Why This Conversation Matters
The Trojan War has occupied an unusual place in Western civilization for nearly three thousand years. It is simultaneously history and literature, archaeology and myth, memory and imagination. Every generation seems compelled to ask the same question: Did it really happen?
Barry Strauss suggests that this is the wrong question—or at least an incomplete one. The more interesting question is how a historical conflict became one of humanity’s greatest stories, and why that story continues to illuminate the realities of war long after the kingdoms that fought it disappeared. Homer was not writing history in the modern sense. Yet he preserved something historians care deeply about: the mentality of another world. Through him we glimpse how Bronze Age people understood honor, friendship, kingship, revenge, and fate. We also see how some parts of warfare remain the same, even when the technology of killing other humans is very different.
Throughlines
Medieval, early-modern, and modern readers have often approached the Iliad with two instincts that pull in opposite directions. One is to treat it as history disguised as poetry. The other is to dismiss it as poetry that tells us nothing about history. Barry Strauss argues for something a little more subtle than that.
He believes that Homeric poems are neither newspaper reports nor complete fairy tales. They are some kind of historical memory—memory transmitted across centuries by oral poets, reshaped by successive generations, embroidered with gods and miracles, yet still preserving remarkably authentic glimpses of an earlier civilization.That distinction matters because history is never simply the accumulation of facts, but also the preservation of ways of seeing the world.
Again and again during the conversation, the Bronze Age reveals itself not through dates or battles but through mentality. Guest friendship is not merely etiquette; it is the social glue that makes life possible in a violent world. Honor is not vanity but political currency. To insult a king publicly is to threaten the fragile hierarchy upon which an army depends. Even wars themselves are explained differently. Modern historians instinctively search for structural causes—trade routes, climate change, economic competition, strategic geography. Bronze Age peoples looked instead to persons: stolen wives, family honor, broken oaths, divine favor.
Neither perspective is entirely wrong. Indeed, one of the conversation’s most striking insights is that these explanations often coexist. Troy occupied one of the most strategic locations in the eastern Mediterranean, controlling access between the Aegean and the Black Sea. Countless later powers would fight over the same ground. Yet people rarely march to war under banners proclaiming grain routes and commercial advantage. They march for honor, loyalty, revenge, family, nation, or faith. Structural forces create the conditions for conflict; human beings experience them personally.
The conversation also reminds us how remarkably constant war itself has remained. Epidemics sweeping through camps. Raiding expeditions. Night patrols. Arguments between commanders. Mutiny among exhausted soldiers. Occupation. The sack of cities. Combat trauma carried home by survivors. Remove the bronze armor, and much of the human experience would be recognizable to soldiers in Napoleon’s armies, on the Western Front, or in Iraq.
Homer understood something historians sometimes forget: war is not merely a sequence of campaigns. It is a moral environment that reshapes everyone who enters it.
Perhaps that explains why the stories after Troy prove just as compelling as the war itself. Odysseus cannot simply return home. Agamemnon brings victory back with him only to discover that triumph has solved nothing. Greece itself seems unable to recover from the violence it has unleashed. The homecomings become stories not of celebration but of damaged people trying to re-enter ordinary life.
Barry Strauss makes an intriguing observation near the end of the conversation. Modern historians explain the collapse of the Bronze Age through impersonal forces: migrations, epidemics, environmental change, systemic breakdown. Homer explains the same catastrophe differently. The men who returned from Troy were broken, and broken men broke the world around them.
Questions for Reflection
What kinds of historical truth can survive within myth?
Why do societies preserve stories long after they have forgotten the events that inspired them?
How do personal explanations for war differ from structural explanations?
What does guest friendship reveal about life in violent societies?
Why are homecoming stories often more psychologically revealing than battle stories?
How much continuity exists between ancient warfare and modern warfare?
Why do archaeological discoveries sometimes strengthen rather than weaken legendary traditions?
What does Homer’s treatment of honor tell us about Bronze Age political life?
Can literature preserve historical mentalities more effectively than chronicles?
What myths from our own age might future historians discover contain unexpected historical truths?
For Further Investigation
Barry Strauss, The Trojan War: A New History (Simon and Schuster, 2006)
—, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
Homer, The Iliad
translated by George Chapman (1611; republished by Princeton University Press, 1998)
translated by Alexander Pope (Oxford University Press World’s Classics, 1998)
translated by Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press, 1951)
translated by Stanley Lombardo (Hackett Publishing Company, 1997)
Homer, The Odyssey
Eric H. Cline, The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction.
—, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed.
Gregory Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours (Belknap Press, 2020)
Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (Simon and Schuster, 1995)
—, Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (Scribner, 2003)
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