Troy: Gore, nudity and sex... but how real is the myth?

It has been billed as the BBC’s latest rival to Game of Thrones and promises – lucky us – to deliver Game of Thrones-worthy amounts of gore, nudity and sex. But is Troy: Fall of a City, an eight-part retelling of the famous Greek myth, every bit as fictional as the works of George RR Martin?

The simple answer, as all but the most historically confused of viewers will probably already know, is an emphatic yes. The operative word here is myth – and, unless you’re an ardent Zeus-worshipper, you’re probably not under the impression that human-like deities once walked the Earth, disguising themselves as swans, impregnating unsuspecting women, holding impromptu beauty contests and generally causing chaos with their irresponsible ways.

The new BBC-Netflix co-production is based in part on Homer’s epic Iliad, and on the mythological events contained therein (many of which were also recounted by other ancient authors). It’s an adaptation, in short, of a very old piece of fiction. But like Game of Thrones, which takes inspiration, in places, from British history, the Troy story may have its roots in a real event.

So what’s it all about?

In a nutshell? The story of Troy, according to Greek myth, centres around a romance between Helen, wife of the Spartan King Menelaus, and Paris, a young prince of the great city of Troy. Paris, prophesied to one day cause the downfall of his city, is asked to judge which of three goddesses is the most attractive: Aphrodite, Athena or Hera.

The so-called Judgement of Paris, with the opportunity it presents to portray not one but three naked goddesses, later became an inexplicably popular subject for artists – but the salient point is that our young hero plumps for Aphrodite, goddess of love. The triumphant deity rewards the prince with the affection of Helen, the most beautiful woman on Earth.

Unfortunately, Helen happens to be married to another man (the aforementioned Menelaus) and her decision to run off with her lover triggers an epic, long-lasting war, as the Greek King Agamemnon, thanks to a pre-existing pact with Menelaus, vows to help bring the runaway queen back home.

Troy falls under siege, lots of people die and (twist alert) the war only ends after the Greeks trick their enemy into accepting a gift of a great wooden horse. Inside the gift horse – which they really should have looked in the belly of, if not the mouth – are Greek soldiers, ready to jump out at night and take the city. Troy falls, and Helen is returned to Menelaus, who vows to kill her for her unfaithful ways, but changes his mind at the last minute, after realising he still fancies her. Or something like that.

Despite the fact that it’s a retelling of a story most people are already familiar with – one that’s been the subject of numerous plays, as well as several films and TV adaptations – Troy: Fall of a City seems to have a fair amount going for it, including a lavish budget (a reported ￡2 million an episode) and a determination to include some “necessary” violence.

Early reports promised that a certain fatherly sacrifice would be shown in all its gruesome detail – and writer David Farr has reassured viewers that the battle scenes will be authentically grim. “Channels are now braver and more confident about not shying away from showing violence when it is needed,” he said ahead of the first episode. “And when you’re seeing a battle it’s very important you’re feeling the deathliness of that battle.”

But did Troy really exist?

The historical existence of principal characters such as Helen, Achilles, Menelaus and Agamemnon can probably be discounted: there’s no proof, to date, that any of these people ever lived.  But there’s a surprising amount of evidence that the mythological city of Troy may have existed, around 1300 or 1200 BC – and that it did suffer a dramatic fall. The story, as recounted by Homer many centuries later, may therefore have been inspired by the cultural memory of real events.

A site in Turkey named Hisarlik, excavated by Heinrich Schliemann in 1870, was claimed at the time to be the “real” Troy. While many of Schliemann’s excited pronouncements were later proven wrong – he had not, for instance, uncovered the jewels of Helen – historians today believe that the real Troy probably did exist in this spot.

The crucial point, however – one missed by Schliemann, who apparently destroyed several important archaeological layers – is that the site is home to evidence of many different cities, each one built over the remains of the last. It’s unclear exactly which one of these may have inspired Homer’s tale, but the most likely culprit, according to modern archaeologists, is the so-called Troy VII, which dates back to the 13th century BC, and which does seem to have been destroyed by an invasion or sacking (archaeologists found “evidence of burning, bones, and piles of stones for slingshots”). Its predecessor, Troy VI, was most likely ravaged by earthquakes, but may also have inspired the legends.

