What started the Trojan War?

The plan of Zeus

The oldest summary of the story, from the lost epic Cypria, opens: “Zeus plans with Themis to bring about the Trojan war.” A surviving fragment of the same poem gives his reason:

There was a time when the countless tribes of men, though wide-dispersed, oppressed the surface of the deep-bosomed earth, and Zeus saw it and had pity and in his wise heart resolved to relieve the all-nurturing earth of men by causing the great struggle of the Ilian war, that the load of death might empty the world.

The Iliad may hint at the same design in its opening lines, where the dead pile up “for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled” (1.5, Butler’s Jove being Zeus). Apollodorus reports other motives: Zeus wanted his daughter to become famous for setting Europe and Asia at war, or wanted to exalt the race of heroes (Epitome 3.1). The quarrel among three goddesses, and Paris’s verdict, were the means, told in what is the apple of discord?

A crime against a host

On earth, the war began with a betrayal of hospitality. Paris sailed to Sparta and was welcomed as a guest, first by Helen’s brothers, then by Menelaus, who feasted him and then left for a funeral in Crete, trusting Helen to look after the visitors. Paris left by night with Helen and the palace treasure. For the Greeks this broke xenia, the bond between guest and host that Zeus himself protected as Zeus Xenios. Whether Helen was taken or chose to go, the poets disagree, as who was Helen of Troy? explains. When Greek envoys later demanded Helen and the treasure back, the Cypria says, the Trojans refused.

The suitors’ oath

Why did all of Greece go? Years before, so many princes had courted Helen that her father Tyndareus feared the losers would turn on the winner. Odysseus offered a way out in exchange for help winning Penelope: make every suitor swear to defend the chosen bridegroom against any wrong done to him over the marriage (Apollodorus, Library 3.10.9). Tyndareus chose Menelaus, and the oath held. Now Menelaus called it in, and his brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, gathered the army. The historian Thucydides was skeptical: Agamemnon led, he thought, less because of an oath than because he was the strongest king of his day (1.9).

Reluctant heroes

Not every king wanted to sail. Odysseus pretended to be mad until Palamedes seized his infant son Telemachus and the act collapsed. Thetis, who knew her son would die young at Troy, hid Achilles on the island of Skyros, dressed as a girl among the daughters of King Lycomedes; Odysseus found him out with a pile of gifts that included weapons and a sudden trumpet call.

From Aulis to the tenth year

In the poets’ count the war lasted ten years, and the clock starts at Aulis, where the fleet gathered. In the Cypria it first sailed to Mysia and sacked the wrong city, Teuthrania, taking it for Troy, before a storm scattered the ships. At the second muster, Agamemnon shot a stag and boasted that he outdid Artemis, and the goddess held back the winds until his daughter Iphigenia was brought to the altar; in the Cypria, Artemis snatches the girl away and leaves a stag in her place. At Aulis, too, the seer Calchas read an omen of a serpent devouring nine sparrows: “so shall we fight nine years at Troy, but in the tenth shall take the town” (Iliad 2.328–329). Thucydides blamed the length on supplies, since the army spent its time farming and raiding instead of pressing the siege (1.11).