The True Story of Netflix Series 'Troy: Fall of a City' (2024)

New Netflix series Troy: Fall of a City, co-produced with the BBC, is most obviously based on Homer's account of the Trojan War in the Iliad, but there are a number of other historical inspirations for the true story behind Troy.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Executive Producer Derek Wax names a few historic works that most shaped his depiction of the era. "There's Apollodorus, and various other Greek writers who compiled the myths in rather a dry and prosaic way," Wax said. "There are also writers like Aeschylus who came 300-400 years after Homer." And while the primary source for our modern understanding of the Trojan War are Greek and Roman historians and dramatists writing hundreds of years after the actual events, archaeology has also offered better insight into the real story of Paris, Helen, Hector, Agamemnon and Achilles.

The basic story of the Trojan War begins with Paris, as does Troy: Fall of a City. A prince of Troy, Paris steals away Helen, the wife of Troy's ally Menelaus, king of Sparta. After Menelaus and his ally Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, fail to secure Helen's return through diplomacy, Menelaus turns to his brother, Agamemnon, who raises an army and a fleet to carry them across the Aegean Sea. After eight years of naval misadventure, the army finally reached Troy and settled in for a nine-year siege.

The most important source material for Troy: Fall of a City, the Iliad, describes events taking place over four days in the 10th year of the siege of Troy. This is when all the real tragic stuff goes down, including the deaths of Achilles, Paris, Priam and Hector, plus the sack of Troy itself.

But how much of this is actually true?

The origins of Homer and the Iliad are murky, which means the Trojan War, believed to have taken place in the 1100s B.C.E., 400 years before Homer, stands on even shakier footing. Though the Iliad was likely compiled from oral tradition in the 700s B.C.E., the oldest existing manuscript of the Iliad dates back to the 10th century C.E., which included, in one volume, explanatory comments believed to have originated from a librarian of the famed Library of Alexandria, plus excerpts from a biography of Homer written by Proclus, the Latin tutor to Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. The scholarly work referenced in this oldest version of the Iliad, known today as Venetus A, has all been lost, a recurring theme when attempting to plumb the real origins of the Trojan War.

Despite the difficulties of piecing together the history of Troy from documents which are themselves historical treasures, modern consensus at least suggests the Trojan War actually happened, contrary to earlier scholarship, which had reduced the events of the Iliad to the status of fable.

That changed in 1868, when archaeologists Heinrich Schliemann and Frank Calvert began excavations in Turkey, at a place called Hissarlik, now believed to be the site of ancient Troy. The dig revealed near-constant habitation on the site, stretching all the way back to 3000 B.C.E. and eventually divided into nine distinct cities, each built atop the last. Schleimann was quick to claim they had discovered Homer's Troy, naming gold caches "Priam's Treasure" and declaring a gold mask to have been the property of Agamemnon.

While Schliemann's claims were based on little more than wishful thinking, later archaeologists began to focus on one particular layer as the most likely site of the Trojan War: Troy VIIa. This layer of Troy spans approximately 1300 to 950 B.C.E., a period when Troy was less than a square mile in size, surrounded by walls and 30-foot towers, with a population of between five and ten thousand. A layer of destruction corresponding to approximately 1190 B.C.E., complete with bronze arrowheads and human skeletons with their skulls bashed in, all point to Troy VIIa as the likeliest site of the Trojan War.

While scholars across disciplines have established the existence of a Troy destroyed in a war, it remains to be determined just how much of the Homeric narrative is accurate. By combining different historical sources into a Trojan War pastiche, Troy: Fall of a City embraces both plausible and implausible plot points (and that's without getting into the gods). The historian Thucydides, for example, argued the actual Trojan War was much smaller in scale than in Homer's account. Later Greek historians, such as Dio Chrysostom, writing in the first century C.E., even argued that the Trojans won the war and the Greeks created the Iliad to rewrite history.

But while the characters from the Iliad and Troy: Fall of a City should largely be considered mythological, modern evidence suggests Homer's broad strokes probably had some basis in truth, right down to the local geography.

The Trojan War took place hundreds of years before Homer, who is himself near-mythological. The earliest historians, whose work is mostly lost to us, also struggled to sort out the truth of the Trojan War. But while the Paris and Helen of Netflix's Troy: Fall of a City should be seen more as a mythological or fictional character, our best understanding of the extant evidence suggests the Trojan War was a real historic event.

All eight episodes of Troy: Fall of a City are now available to stream on Netflix.