13. Troy
The Film: As told by Homer in The Iliad, in 1193 BC Prince Paris of Troy kidnapped Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. In retaliation, Menelaus sends Achilles and the entire Greek armada to besiege Troy, and the war lasts for a decade. Troy could have been a truly great film if it wasn’t for some disrespectful and unnecessary alterations made to this literary masterpiece that has survived for thousands of years. Unfortunately, Hollywood modified the story in great ignorance and arrogance. Not a bad film, but it could have been much better.
The Historical Events: The historicity of the Trojan War is still subject to debate. Most classical Greek scholars thought that the war was a historical event, but many believed that the Homeric poems had exaggerated the events to suit the demands of poetry. Thucydides, who is known for being critical, considers it a historical event but doubts that 1,186 ships were sent to Troy. Euripides started changing Greek myths at will, including those of the Trojan War. Near year AD 100, Dio Chrysostom argued that while the war was historical, it ended with the Trojans winning, and the Greeks attempted to hide that fact.
In 1870, however, Western historians agreed that the Trojan War never happened and Troy was a fictional place, existing only in Homer’s mind. Then Heinrich Schliemann popularized his excavations at Hisarlik, which he and others believed to be Troy, and of the Mycenaean cities of Greece. Nowadays, many scholars agree that the Trojan War is based on a historical core of a Greek expedition against the city of Troy, but not many will agree that the Homeric poems narrated the historical facts of the war accurately.
One way or another, next time you claim that Odysseus, Achilles and Patroclus were just fictional figures that never existed, just think what our descendants in a thousand or two thousand years from now will be thinking when they will be reading a sports newspaper that describes Michael Phelps as half-human and half-shark aqua-man.