The history of countries usually begins--and also ends--with war. The first great happening in the history of Greece was a war. It was called the Trojan War and was supposed to have taken place about twelve hundred years before Christ, or not long after the beginning of the Iron Age. But we are not only not sure of the date; we are not even sure that there ever was such a war, for a great deal of it, we know, is simply fairy-tale. This is the way the tale goes. Once there was a wedding feast of the gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus, when suddenly a goddess who had not been invited threw a golden apple on the table. On the apple was written these words: To the Fairest. The goddess who had thrown the apple was the goddess of quarreling; and true to her name she _did_ start a quarrel, for each of the goddesses, like vain human beings, thought she was the fairest and should have the apple. At last they called in a shepherd boy named Paris to decide which was the fairest. Each goddess offered Paris a present if he would choose her. Juno, the queen of the gods, offered to make him a king; Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, offered to make him wise; but Venus, the goddess of beauty, offered to give him the most beautiful girl in the world for his wife. Now, Paris was not really a shepherd boy but the son of Priam, the king of Troy, which was a city on the sea-shore opposite Greece. Paris when a baby had been left on a mountain to die, but had been found by a shepherd and brought up by him as his own child. Paris didn’t care about being wise; he didn’t care about being king; what he did want was to have the most beautiful girl in the world for his wife, and so he gave the apple to Venus. Now the most beautiful girl in the world was named Helen, and she was already married to Menelaus, the king of Sparta. But in spite of that fact Venus told Paris to go to Sparta in Greece, where he would find Helen, and then run away with her. So Paris went to Sparta to visit King Menelaus and was royally entertained by him. And then Paris, although he had been treated so kindly and been trusted, one night stole Helen away and carried her off across the sea to Troy. Though this was in the Iron Age, it was the way a Cave Man of the Stone Age might have acted. Menelaus and the Greeks were naturally very angry and immediately prepared for war and sailed off for Troy to get Helen back. Now, in ancient times all cities had walls built around them to protect them from the enemy. As there were no cannons nor guns nor deadly weapons such as are used in war nowadays, it was very hard to get into a walled city or capture it. Troy was protected in this way with walls; and though the Greeks tried for ten years to capture it, at the end of the ten years Troy was still unconquered.