11 A Fairy-Tale War

THe history of countries usually begins—and also ends—with war. The first great happening in the history of Greece was a war. It was called the Trojan War and was supposed to have taken place about twelve hundred years before Christ, or not long after the beginning of the Iron Age. But we are not only unsure of the date; we are not even sure that there ever was such a war, for a great deal of it, we know is simply fairy tale. This is the way the tale goes.

Once there was a wedding feast of the gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus, when suddenly a goddess who had not been invited threw a golden apple on the table. On the apple were written these words:

To the fairest.

The goddess who had thrown the apple was the goddess of quarreling; and true to her name she did start a quarrel,for each of the goddesses, like vain human beings, thought she was the fairest and should have the apple. At last they called in a shepherd boy named Paris to decide who was the fairest.

Each goddess offered Paris a present if he would choose her. Hera, the queen of the gods, offered to make him a king;Athena, the goddess of wisdom, offered to make him wise; but Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, offered to give him the most beautiful girl in the world for his wife.

Now, Paris was not really a shepherd boy but the son of Priam, the king of Troy, which was a city on the seashore opposite Greece. When he was a baby, Paris had been left on a mountain to die, but he had been found by a shepherd and was brought up by him as his own child.

Paris didn’t care about being wise; he didn’t care about being king; what he did want was to have the most beautiful woman in the world for his wife, and so he gave the apple to Aphrodite.

Now the most beautiful woman in the world was named Helen, and she was already married to Menelaus, the king of Sparta. In spite of that fact, Aphrodite told Paris to go to Sparta in Greece, where he would find Helen, and then run away with her. So Paris went to Sparta to visit King Menelaus and was royally entertained by him. And then Paris, although he had been treated so kindly and had been trusted, one night stole Helen away and carried her off across the sea to Troy.

Menelaus and the Greeks were naturally very angry and immediately prepared for war and sailed off for Troy to get Helen back. Now, in ancient times all cities had walls built around them to protect them from the enemy. As there were no cannons nor guns nor deadly weapons such as are used in war nowadays, it was very hard to get into a walled city or capture it. Troy was protected in this way by walls; and though the Greeks tried for ten years to capture it, at the end of the ten years Troy was still unconquered.

At last the Greeks decided to try a trick to get into the city.They built a huge horse of wood, and inside this wooden horse they put soldiers. They placed the horse in front of the city walls and then sailed away as if at last they were giving up the war.The Trojans were told by a spy that the horse was a gift of the gods and that they ought to take it into the city. A Trojan priest named Laocoon, however, told his people not to have anything to do with the horse, for he suspected a trick. But people seldom take advice when told not to do what they want to do.

Just then some huge snakes came out of the sea and attacked Laocoon and his two sons and, twining around them, strangled them to death. The Trojans thought this was a sign from the gods, or an omen as they would have said,that they should not believe Laocoon; so they determined to take the horse into the city against his advice. The horse was so big, however, that it would not go through the gates, and in order to get it inside the walls they had to tear down part of the wall itself. When night fell, the Greek soldiers came out of the horse and opened the gates of the city. The other Greeks, who had been waiting just out of sight, returned and entered through the gates and the hole the Trojans had made in the wall. Troy was easily conquered then, and the city was burned to the ground, and Helen’s husband carried her back to Greece. Because of this horse trick, we still have a saying,“Beware of the Greeks bearing gifts,” which is as much as to say, “Look out for an enemy who makes you a present.”

The story of the Trojan War was told in two long poems.Some people think they are the finest poems that were ever written. One of these poems is called the Iliad, from the name of the city of Troy, which was also known as Ilium.The Iliad describes the Trojan War itself. The other poem is called the Odyssey and describes the adventures of one of the Greek heroes on his way home after the war was over. The Greek hero’s name was Odysseus, which gives the name Odyssey to the book, but he was also called Ulysses. These poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were composed by a Greek poet named Homer, who is supposed to have lived at some time before 700 B.C.

Homer may have been a bard; that is, a singing poet who went about from place to place and sang his songs to the people. He probably collected old legends and made his poems from them. Usually a bard played on a lyre as he sang, and the people gave him something to eat or a place to sleep to pay him for his songs.

People enjoyed hearing Homer’s songs. They learned them by heart, and mothers taught them to their children after Homer had died. The poems are written down in Greek, and you may some day read them in Greek, if you study that language, or at least in an English translation.

I have told you that Homer probably made his songs out of old legends. There were many legends, too, about Homer himself, and we don’t know which are true. He was said to have been blind. Seven different cities each proudly claimed that Homer had been born in their city, so you can count six or seven legends right there!