Both of these cities, according to archaeologist Eric Cline, seem to fit the bill for the Homeric city. A new series of excavations in the 1990s and 2000s, for instance, revealed that Troy VI and Troy VI were vast, prosperous and powerful places, surrounded by defensive walls (as per the Iliad’s description) But, while these cities seem to have been involved in ongoing wars, the motivation behind the conflicts was probably more prosaic than the myths suggest. Troy’s prosperity and its enviable position, close to the Dardanelles and situated on important trade routes, would have provided a more likely cause.

“This war may have been fought for the usual reasons: economic gain, greed, glory, territory, and the control of trade routes,” Cline said in a separate 2004 interview – although he did later add: "One can't really rule out that it was fought over Helen, but at the moment we don't have any supporting data for that”.

So the TV show is faithful – to a myth?

Overall, it looks as if the series will be more or less faithful to its mythological source material – especially when compared the 2004 Brad Pitt/Orlando Bloom movie, which played fast and loose with key plot points from the original tale, and cut out all the gods to boot. But it’ll also be adding its own twist, focusing more on events inside the besieged city.

“Our story draws not only on Homer and the Greek dramatists but also on Shakespeare and Chaucer and other retellings. We have also invented bits, and I’m entirely comfortable with that – these are living stories and every retelling adds another layer to the myth,” Farr recently told the Guardian.

Indeed, it’s worth noting that the Troy myth has been interpreted in various different ways throughout history – rendering the idea of a “faithful” interpretation a little silly.

"Homer is writing a memory of the end of the world," Diane Thompson, author of The Trojan War: Literature and Legend from the Bronze Age to the Present, previously told the National Geographic. "Nostalgia fuels his writing, and it has fuelled it ever since." Later writers, she explains, such as the Roman Virgil, would put their own spin on the story’s events, linking the bravery of the Trojans to their own culture, and deriding the Greek heroes as “scruffy villains”.

No one these days wants to see the version of the tale in which Helen is abducted and raped by Paris, but Renaissance artists clearly had different tastes. Conversely, many modern viewers will be open to the idea of a sexual bond between the Greek hero Achilles and his companion Patroclus (or Patroklus). The pair were portrayed by Homer as having a loving and close friendship, which may or may not have been sexual – and, ahead of the new show, some expressed their hopes that the BBC wouldn’t be afraid to portray the two men as lovers. (In the 2004 film they were cousins – and definitely not kissing cousins.)

Earlier this year there were a few mutterings, confined to the pettier margins of the internet, about the fact that two black actors, David Gyasi and Lemogang Tsipa, had been cast as the warriors, and about the fact that Hakeem Kae-Kazim would be playing Zeus (“Question, would anyone be mad if I made movie about US history, and actor playing Obama would be white?” fumed one rather confused commenter).

But as past plays, paintings and poems demonstrate, successive generations have always told the story of Troy in new, culturally relevant ways. There’s no logical reason, especially in this day and age, why a fictional character such as Achilles shouldn’t be portrayed by a black actor.

Furthermore, even within the context of the show’s fictional historical world, the presence of people with African ancestry isn’t exactly an anomaly: in some versions of the myth Ethiopian soldiers were present during the siege of Troy, defending the city under the command of their leader Memnon.

What about that wooden horse? 

Alas: it probably wasn’t. But it may, just possibly, have had some symbolic importance. As previously mentioned, there is evidence that one of the past Trojan cities, Troy VI, was destroyed by earthquakes, a natural disaster associated with the sea god Poseiden – who was also connected to horses. It’s a rather tenuous theory, but some historians believe that the idea that Troy was brought down “by a horse” might have its roots in these events.

 Others, however, have argued that the legend of the Trojan horse probably has a more practical explanation. According to Oxford University classicist Dr Armand D'Angour: “Archaeological evidence shows that Troy was indeed burned down; but the wooden horse is an imaginative fable, perhaps inspired by the way ancient siege-engines were clothed with damp horse-hides to stop them being set alight.”

So that’s that, then. Troy itself existed – but there was probably no Helen, and probably no wooden horse either.