What happened
In the legend, the Greeks besieged Troy for ten years after the abduction of Helen. The Iliad sings of the wrath of Achilles and the death of Hector; the wooden horse and the city’s fall belong not to the Iliad itself but to the Odyssey and the wider epic tradition.
Background
The ancient Greeks treated the war as history and dated it variously — Eratosthenes calculated 1184 BC — while modern scholars hold that any historical kernel can be placed only in late Mycenaean times. The site, Hisarlik in northwest Turkey, has been identified as Troy since Schliemann’s excavations in the 1870s. Its citadel holds many layers: Troy VI and VIIa show destruction in roughly the right era, and Hittite texts mention a Wilusa (Ilios) and conflicts involving Ahhiyawa — suggestive, but not proof of Homer’s war. The scholarly consensus is that whether a specific Trojan War happened is unknowable, and that the epic fuses memories of Mycenaean-era conflicts in Anatolia.
Consequences
The story of the war became the founding narrative of Greek literature and identity. It fed Greek tragedy, gave Rome its origin-myth through Aeneas, and has nourished Western storytelling down to the present. The site of Troy was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1998.