Hi
I have searched for the more realistic number of ships that sailed for Troy at the outset of the Trojan war. It wasn’t a thousand. I remember it being in the hundreds but I haven’t been able to find any links.
I’d also be interested in the historical personalities involved in the war. I know King Ajax was a real historical king of the Mycenaean kingdom of Salamis. Who were some others?
I look forward to your feedback.
davidmich
According to the Catalogue of Ships in the Illiad, the total comes to 1,186.
I am not aware of any tally of ships independent of Homer. I am not aware of any archeological evidence that any ships were involved at all.
I don’t think this belongs in General Questions.
If it’s about an actual war on Troy, there’s not going to be a factual answer.
If it’s about Homer’s story, then it belongs in Cafe Society.
There is a factual answer. Either we know it, we dont know what it is (yet) or its no longer knowable. But the answer to his question is factual.
Did Schliemann not find Troy?
He did but like the old testament its hard to find corroborating evidence of individual incidents.
Only assuming the Trojan War was a real event. Which is highly plausible, even likely based on the latest data, but equally unprovable.
So the real answer is that nobody knows and barring some truly astounding archaeological find we never will know. We don’t know if “Homer’s” account was based on a real event though it probably was, we don’t know the forces arrayed, we don’t know for sure exactly where ( though we have some very good hypotheses ), we don’t even really know who won. Thucydides himself was skeptical about 1,186 ships, an oddly precise number.
The Trojan War is one of those quasi-historical events that dangles on the precipice of mythology. Not enough solid data to really get into numbers.
Not necessarily relevant as to whether it belongs in this forum or not. If either of the latter two possibilities are the case, then there is no General Questions answer, and it belongs in some other forum.
Given that AFAIK there is no archaeological or historical information available on this, the answer must be based on the Iliad, so let’s move this to Cafe Society.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The face that launched 1,186 ships doesn’t exactly have the same flow.
Priam was probably based upon an actual King of Wilusa. Helen probably existed,she remember was Queen of Sparta in her own right and her marrying somebody across the Agean gave that power a major reason to get a foothold in Greece itself.
Eveybody else s hard nay impossible to determine. They might be real (though I seriously doubt Zeus, Aphrodite, Apollo, Hera et al ;)
were). Equally like the film Fury it might be fictional charaters taking part in a real event… we know WW2 happened, but we there was no Tank crew like the one depicted.
Incidentally, the catalogue of ships is one of the intrinsic evidence in the poem itself that is evidence that some event occured, as it mentions cities which did not exist in Homer’s time.
Yes, poetic license. I don’t think the towers of Ilium were topless either. Helen, though, I’m not so sure about.
Back when I studied A level Greek and read the thing in the original it was thought that the Illiad was a conflation of a number of conflicts over a significant period of time. One pointer of that was held to be the description of the shields: some had medium-sized shields, and others had body-height shields. Indeed, Troy with its prominent and controlling position was bound to be fiercely contested.
Maybe that’s what launched the extra 186 ships.
My favorite unit of measurement is the milli-helen, the amount of beauty sufficient to launch one ship.
So a milliHelen is now the amount of beauty required to launch 1.186 ships? That sounds like another of those units that’s defined as some strange approximation from the English system.
The face that launched 1000 ships and the boobs that launched 186 more?
Poetic license.
Mine is the negative milli-helen, the unit of ugliness necessary to sink one ship.
But how many millihelens does a B quark have?