The Apple of Discord

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

. . . I quite admit that it's unlikely (though not impossible) for the Trojan War to last ten years; . . .

As I said before, I can see the actual war lasting three years tops.

We'll never know for sure. However, from the lectures I've heard Mycenean warfare against other city states generally involved a long period of raiding, looting & slave-taking to improve your own finances (so to speak) and damage your enemy. Once your opponent is sufficiently whittled down, you could finish him off one last attack.

IIRC Homer (or the Homeroi -- some scholars now think that "Homer" was a name given to the fictitious single author of a batch of poets) wrote about five hundred years after the events of the Iliad/Odyssey. So they may well have not known how Myceanean warfare worked.

I could see a period of years in which groups of Greeks would be home in the spring to get the planting in, raid the shores of Troy's region in the summer, and return home in time for the harvest. "Homer" may simply not have known that the Greeks didn't actually camp outside the walls for the years of warfare.