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Article: Homer & history.(The Trojan War: A New History)(Book review)
- Article from:
- New Criterion
- Article date:
- January 1, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Barry Strauss The Trojan War: A New History. Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $26
Somewhere around 1200 B.C. a group of Greek raiders attacked a prominent Hittite town in northern Asia Minor. After a prolonged siege, they sacked Troy and left. Shortly after returning to the Greek mainland, the victors saw their own cities suffer a similarly catastrophic destruction.
That's about all we surmise with any certainty about the great Trojan War and its aftermath--the most famous but least known of ancient Greek conflicts, one that predated the well-recorded Persian and Peloponnesian Wars of the city-states by over 700 years.
Each generation of classical ...