Trojan War
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.