It was the centre of a powerful state, Grecian in race and language; and when Paris, son of King Priam, visited Sparta and carried off the beautiful wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, all the heroes of Greece banded together and invaded Priam’s dominions.

The twelve hundred ships that sailed for Troy transported one hundred thousand warriors to the valley of Simois and Scamander.  Among them was Agamemnon, “king of men,” brother of Menelaus.  He was the leader, and in his train were Achilles, “swift of foot”; “god-like, wise” Ulysses, King of Ithaca, the two Ajaxes, and the aged Nestor.  The narrative of their adventures is told in the Homeric poems with a power of musical expression, a charm of language, and a vividness of imagery unsurpassed in poetry.

For ten years the besiegers encircled the city of Priam.  After many engagements and single combats on “the windy plain of Troy” the great hero of the Greeks, Achilles of Thessaly, is wronged by Agamemnon, who carries away Briseis, a fair captive girl allotted as the spoils of war to the “Swift-footed.”  The hero of Thessaly thenceforth refuses to join in the war, and sullenly shuts himself up in his tent.  It is only when his dear friend Patroclus has been slain by the valiant Hector, eldest son of Priam, that he sallies forth, meets Hector in single combat, and finally slays him.  Achilles then attaches the body of Hector to his chariot and insultingly trails it in the dust as he drives three times around the walls of Troy.  The Iliad closes with the funeral rites celebrated over the corpse of Hector.

We now arrive at the capital and culminating point of the Grecian epic—­the two sieges and captures of Troy, with the destinies of the dispersed heroes, Trojan as well as Grecian, after the second and most celebrated capture and destruction of the city.

It would require a large volume to convey any tolerable idea of the vast extent and expansion of this interesting fable, first handled by so many poets, epic, lyric, and tragic, with their endless additions, transformations, and contradictions,—­then purged and recast by historical inquirers, who, under color of setting aside the exaggerations of the poets, introduced a new vein of prosaic invention,—­lastly, moralized and allegorized by philosophers.  In the present brief outline of the general field of Grecian legend, or of that which the Greeks believed to be their antiquities, the Trojan war can be regarded as only one among a large number of incidents upon which Hecataeus and Herodotus looked back as constituting their fore-time.  Taken as a special legendary event, it is, indeed, of wider and larger interest than any other, but it is a mistake to single it out from the rest as if it rested upon a different and more trustworthy basis.  I must, therefore, confine myself to an abridged narrative of the current and leading facts; and amid the numerous contradictory statements which are to be found respecting every one of them, I know no better ground of preference than comparative antiquity, though even the oldest tales which we possess—­those contained in the Iliad—­evidently presuppose others of prior date.