# Questions regarding the Trojan War. How many ships really sailed for Troy? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [July 12, 2015, 1:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-regarding-the-trojan-war-how-many-ships-really-sailed-for-troy/724941 "2015-07-12T13:05:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2015, 5:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-regarding-the-trojan-war-how-many-ships-really-sailed-for-troy/724941/21 "2015-07-13T05:26:58Z")
> [@Senegoid](#): > > The face that launched 1000 ships and the boobs that launched 186 more? Wow! That’s 93 per boob! She must have really been stacked! 🆒 ---
**Author:** ![Chimera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Chimera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chimera)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2015, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-regarding-the-trojan-war-how-many-ships-really-sailed-for-troy/724941/22 "2015-07-13T13:39:04Z")
> [@Simplicio](#): > > The face that launched 1,186 ships doesn’t exactly have the same flow. Her face only launched a thousand of them. The other 186 came along because their buddies were going and they had nothing better to do that decade. ---
**Author:** ![Zeldar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/b77776/32.png) [@Zeldar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeldar)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2015, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-regarding-the-trojan-war-how-many-ships-really-sailed-for-troy/724941/23 "2015-07-13T14:06:32Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > According to the Catalogue of Ships in the Illiad, the total comes to 1,186. > [@Simplicio](#): > > The face that launched 1,186 ships doesn’t exactly have the same flow. > [@jimbuff314](#): > > Yes, poetic license. I don’t think the towers of Ilium were topless either. Helen, though, I’m not so sure about. > [@Simplicio](#): > > Maybe that’s what launched the extra 186 ships. > [@Colibri](#): > > My favorite unit of measurement is the milli-helen, the amount of beauty sufficient to launch one ship. > [@Senegoid](#): > > 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. > [@Senegoid](#): > > The face that launched 1000 ships and the boobs that launched 186 more? > [@Askance](#): > > Mine is the negative milli-helen, the unit of ugliness necessary to sink one ship. > [@Chronos](#): > > But how many millihelens does a B quark have? > [@terentii](#): > > Wow! That’s 93 per boob! She must have really been stacked! 🆒 > [@Chimera](#): > > Her face only launched a thousand of them. The other 186 came along because their buddies were going and they had nothing better to do that decade. You people beat me to it, and I was all ready to be cute! ☹ ---
**Author:** ![Stanislaus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stanislaus/32/3391_2.png) [@Stanislaus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stanislaus)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2015, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-regarding-the-trojan-war-how-many-ships-really-sailed-for-troy/724941/24 "2015-07-13T14:21:01Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > 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. There is, aptly enough, a sort of Theseus’ Ship phenomenon with regard to the historicity (or otherwise) of the Iliad. At the extreme end of the scale, you have the (untenable) position that the Iliad is a record of events: a woman called Helen left Sparta with a young prince of Troy called Paris; her husband asked his brother to lead a coalition of the Greeks against Troy; 1000 ships sailed; there was a warrior called Achilles who was rather sulky etc. etc. You can start whittling away at this (it wasn’t a 1186 ships, there probably wasn’t an actual Achilles, don’t even mention the horse) but still claim that there was a major pan-Hellenic expedition under a major king at a single point in time which levelled a great city in its prime. And then you can go further and say, well, the Iliad is probably distilling several such large-scale wars into one, and Troy was probably never levelled quite so finally as Homer makes out, but it’s a reasonably good depiction of trans-Aegean conflict. And whittle away some more: well, OK, maybe not major wars as such - Homer - or “Homer” - is building on raiding and plundering expeditions and vastly exaggerating their scale. There were never anything like 1000 ships, and probably not any kind of coalition - at best maybe a couple of islands/city states would combine forces and split the plunder. Troy itself would suffer under these raids, but not fatally. And finally at the other extreme - Homer knew there was a thing called war and a city called Troy, and wove the Iliad from those two threads alone. We can’t say exactly where between the two extremes the truth lies, although I tend to think it’s more towards the exaggerated raiding end. In any case, at what point in this whittling process you decide the Iliad ceases to be “historical” is very much a matter of personal choice. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2015, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-regarding-the-trojan-war-how-many-ships-really-sailed-for-troy/724941/25 "2015-07-13T14:35:41Z")
> [@Tamerlane](#): > > 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. Heh it would be interesting to do a list of such events. The Arthurian legend (Possibly a real Brittano-Roman general resisting the Saxons?); King David (possibly ran a small “Kingdom” in what is now Israel, but not the grand one described in the Bible?) etc. ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2015, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-regarding-the-trojan-war-how-many-ships-really-sailed-for-troy/724941/26 "2015-07-13T14:44:33Z")
Exodus account as well. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2015, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-regarding-the-trojan-war-how-many-ships-really-sailed-for-troy/724941/27 "2015-07-13T15:07:40Z")
