It all started about thirty two hundred years ago with a quarrel between the goddesses Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite.  The goddess of strife and discord, Eris, wanted to give one of  these three goddesses a golden apple meant for “the fairest”.  The three goddesses couldn’t agree on who was the fairest, so they went to Zeus.  Zeus sent the goddesses to Paris who was the son of Priam, the King of Troy.   Each of the goddesses offered Paris a reward for picking her to be “the fairest”.  Athena offered to make Paris a great general and hero.  Hera offered to make Paris a ruler of a rich and powerful kingdom.  Aphrodite offered Paris the most beautiful woman in the world in marriage. Paris decided that Aphrodite was “the fairest” and should receive the golden apple.  Aphrodite in return caused one of Zeus’ many, many daughters Helen of Sparta, the most beautiful woman in the world, to fall in love with Paris who then brought her to Troy. The trouble was that Helen at the time was married to Menelaus, king of the Greek city state of Sparta.  Agamemnon, Menelaus’ brother and king of Mycenae, then led a huge expedition of Greek ships to Troy to reclaim Helen for his brother.  Thus Helen of Troy was the “face that launched a thousand ships”.

The Greek forces’ first expedition led by Agamemnon to Troy was scattered by a severe storm before it reached Troy, and it took the forces eight years to re-gather.  After that the Greek forces besieged Troy for nine years, culminating in the ploy of the hollow wooden Trojan horse filled with Greek Soldiers.  After the Greeks entered Troy, they perpetrated a massacre of Troy’s sleeping population and the burning of the city.

After the archaeological discovery of the remains of Troy in 1867, many historians now believe there was an actual Trojan War between the Greeks and Troy.  But the story of the Trojan War is now inextricably tied up in myth and legends of the gods.

There was a strong tradition of oral poetry in Greece, and after the Trojan War, it was only natural to place the events of the Trojan War into these oral poems.  These oral poems were passed down from generation to generation.  No one knows if Homer was a real person or a composite of oral poets.  At some point some of these oral poems got written down into what we now call ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ which are attributed to someone we call Homer.  Some scholars see the name Homer as meaning ‘he who fits the songs together’.   Many scholars believe ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ did not become fixed texts until six centuries after the Trojan War was supposed to have taken place.  Besides ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’, there is an entire Epic Cycle of poems about the Greek gods and the Trojan War that got written down between the 8^th and 6^th century BC.  These are the sources for all of the stories that make up Greek myths.

The great Greek dramatists of the 4^th century BC, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides, built many of their finest plays around these Greek myths.  Greek mythology later became the basis for Roman mythology.

In 1930, Edith Hamilton, an author from the United States, wrote ‘The Greek Way’ which was her earliest expression of her belief in “the calm lucidity of the Greek mind” and ‘that the great thinkers of Athens were unsurpassed in their mastery of truth and enlightenment’.  In 1942 she wrote ‘Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes’ which is now the standard source for the Greek myths.  King Paul of Greece awarded Edith Hamilton the Golden Cross of the Order of Benefaction, making her an honorary citizen of Athens, even though she had never been to Greece before.  Edith Hamilton travelled to Athens to accept the award in a theatre where nodding to the applause, she said, “I am an Athenian citizen! I am an Athenian citizen! This is the proudest moment in all my life.”