The Apple of Discord

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by malloyd

And of course I'm absolutely certain no goddesses actually appeared to offer bribes to any Trojan prince, so assuming the Illiad records any real preference the city had for Aphrodite, and admittedly it may not, it must have some other source.

Well, Apollo is definitely a Trojan god in the Iliad, so the audience definitely understood that some of their gods were worshipped there.

On the other hand the war in the poem doesn't actually need to record anything historical at all. There probably wasn't a war anything like that one, even if you ignore the theological elements, just for purely logistical reasons.