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who wrote 'trojan war'
Little is known about the historical Homer. Historians date the completion of the “Iliad” to about 750 B.C., and the “Odyssey” to about 725. Both began within the oral tradition, and were first transcribed decades or centuries after their composition. Many of the most familiar episodes of the war, from the abduction of Helen to the Trojan Horse and the sack of Troy, come from the so-called “Epic Cycle” of narratives assembled in the sixth century B.C. from older oral traditions.

In the first century B.C. the Roman poet Virgil composed the “Aeneid,” the third great classical epic inspired by the Trojan War. It follows a group of Trojans led by the hero Aeneas who leave their destroyed city to travel to Carthage before founding the city of Rome. Virgil’s aim was in part to give Rome’s first imperial dynasty an origin story as impressive as that of the Greeks.


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