Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 22

The Iliad and The Odyssey, ancient epic poems, tell fantastic stories about a long war between Greeks and Trojans and the journey home from that war. They’re so fantastic — full of vengeful gods and supernatural peril — that it’s hard for modern people to credit any part of them as true.

Yet a kind of history is in these poems. This history became more tantalizing in the late 19th century, when an eccentric German businessman dug up the city of Troy, revealing that it had been a real place, one of many ancient Troys built in just the place the poems describe. Each city rose and fell, and another rose on top of it while the old one was forgotten.