Told of a possible location for the city, at Hisarlik on the west coast of modern Turkey, Schliemann began to dig, and uncovered a large number of ancient treasures, many of which are now on display at the British Museum. It was in fact the prospect of rediscovering Homer’s Troy that led the rich Prussian businessman, Heinrich Schliemann, to travel to what is now Turkey in the late 19th Century. Troy, too, is portrayed in such vivid colour in the epic that a reader cannot help but to be transported to its magnificent walls. Achilles spears Hector “at the gullet, where a man’s life is most quickly destroyed”, as Martin Hammond translated it. A soldier dies by the water and “eels and fish make busy around him, feeding upon and devouring the fat around his kidneys”. The grim realities of battle are described so unflinchingly in the Iliad that it is hard to believe they were not based on observation. It isn’t surprising that people have been convinced of the reality of the Trojan War. Aeneas and his men left to found a new home in Italy. John Dryden, England’s first official poet laureate, translated superbly the part where the horse was made: “The Greeks grew weary of the tedious war,/ And, by Minerva’s aid, a fabric rear’d,/ Which like a steed of monstrous height appear’d”.

In his poem, the Aeneid, Virgil described how the hero Aeneas escaped the burning citadel with a group of followers after the Greeks entered in their wooden horse. The Romans went so far as to present themselves as the descendants of the surviving Trojans.

The illiad story