 8th century BC.

The destruction of Troy is estimated to have happened around the beginning of the 12th century BC.

Some passages of the Iliad may refer to stories inherited from earlier times of the Mycenaean Greeks, e.g. from the 14th century BC.

It is unlikely that anything in the Iliad can be traced to specific events that have happened 800 years earlier, i.e. in the 16th century BC, even if some of the kinds of poetic formulae employed by Homer are much older and they may have been inherited from the common Proto-Indo-European language.

by adrian_b

5/12/2026 at 4:50:28 PM

I was disappointed the horse wasn't real

by ge96

5/12/2026 at 5:14:40 PM

Ben Bova hypothesized that Homer was actually describing early siege towers, but given the veracity of many mundane parts of the story it seems unlikely.

by moomin

5/13/2026 at 4:22:55 AM

Yes, I remember reading that - though it was just a passage in one book in the "Orion" series (that series also had an idea about the "real" Noah's Ark - that it was seeds and plants collected and saved in a hurry from a valley just about to be flooded. That would be from an early attempt at plant domestication).

The "horse" part of the siege tower idea was that the towers would be protected against fire etc. by horse hides.

by Tor3

5/13/2026 at 6:51:33 AM

When the Orion series is good, it’s very fun. IIRC he also goes to Jericho six months after Troy because why not?

by moomin

5/12/2026 at 5:48:28 PM

I have also heard it described as a boat.

by detourdog

5/12/2026 at 10:37:33 PM

Tunnelling is another possibility.

by nephihaha

5/12/2026 at 8:01:27 PM

So were the Trojans.

by Andrex

5/12/2026 at 5:11:43 PM

How do you know? It was mentioned by Homer, wasn't it?

by readthenotes1

5/12/2026 at 5:20:54 PM

At least not in the Iliad though it gets short mentions in the Odyssey.

Most of what we know of it appeared in non-Homeric stories and most famously (nowadays) in Virgil.

by huxley

5/12/2026 at 5:47:37 PM

That is so, but my understanding was that those later stories tie back to a lost epic (Iliupersis) that, while not officially attributed to Homer, was being sung contemporaneously with the other stories of the Trojan war cycle.

by elmomle

5/12/2026 at 5:16:11 PM

I don't just online consensus. Need to simulate the universe's particles and rewind time like that show Devs to witness it myself.

by ge96

5/12/2026 at 6:53:56 PM

The show is based on a story by qntm [0] (which I submitted before to HN but sadly got no traction) who also wrote a great book recently called There Is No Antimemetics Division, to rave reviews on HN.

[0] https://qntm.org/responsibilit

by satvikpendem

5/12/2026 at 6:40:32 PM

Thpoilerth!

by foobarian

5/12/2026 at 5:14:03 PM

We don't even know if Homer was real. XD

by jsharpe

5/12/2026 at 5:21:51 PM

I’ve seen it fairly convincingly argued that he wasn’t!

by moomin

5/12/2026 at 8:57:00 PM

Take this with a bucket of salt because I haven't read much on this topic.

But just reasoning 'rationally', I assume the argument is that the Iliad / Oddysey were told in cultures of predominantly oral tradition? So likely, just as with the game of telephone, the story got told and retold, and distorted, many times until someone ("Homer") decided to write it down?

So the argument being that Homer is not the 'creator' of the stories, and might just be someone who wrote it down?

Or perhaps the argument is that no single person wrote it down?

by Insanity

5/12/2026 at 10:50:28 PM

There are some plausible arguments that the authors of the Iliad and Odyssey are not the same, even if they must have been closely related.

For instance I find very plausible the hypothesis that the Iliad was composed by a man and the Odyssey was composed by a woman.

The main reason is the striking resemblance of the Iliad with an action movie, in contrast with the Odyssey that looks exactly like a chick flick.

More seriously, the Iliad focuses on a lot of things of great interest for the men of those times, like gory details about the best methods to kill or maim opponents in combat, or athletic competitions, while the Odyssey focuses on many things of interest for females, like clothes, food, gardens, romance, and it even has several passages that look quite feminist, despite being written millennia ago, by complaining about the discrimination unjustly enforced by men against women. The Odyssey also has a lot of strong female characters that are more important than the men, e.g. Calypso, Circe, Aurora, Nausicaa, Penelope.

