Wow! That’s 93 per boob! She must have really been stacked! 
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! 
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.
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.
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.
So you must redefine it to mean the quantity of pulchritude necessary to launch 1.186 ships.
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.
Any rough estimates on the number of people on each ship?
All questions on this topic are answered here:*
*Hey, I was impressed as hell back when I was in sixth grade! :cool:Agreed, but I always rather liked this one, too: Smoot - Wikipedia