Homer's Troy, did it really exist? Did the Trojan War really happen as depicted in the Iliad? There are many sceptics that say no, the Trojan War, described in the epic poem The Iliad never happened. On the other hand, many others have spent years trying to prove these critics wrong. An archaeologist, by the name of Manfred Korfmann, who was directly involved in one of the several excavations of Troy, stated that because the city was so strategically placed by a large body of water, to make trade easier, that the war could have easily been fought there and that The Iliad was the story from that war.
             Troy was a city, located at Hissarlik, in Turkey (Tyler 7). Homer describes the Trojan War as a ten-year long bloodbath. The event, in which Homer recites as the cause of this long battle, is when Paris, who is the prince of Troy, convinces Helen, wife of Menelaus, to come back to Troy to be his wife. This of course infuriates Menelaus, the King of Sparta. So the Greeks decide that they will go retrieve her from the walls of Troy. Battles occur day in and day out. Both the Greeks and the Trojans have won their share of these battles. The problem was that the Trojan walls were seemingly impenetrable. The Greeks devise the plan of the Trojan Horse. As a gift, they built a huge wooden horse large enough to fit many Greeks inside. When the Trojans brought the horse inside the walls, and were celebrating their supposed victory, the Greeks emerged from the horse and overtook the city. Killing and burning everything in sight.
             Homer's story is a "strange mixture of gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines"(Edmondson 4); this is why many pass it off as a fictional story. Jacob Bryant, rejected the reality of the war and the city of Troy (Wood 41). Others, such as Heinrich Schliemann and Frank Calvert, both archeologists, were convinced the Trojan War happened and that Troy really did exist, and they set out...