The text of the Odyssey also contains evidence of being composed later than the Iliad, perhaps by several decades (due to some evolution of the language). So it has been hypothesized that the Odyssey was composed by a female relative of Homer, e.g. by his daughter or niece.

In any case, the author of the Odyssey mastered perfectly the same kind of language and poetic structures that were used in the Iliad, so he or she must have studied for many years the older poems in the same tradition, like the Iliad and the many others that have been lost.

A very large number of verses and short sequences of verses from the Iliad and the Odyssey are much older than the complete poems. However, someone, i.e. "Homer" alone, or with his assistants or relatives, had integrated all the older inherited poetic fragments into big coherent epic poems, before they were recorded in writing.

by adrian_b

5/13/2026 at 3:38:48 AM

I agree in broad strokes, but who is Aurora and what about the athletic games among the Phaeacians?

by goldfishgold

5/13/2026 at 12:33:56 PM

Aurora is the Latin name of the Goddess of the Dawn, one of the very few gods that have been inherited since Proto-Indo-European times. After migrations, the Indo-European people have adopted most of their gods from other populations, preserving only a few of their ancient gods, like the God of the Sky, Greek Zeus = Latin Jupiter and the Goddess of the Dawn, Greek Eos = Latin Aurora. Despite superficial differences, the Greek names and Latin names of these god and goddess are the same, descending from a common form through phonetic alterations (Dieu => Zeu- = Ju- and Ausos => Eos = Auror-, through regular phonetic changes, while -piter means father and -a was added to Auror to make it more similar with most other female names).

In the Odyssey, there is a lamentation about how the female goddess Eos = Aurora is strongly criticized for taking human lovers whenever she wants, while when the same thing is done by male gods, like Zeus = Jupiter, that is overlooked or even praised. Therefore this criticism about how promiscuity is treated differently by society for females and for males is millennia old.

You have a point that the Odyssey also mentions athletic competitions, not only the Iliad, but the importance and the amount of space dedicated to describing such events is much less than in the Iliad, where an entire chapter is dedicated for this and there are very detailed descriptions of the techniques used by each competitor.

In the Odyssey, the athletic competitions are just a vehicle used to highlight the physical abilities of Odysseus, demonstrating that even if he is older he can still easily outmatch younger competitors.

In the Iliad, the athletic competitions are described much like a radio or TV commentator would describe the events to spectators, focusing more on the description of the actions of the competitors as a show of skill, than on the results.

by adrian_b

5/12/2026 at 9:46:26 PM

[flagged]

by fleahunter

5/12/2026 at 6:27:39 PM

Ignoring the historical record and academic consensus, its very unlikely this trick could ever work. Ancient people weren't simpletons and the logistics of it all are pretty silly.

Its just poetic fiction in what is a long form poem.

by zoeysmithe

5/12/2026 at 6:44:57 PM

Virgil's version with Laocoön correctly guessing the plot and then being slain by Poseidon always felt to me like a later addition explicitly designed to explain "The Trojans weren't really that stupid, were they?" There's a similar undercurrent if you read Hesiod's Theogony, where Prometheus' famous "Trick at Mecone" is written as though Zeus knew it was a trick but chose the pile of bones anyway. It's as though the original story had Zeus being tricked in earnest, but later writers grew uncomfortable with the idea that their high god was so easily fooled.

With that said, it always in turn felt like the serpents' presence undermined Odysseus' claim of being clever, since from that perspective the Trojans didn't have much choice but to bring it in, or risk the ire of the gods. It's hardly a ruse if the enemy knows it's a trap but is compelled by supernatural forces to take it anyway.

by AdmiralAsshat

5/13/2026 at 7:18:08 AM

> It's as though the original story had Zeus being tricked in earnest, but later writers grew uncomfortable with the idea that their high god was so easily fooled.

That kind of thing happens all the time. Just sticking to the Trojan War, the original mythology has the Greeks unable to set sail because Artemis maintains unfavorable winds, because Agamemnon has offended her. She demands the sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, before she will allow the Greeks to depart.

This sets up several other parts of the story. It's load-bearing. But to the classical Greeks, it's a slander against Artemis, and we can see the process of mythological revisionism working to adjust what happened.

by thaumasiotes

5/12/2026 at 7:32:18 PM

pretty enjoyable read for an ai generated/assisted article

by masinini