The Trojan War: Reasons, Causes, and Storyline | The Golden Apple, Helen, Achilles, the War's Duration, and Its Ending

When people think of the Trojan War, two scenes usually come to mind first: Paris choosing one of the three goddesses holding the golden apple, and the wooden horse crossing the city gates.

Yet when you open the Iliad, the primary source that tells this war in the most detail, neither of these scenes appears in the text. The Iliad deals only with the final year of the ten-year war — and within that, only the events of a few days. Let's follow along, in order, why that is, and what actually happened during those days.

The golden apple belongs not to the Iliad but to the story set before it

The story in which Paris chooses Aphrodite over Hera and Athena as the most beautiful goddess, and as his reward gains Helen, is widely told in mythological tradition. But this judgment of the apple and Helen's journey to Troy are not scenes the Iliad narrates directly.

Stories passed down orally before the Iliad, along with various fragments of epics written separately after it, fill in the beginning and end of the war. The Iliad itself takes this background as already having happened, and begins its story from a day much later on.

The point where the Iliad actually opens: a day in the tenth year of the war

That day is none other than the scene of Achilles' rage. After quarreling with the supreme commander Agamemnon and having his woman taken from him, Achilles refuses to fight, and the Greek army begins to lose ground without him.

All 24 books of the Iliad cover events spanning a few days to a few weeks, beginning with this rage and ending with Hector's funeral. How the war began, and what happened in the preceding nine years, are stories outside this work. So the scenes we'll now go through take place not across the entire ten years of war, but within this final stretch that the Iliad actually depicts.

Book 3: the day they tried to end the war with a single duel

After Hector calls him a coward, Paris steps forward, proposing that he fight first. The idea was that he and Menelaus would fight alone, the winner would take Helen and the treasures, and the rest would stop the war.

Both sides accepted this proposal, and laying out a white ram and a black ewe and wine, they swore an oath invoking Zeus, the sun god, and the earth as witnesses. The condition was that whoever died in the duel would be the loser, and the rest would keep the peace from that moment on.

Paris's first-thrown spear struck Menelaus's shield but failed to pierce it, and the spear Menelaus threw next pierced Paris's shield and armor, yet Paris twisted his body and barely escaped. When Menelaus struck down at his helmet with his sword, the sword shattered to pieces.

Left empty-handed, Menelaus grabbed the horsehair crest on Paris's helmet and tried to drag him away. At that moment Aphrodite intervened, snapped the helmet strap, wrapped Paris in a thick mist, and in an instant carried him off to his bedroom.

Agamemnon declared Menelaus the victor, and it seemed that all that remained was for Helen to be returned. But since Paris had vanished from the battlefield entirely, the promise to end the war through this duel was left with no one to honor it in the first place. And this broken promise brings the fighting back again.

Book 6: the people Hector meets inside the city after returning from the battlefield

Stepping away from the fighting for a moment and returning to the city, Hector meets three people in turn. His mother Hecuba, whom he meets first, offers him wine, but Hector declines, saying he cannot pray to the gods with his body stained with blood and dust, and instead asks her to gather the women and pray at the temple for the outcome of the war.

Next he stopped by Paris's house. To Paris, who was tending to his armor, Hector snaps that his people are dying — what is he doing here? — and Helen, standing beside him, blames herself, saying she is the cause of all this misery.

The last place he visited was his own home, where his wife Andromache was waiting for him with their young son Astyanax in her arms. Weeping, Andromache pleads that his valor will only lead him to ruin, and begs him to please stay inside the walls, so that their son will not be left an orphan and she a widow.

Hector replies that avoiding battle would be cowardly, and that for the sake of his father's honor and his own, he must fight. Yet at the same time he looks ahead to the painful future in which his wife may one day have to draw water as a slave in an enemy land.

When Hector reaches out his arms to hold the child, the baby is frightened by the horsehair crest on the helmet, bursts into tears, and buries himself in his nurse's embrace. At the sight, husband and wife break into laughter together, and only after taking off his helmet and setting it down does Hector lift the child into his arms. He then prays to heaven that this child may one day become a leader of Troy like himself, and that he may then live a better life than his own.

