=The Trojan War.=--Of all these legends the most fully developed and the most celebrated was the legend of the Trojan War. It recounted that about the twelfth century, Troy, a rich and powerful city, held sway over the coast of Asia. Paris, a Trojan prince, having come to Greece, had abducted Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. Agamemnon, king of Argos, made a league of the kings of Greece; a Greek army went in a fleet of two hundred galleys to besiege Troy. The siege endured ten years because the supreme god, Zeus, had taken the side of the Trojans. All the Greek chiefs participated in this adventure. Achilles, the bravest and the most beautiful of these, killed Hector, the principal defender of Troy, and dragged his corpse around the city; he fought clad in divine armor which had been presented him by his mother, a goddess of the sea; in turn he died, shot by an arrow in the heel. The Greeks, despairing of taking the city by force, employed a trick: they pretended to depart, and left an immense horse of wood in which were concealed the chiefs of the army. The Trojans drew this horse into the city; during the night the chiefs came forth and opened the city to the Greeks. Troy was burnt, the men slaughtered, the women led away as slaves. But the chiefs of the Greeks on their return were beset by tempest. Some perished in the sea, others were cast on foreign shores. Odysseus, the most crafty of the chiefs, was for ten years buffeted from one land to another, losing successively all his ships, himself the sole survivor of the disasters. All antiquity had steadfast faith in the Trojan War. 1184 B.C. was set as the date of the ending of the siege, and men pointed out the site of the city. In 1874 Schliemann purposed to excavate this site; it was necessary to traverse the débris of many cities which lay over it; at last at a depth of about fifty feet he found in the deepest bed of débris the traces of a mighty city reduced to ashes, and in the ruins of the principal edifice a casket filled with gems of gold which he called the Treasury of Priam. There was no inscription, and the city, the whole wall of which we have been able to bring to light, was a very small one. A large number of small, very rude idols have been found, which represent an owl-headed goddess (the Greeks thus represented the goddess Pallas). Beyond this no proof has been found that this city was called Troy. =The Homeric Poems.=--It is the two poems attributed to Homer which have made the taking of Troy renowned throughout the world--the Iliad, which related the combats of the Greeks and the exploits of Achilles before Troy; and the Odyssey, which recounts the adventures of Odysseus (Ulysses) after the capture of Troy.