Jul 5, 2026 · 37 min · 11 segments
Tansy’s Hot Cup of History essay series continues with the real history behind some of Xena’s greatest hits. This month, to prepare yourselves for Christopher Nolan’s *The Odyssey*, we have a…
Tansy Rayner RobertsHostOur earliest sources for the known history of ancient Greece, basically from the 5th century BCE and thereabouts, they believed that Troy and the siege that destroyed the city genuinely happened not that long ago.
However, these sources were already suspicious about whether specific versions of that story and Homer's Iliad in particular, had the facts straight.
So even though Troy is like the one everybody knows, even the city is under another name.
Centuries later, the ancient Romans adapted the Trojan War myth to be all about them and tying it to their foundation story and like their greek counterparts they treated the history of troy as essentially true while conveniently ignoring the bits they didn't like the more time passed the harder it was for humans of the western world to accept that it was real The stories remained popular, but by the 19th century, and I acknowledge I've skipped a lot of time there in that little segue, European historians were treating the stories of Troy and Helen and Agamemnon and all that as part of an imaginary myth cycle, rather than a potential source of useful facts about the history of Bronze Age Mycenae.
So then in a, so yeah, over the course of two and a half thousand years, Troy has gone from definitely, definitely real history through various versions all the way through to definitely myth and in between lots of question marks.
Then in the 1870s, a wealthy retired businessman named Heinrich Schliemann carved a hole deep into a hillside somewhere in Turkey, and opened the whole question up again.
And academics, universities, the scholarship went, what the fuck? Schliemann had not, by the way, found Homer's Troy.
What he found was a many-layered archaeological site of ruined city upon city upon city.
He stopped in his digging when he reached his favourite, which we now have labelled Troy II.
second from the bottom so he carved that giant hole into the hill through all of these destroyed cities layer layer layer layer and he stopped at the second last one which he was pretty sure was the right one that was ancient ilium In doing so, he caused so much damage to the upper layers that when it was later scientifically determined that Troy 2 was too old to match up with Priam and Hector and that lot, it was too late to learn anything from Troy 3 and Troy 4.
Schliemann also removed large quantities of gold jewelry and artifacts from the site.
He later told a story, an amusing dinner party story, about how his wife wore the ancient pieces as jewelry to help smuggle them out of the Ottoman Empire.
I used to tell people that story a lot and then it turns out Mrs. Schleman was in another country at the time of this alleged heist.
Which does make you wonder which woman Schleman did have conveniently available to hang a fortune in antiquities from her neck and earlobes in the days before metal detectors.
Our earliest sources for the known history of ancient Greece, basically from the 5th century BCE and thereabouts, they believed that Troy and the siege that destroyed the city genuinely happened not that long ago.
However, these sources were already suspicious about whether specific versions of that story and Homer's Iliad in particular, had the facts straight.
So even though Troy is like the one everybody knows, even the city is under another name.
Centuries later, the ancient Romans adapted the Trojan War myth to be all about them and tying it to their foundation story and like their greek counterparts they treated the history of troy as essentially true while conveniently ignoring the bits they didn't like the more time passed the harder it was for humans of the western world to accept that it was real The stories remained popular, but by the 19th century, and I acknowledge I've skipped a lot of time there in that little segue, European historians were treating the stories of Troy and Helen and Agamemnon and all that as part of an imaginary myth cycle, rather than a potential source of useful facts about the history of Bronze Age Mycenae.
So then in a, so yeah, over the course of two and a half thousand years, Troy has gone from definitely, definitely real history through various versions all the way through to definitely myth and in between lots of question marks.
Then in the 1870s, a wealthy retired businessman named Heinrich Schliemann carved a hole deep into a hillside somewhere in Turkey, and opened the whole question up again.
And academics, universities, the scholarship went, what the fuck? Schliemann had not, by the way, found Homer's Troy.
What he found was a many-layered archaeological site of ruined city upon city upon city.
He stopped in his digging when he reached his favourite, which we now have labelled Troy II.
second from the bottom so he carved that giant hole into the hill through all of these destroyed cities layer layer layer layer and he stopped at the second last one which he was pretty sure was the right one that was ancient ilium In doing so, he caused so much damage to the upper layers that when it was later scientifically determined that Troy 2 was too old to match up with Priam and Hector and that lot, it was too late to learn anything from Troy 3 and Troy 4.
Schliemann also removed large quantities of gold jewelry and artifacts from the site.
He later told a story, an amusing dinner party story, about how his wife wore the ancient pieces as jewelry to help smuggle them out of the Ottoman Empire.
I used to tell people that story a lot and then it turns out Mrs. Schleman was in another country at the time of this alleged heist.
Which does make you wonder which woman Schleman did have conveniently available to hang a fortune in antiquities from her neck and earlobes in the days before metal detectors.
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