Please read the text with an American Accent
For later Greeks the Trojan War was the best remembered event of the Mycenaean age: it is the central fact of history behind the Iliad and Odyssey; and it was constantly present to the Greek mind as a turning-point of the heroic age.
The two greatest Greek historians both refer to it in the opening chapters of their work: Herodotus recalls it as an earlier conflict of east and west, analogous to a that of the Persian Wars; Thucydides speaks of it as the first united foreign enterprise of the Greeks. That it was a united Greek enterprise is a point of some importance. The fame and glory of it were a joint inheritance of all the Greeks, just as the Homeric epics were. But we should be wrong to suggest that it was the Homeric epic that made it so, or that the epic was the sole source of the knowledge of the war.
It is true that are considered reading of Iliad and the Odyssey will give one the outline - that Agamemnon mustard a force of men and ships from all Greece against Troy to avenge the abduction of Helen, wife of his brother Menelaus of Sparta, and that Troy vase eventually sacked after a long-drawn-out siege. Homer's purpose was to tell a tale of human experience of universal application; and his narratives have the Trojan War for their backcloth because the period of that war and its aftermath was the most momentous in the then remembered past of the Greeks, and was universally recognized as such. Indeed the fact that the Trojan War was accepted as historical by the entire ancient Greek world, and that no writer in all that nation of skeptics ever questioned its historicity, is the most compelling evidence that it really did take place.