> [@AK84](#): > > Exodus account as well. I think the Exodus account is further along the spectrum into pure mythology than these other stories, myself. Though that would make a good debate. What is really interesting about the Troy legendarium is that it was composed by people who were considerably more primitive in social organization that those in the events being depicted: the Mycenaens and Hittites, for example, had regular armies, centralized governments, and writing; the “dark ages” Greeks had none of these things - it is like early medieval accounts of Rome. This lends a certain amount of plausability to the notion that the Iliad, in its depiction of warfare, was a genuine attempt to describe a Mycenaen battle, but by people who did not actually know how such battles were fought. In the Iliad, the heroes on both sides fought in a recognizably ‘primitive’ manner - each hero picked another hero out of the crowd, told him his lineage, then dueled with him one-on-one (while lesser men kept to the back). The heroes rode chariots to the battle, but never fought _while_ riding them. [In contrast, Mycenaens and Hittites almost certainly used more recognizably ‘modern’ tactics, using chariots to outflank enemies, possibly wieling lances or composite bows from the chariot itself - this is speculation, but reasonable, given that we know Mycenaen kingdoms spent considerably on amassing large numbers of chariots, and warriors are depicted in vase art wielding lances from chariots]. Another example of a mythologizing of something that may have been misunderstood is a bit more of a speculative stretch - and that is, the “wooden horse” could be a highly mythologized account of the use of a siege-tower. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2015, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-regarding-the-trojan-war-how-many-ships-really-sailed-for-troy/724941/28 "2015-07-13T16:49:27Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > My favorite unit of measurement is the milli-helen, the amount of beauty sufficient to launch one ship. So you must redefine it to mean the quantity of pulchritude necessary to launch 1.186 ships.😃 ---
**Author:** ![astorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ad7895/32.png) [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2015, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-regarding-the-trojan-war-how-many-ships-really-sailed-for-troy/724941/29 "2015-07-13T17:20:55Z")
In the prologue to his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides indicated that he DID believe the Trojan War was real, and that it WAS the greatest war that had ever taken place in that part of the world… but that Homer was a mere poet, and therefore prone to exaggeration, so there was no way to know just how large an army or how large a fleet Agamemnon had at his command. There is no consensus among historians as to how epic a conflict the Trojan War was. One common take was that is was a prolonged series of Viking-style assaults and raids. But modern historians are making educated guesses, just as Thucydides was. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2015, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-regarding-the-trojan-war-how-many-ships-really-sailed-for-troy/724941/30 "2015-07-13T18:01:33Z")
> [@astorian](#): > > In the prologue to his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides indicated that he DID believe the Trojan War was real, and that it WAS the greatest war that had ever taken place in that part of the world… but that Homer was a mere poet, and therefore prone to exaggeration, so there was no way to know just how large an army or how large a fleet Agamemnon had at his command. > > There is no consensus among historians as to how epic a conflict the Trojan War was. One common take was that is was a prolonged series of Viking-style assaults and raids. But modern historians are making educated guesses, just as Thucydides was. The problem the ancient Greeks had with the Trojan War is that, due to the so-called “Greek dark age”, they actually knew very little about Mycenaean history other than the myths: they had no way to validate any of them, even though they were, of course, much closer in time to the events than we are. In particular, the knowledge of writing had completely died out (Mycenaeans used “Linear B”, which while the language is a form of ancient Greek, symbolically bears no resemblence to later Greek writing, which was adapted from Phonecian script). Linear B was only deciphered in the 1950s. “Linear A”, and an earlier script called “Cretan Hieroglyphics” used by the Minoans, remain undeciphered to this day. ---
**Author:** ![PastTense](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pasttense/32/14550_2.png) [@PastTense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PastTense)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2015, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-regarding-the-trojan-war-how-many-ships-really-sailed-for-troy/724941/31 "2015-07-13T22:05:17Z")
Any rough estimates on the number of people on each ship? ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2015, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-regarding-the-trojan-war-how-many-ships-really-sailed-for-troy/724941/32 "2015-07-13T22:49:41Z")
All questions on this topic are answered **here:** \* \*Hey, I was impressed as hell back when I was in sixth grade! :cool: ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2015, 4:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-regarding-the-trojan-war-how-many-ships-really-sailed-for-troy/724941/33 "2015-07-14T04:33:44Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > My favorite unit of measurement is the milli-helen, the amount of beauty sufficient to launch one ship. Agreed, but I always rather liked this one, too: [Smoot - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-regarding-the-trojan-war-how-many-ships-really-sailed-for-troy/724941.md?page=1)