Book 16: the promise Achilles made and the line Patroclus crossed

As the battle line is pushed back to the ships, Achilles' closest companion Patroclus tearfully begs to join the fight. Achilles finally consents, but makes it absolutely clear: drive the Trojan army away from the ships and come straight back, and do not fight any deeper into the field while he is absent.

Patroclus, wearing Achilles' borrowed armor, turns the tide of battle in an instant. But this very success pulls him away from the promise that had held him in place. He does not withdraw, pushing the assault all the way to the city walls three times, and even when Apollo himself appears and warns him that it is not his fate to bring this city down, he does not stop.

In the end, Apollo strikes him from behind on the back and shoulders, stripping off his helmet, breaking his spear, and undoing his armor. In that moment Euphorbus stabs him in the back with a spear, and Hector, closing in, brings him down with a final blow.

Just before his breath fails, Patroclus leaves Hector with one last word: you too will soon die at the hands of Achilles. This death — losing his life as the price of crossing the line Achilles had set — becomes the very thing that calls Achilles, who had turned his back on the fighting, back to the battlefield.

Book 22: why Hector, left alone before the gates, turned his back

Learning that Achilles is after him as payment for killing Patroclus, Hector remains alone outside the city. His father Priam begs from atop the walls, pleading never to face that man alone and to come inside and protect the people of Troy, and his mother Hecuba clings to him, baring her breast and urging him to fall back if only for her sake.

But the moment Achilles draws near, Hector cannot hold his ground and turns to flee. It was a flight long enough that a chase around the city walls went on for three full circuits.

At this point Athena appears, transformed into Hector's brother Deiphobus, and urges him to stand and face Achilles together. Strengthened, Hector finally stops in his tracks and turns around.

But the brother who had promised his help had vanished without a trace. After exchanging spear throws and finally clashing even with swords, Hector is pierced through the throat by Achilles' spear. As his breath fades, he asks that his body alone be returned home, offering that his parents will pay his ransom — but Achilles refuses outright, saying he will only throw him to the dogs, and no such thing will happen, then lashes the body to his chariot and drags it away.

Book 24: what a father went to reclaim under cover of night

Watching his son's body suffer continued desecration, Priam finally resolves to go alone to Achilles' quarters at night. Hermes, ordered by Zeus to guide him, appears in the form of a young attendant, casts the sentries into deep sleep, and unbars the city gates to clear the way.

Entering the quarters, Priam kisses the very hands that had killed so many of his sons and clasps his knees. He then asks Achilles to remember his own father Peleus, saying that of his fifty sons none now remain, and that he has come bearing the ransom for that last son's body.

At these words, even Achilles' heart is shaken. Priam weeps for his dead son, and Achilles weeps for his own father and for Patroclus, who departed before him.

Once his heart has settled, Achilles has the body washed and anointed with oil, and carried by hand onto a bier. And as Priam requested, he promises to halt the fighting for nine days of mourning and a funeral on the tenth. The Iliad draws its curtain at the point where this funeral ends.

The wooden horse and even the figure of ten years belong to a different story that follows

So what the Iliad actually shows us is a few days in the tenth year of the war — this duel, these partings, these deaths, and this funeral. The duration that the war lasted exactly ten years, and the ending in which Troy fell by means of the wooden horse, are not scenes this work narrates directly.

Those events belong to other epic traditions that continue after the Iliad. Like the golden apple mentioned at the start, the wooden horse that ended the war is likewise a story handed down separately, outside the Iliad.

If you want to look more closely at each figure

In the myth of Helen, where the story began with a duel, you can see more about where she stood between Paris and Menelaus, and in the myth of Achilles, who returned to the battlefield upon his companion's death, you can follow the circumstances leading up to his confrontation with Hector.

If you want to trace more deeply the final scene with his family through to his death, see the myth of Hector, and the story of the companion who paid the price for crossing the promise is covered in detail in the myth of Patroclus. And if you're curious about the ending absent from the text of the Iliad — that story of the wooden horse — you can continue with the myth of the Trojan Horse.