Greek gods play a large role in the myth of how the Trojan War was started. The reason gods were introduced to the Greek culture was to serve as an answer to the origin of man, as well as to offer authority figures that could be summoned when the Greek needed help. The Greek gods were believed to have a divine presence and were worshipped by many. They were an important aspect of Greek culture that flowed over into literature, art, and other topics. Many of Homer’s works include the involvement of Greek gods and goddesses. The gods that are seen throughout Homer’s works are immortal and they hold a lot of power. They have the power to know just about everything and are the highest in authority without any other power above them. The greatest of the gods is the family in which Zeus is the father. Throughout the majority of Homer’s writings, Zeus is so supreme that he is used to represent the collective power of gods and Zeus is so commonly mentioned. This is why in the origin of the Trojan War, the gods go to Zeus for resolutions of conflict. Unlike some works of writing and some cultures, the gods throughout Homer’s work have no relation to religion but are rather their own separate thing.
The war went on for ten years swinging to one side and then the other. Some of the leading fighters were Achilles, Paris, and Hector. The Greeks won by building a big wooden horse, which we now call the Trojan Horse. Greek soldiers hid inside the horse, and others put the horse on the shore and left in their boats. The Trojans saw the horse and thought that the Greeks had given up and left. They thought the horse was a gift in their honour. They dragged the horse into Troy and celebrated their victory. When night fell, the Greeks hiding inside the horse opened the city gates and set fire to the houses. The Greeks who had left in their boats had just pretended to leave, to trick the Trojans. They returned and won the war. The trick was thought up by Odysseus, King of the small island of Ithaca.
There are many versions to the story of the Trojan War. Two of the most famous of these stories are Homer’s poetry about this war in his books, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Full of exaggerations, distortions, contradictions, and pure fictions, these two books do not give a clear indication whether or not the Trojan war actually occurred. Homer wrote these stories based on the oral tradition of storytelling. Oral tradition has a tendency to not contain precise memories and can morph into different claims based on different cultural influences and intentions. For example, the Iliad is shown to have many similar aspects to characters and wars originating from stories throughout the Hellenic world, like the duel between Lycian Sapedon and Rhodian. These similarities in stories are not originally connected with Troy. This creates fundamental distortion which contains three principles. First, a heroic tradition may be constructed to seem as an event that holds more significance than it truly does. In Herodotus’s version of the Trojan War, he says “his narrative is presented as belonging to the realm of ‘what is said’ rather than ‘what is known.” He tries to present a credible source of the story by eliminating the gods by making Helen be the daughter of a human, Tyndareus, rather than the daughter of a god. He also makes Alexander (Paris) not judge on the beauty of the three goddesses and become convinced by Aphrodite’s promise to marry Helen. Instead, he steals Helen. He does this because humans decide on their own what is and is not credible about ancient civilizations. He knew the popular opinion would be that people do not see supernatural as credible but instead as fiction. Secondly, tradition may be picked up by regions and people who have no relation to the event. For example, different civilizations would use the information as “propagandistic purposes” to make their civilization look heroic or enemy civilizations remain monstrous. The process of passing down stories through word of mouth as the only source leads to inevitable change to the truth in the story through the different cultural influences of those telling the story. For example, if the Spartans were telling their perspective of the Trojan war compared to the Trojans, then the two stories will most likely be very different. Thirdly, the traditions may become distorted in time including the original main idea so that it is not recognizable from the rest of the evidence. This means that there most likely was a Trojan war. However, the war was not the same as what Homer states. The story is known to be part of "spatium" "histoicum" which is the clear belonging of a deep past in which accurate knowledge is difficult to obtain. For example there is also no written evidence to validate the Trojan war and archeologists can not yet provide evidence of who attacked Troy. This makes the storyline much easier to change and is why many researchers believe the Trojan war stories are about war with enemies created as a result of a copper shortage in Greece. At the time, the Trojans were the only ones that would have access to the copper supply in the Back Sea. Overall, these variations in the story of the Trojan war are not reliable sources to aid figuring out whether the Trojan war happened or not; however, they help give an understanding of the cultural background and intentions of the people during this era.