The Classical legends of the Trojan War developed continuously throughout Greek and Latin literature. In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the earliest literary evidence available, the chief stories have already taken shape, and individual themes were elaborated later, especially in Greek drama. The story of the Trojan origin, through Aeneas of Rome, helped to inspire Roman interest; Book II of Virgil’s Aeneid contains the best-known account of the sack of Troy. Finally there are the pseudochronicles that go under the names of Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius.

In the Iliad, the Trojan War fought between the Greeks and Troy originates in the following manner. The wealthy and powerful King Priam of Troy has 50 sons and 12 daughters, both by his wife Hecuba and by his concubines. His son Paris is invited to judge which of the goddesses Aphrodite, Hera, or Athena is entitled to receive the golden apple marked by the goddess Eris (Discord) “for the most beautiful.” Aphrodite promises Paris the most beautiful woman in the world: he therefore awards her the apple and goes to Greece, where he wins the love of, and elopes with, Helen, wife of Menelaus, the king of Sparta.

To recover Helen, the Greeks launch a great expedition under the overall command of Menelaus’s brother, Agamemnon, king of Árgos or Mycenae. The Trojans refuse to return Helen. The Greeks sack small towns in or near the Troad, but Troy, assisted by allies from Asia Minor and Thrace, withstands a Greek siege for 10 years. The gods also take sides, notably Hera, Athena, and Poseidon for the Greeks, and Aphrodite (who has a son, Aeneas, by the Trojan Anchises, grandson of Assaracus), Apollo, and Ares for the Trojans. The Iliad, which is set in the 10th year of the war, tells of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, who was the finest Greek warrior, and the consequent deaths in battle of (among others) Achilles’ friend Patroclus and Priam’s eldest son, Hector.

After Hector’s death, two allies join the Trojans: Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, and Memnon, king of the Ethiopians and son of the dawn-goddess Eos. Achilles kills both of them, but Paris then manages to kill Achilles with an arrow. Before they can take Troy, the Greeks must steal the wooden image of Pallas Athena (the Palladium) from the citadel, fetch the arrows of Heracles and the sick archer Philoctetes from Lemnos, and bring Achilles’ son Neoptolemus (Pyrrhus) from Skyros. Odysseus and Diomedes complete all these tasks. Finally, with Athena’s help, Epeius builds a huge wooden horse. Several Greek warriors hide inside it; the rest of the Greek army sails away to Tenedos, a nearby island, pretending to abandon the siege. Despite the warnings of Priam’s daughter Cassandra, the Trojans are persuaded by Sinon, a Greek who feigned desertion, to take the horse inside the walls of Troy as an offering to Athena; the priest Laocoön, who tries to have the horse destroyed, is killed by sea serpents. At night, the Greek fleet returns and the Greeks from the horse open the gates of Troy. In the total sack that follows, Priam and his remaining sons are slaughtered; the Greeks enslave the Trojan women and send them to various cities in Greece. The adventurous homeward voyages of the Greek leaders are told in two epics, the Returns (Nostoi; lost) and Homer’s Odyssey.

The few Trojan survivors include Aeneas, whose descendants continue to rule the Trojans; later tradition takes Aeneas’s Trojans to Italy as the ancestors of the Romans.

Medieval legends

Medieval European writers, unacquainted with Homer firsthand, found in the Troy legend a rich source of heroic and romantic storytelling and a convenient framework into which to fit their own courtly and chivalric ideals. The chief sources for medieval versions of the story were fictitious eyewitness accounts of the Trojan War by Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius. The key work in the medieval exploitation of the Trojan theme was a French romance, the Roman de Troie (1154–60), by Benoît de Sainte-Maure.

Later medieval writers used the Roman de Troie until it was superseded by a Latin prose account, the Historia destructionis Troiae (c. 1287; “History of the Destruction of Troy”), by Guido delle Colonne. The French author Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye (1464), an account based on Guido, was translated into English by William Caxton and became the first book to be printed in English as The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye (c. 1474).