TROY. The earliest traditions of the Greek people, as contained in their oldest poetry and history, represent the country on both sides of the iEgean as peopled by races, either of genuine Hellenic, or of .closely affiliated tribes. Among those who peopled the eastern or Asiatic coast are specially named the Pelasgi, the Leleges, the Caucones, the Carians, the Lycians, and the Trojans. These last, to whom Homer's poem has given a celebrity that throws all the rest into the shade, occupied the small country in the n.w. corner of Asia Minor, best defined, perhaps, as the region of mount Ida, with its topographical dependencies. That the Trojans were either a Greek race, or some non-Hellenic people under a Greek dynasty, seems probable, from the absence in Homer of any such decided national contrast between Greeks and Trojans, as we find in mediaeval poetry between Christians and Saracens. Local legends represented them as closely connected with Crete; and Homer in the Iliad, xx., makes Priam the sixth in descent from Dardanus, the first of the dynasty, who was supposed to have come from Crete. The story of the Trojan war, which forms the subject of Homer's great poem the Iliad, is extremely simple. The Trojans, in the person of Paris, or Alexander, the son of the reigning monarch, Priam, are represented as having had certain dealings with the Achwans, or Greeks of the Peloponnesus, in the course of which the gay young prince carries off from the palace of Menelaus, king of Sparta. his spouse Helen, the greatest beauty of her age. To revenge this insult, the Greeks banded themselves together, and sailed against Troywith a large fleet. All the Greek tribes afterward famous in history took part in this expedition; but the most notable were tho Argives or Achteans—Greeks of the e. and n. part of the Pelo ponnesus, and adjacent isles; the Spartans—Greeks of the s.e. district of the Pelopon nesus; the Neleids—Greeks of the w. coast of the Peloponnesus; the Bceotians, and the Thessalians. Of the Thessitlians, the most prominent captain was Achilles; and the general command of the whole expedition was committed to Agamemnon, king of .M.yeLnte, as the head of the most numerous contingent, and at the same time the brother of the royal person whose hospitality had been so grossly violated. This well appointed European army is represented as having spent nine years in besieging the god-built walls of the city of Priam without making any impression ou its strength.
A violent quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, breaking out in the tenth rear, so weakened the invading force that the Trojans, under Hector, pushed the back to the very verge of the sea, and almost set their ships on fire. This quarrel forms the subject of the Iliad. At the critical moment, however, the Thessalian captain is reconciled to the head of the expedition; and with his return to the field, the fortune of war changes; Ikctor, the champion of Troy, falls, and the impending doom of the city is darkly foreshadowed. The siege and sack of Troy did not. fall within the plan of Homer's poem, but are narrated at length in the Post Homeriea, Greek poem by Quintus Smyrranus, a poet of the decadence. The Greeks possessed a long series of popular poems called the Cyclic poems, in which the whole sequence of the Trojan story was narrated, giving completeness to the brilliant fragment, which has been adorned by the genius of Homer. From these poems—of which the abstracts are still preserved—Virgil derived those materials which lie has used with such effect in the second and third books of his great poem. The Cyclic poems, besides the events in the Trojan war after the death of Achilles, contained an account of the various colonies in Italy and elsewhere believed to have been founded by the scattered chiefs of the expedition after their return home. Of these, the settlements of Diomede, Philoc totes, and Indomeneus, on the s.e. coast of Italy, and that of 2Eaeas on the banks of the Tiber, are the most famous. The chronology of the Trojan war, depending as it does mainly on artificial construction from genealogical data, is not, of course, trustworthy; but there are good reasons for believing that the generally received date 1184 is.c. is not far wide of the mark. After the fall of the kingdom of Priam, the future story of Troy is short and uneventful. Under the Lydian kings, whose dynasty culminated in Census, a new Troy—Ilium Novum—began to creep into notice, which, from the glory that belonged to its name, and the favor of Alexander the great, Julius Caesar, and other influential visitors, grew into some significance. The interest which attached to it., however, in its most flourishing estate was more antiquarian than political.