Troy has never been an easy proposition. It was a difficult city to conquer and it is a difficult story to tell. It is probably more real than any war story in myth in that one seldom knows which side truly had the right of it: it had definitely not been good form for Paris to elope with the wife of his host; on the other hand, you cannot help liking Hector, and it is near impossible to dredge up enough affection for Menelaus or Agamemnon to support the Greeks wholeheartedly.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, seems uncertain whether he set out to write a comedy or a tragedy. The title characters of Troilus and Cressida take up very little stage space in a play that revolves largely around Achilles’ refusal to take the field against the Trojans. Even the Bard’s most ardent worshippers can only say that the play was a bit of an experiment, its baffling characters comparable to those in Hamlet.

When all is said and done, and despite stiff competition from Heracles and Perseus, the tale of Troy is the best known of the Greek myths. It is also one of the most significant.

The death of Heracles marked the end of an era in the Age of Heroes of Hellenic legend. Before that, each tale had been one of individual courage and feats of valour. After that, every hero was only a character in the epic saga of the Spartan queen.

When Troy fell, the curtain fell on the Age of Heroes. No more would the hundred-headed Hydra roar defiance to the world or the golden hind of Arcadia tempt a warrior to the chase. Aeneas would lead the remnants of Troy westward, and their stories would become a part of the fabled history of eternal Rome.

There was one quest left for Homer to relate: the quest of Odysseus to return to home and country. But that was not so much the final act of the Age of Heroes as an epilogue to it. It was one last journey through the wonders the Greek poets had conjured, one last visit to Circe, one last sight of the Cyclopes, one last song from the Sirens.

The tale of Troy has certain indefinable quality of finality to it, one that is absent from most other myths in the Greek pantheon. Most stories, even the tragedies, leave one with a feeling that no matter what happens, the sun will continue to shine on the Mediterranean, ripening the grapes in the vineyards and the rice in the fields.

On the other hand, Agamemnon’s victory in Asia Minor leaves one with the impression of Priam’s towers burning in the dead of night, of Cassandra in chains, raising her hands in mute supplication, of Hecabe’s lament by the surly black waters of that same sapphire sea. The Trojan horse is a symbol of the ultimate betrayal, the desertion of the city by its patron deity.

To add to all that, Agamemnon himself is not particularly endearing. Iphigenia’s fate tends to kill any shreds of affection or respect for the man, and then there’s his highhandedness in the matter of Briseís. Achilles may be arrogant and brash, but weighed against those qualities is the fact that Homer was his chronicler, and Homer could quite easily make a person approve of Rasputin.

Where Homer chose to end his story is perhaps the best place to end any account of the Trojan War. The sulking Achilles has returned to the field crying for vengeance. Hector is dead, and Paris, Aeneas and all the young lords of Troy together cannot rival his skill as a general. The end is inevitable. Achilles must die. Troy, deprived of the most valiant of her defenders, must fall. With that knowledge, the fates of Cassandra, Andromache and Hecabe are sealed.

There are still minor details to be ironed out: one does not know whether Helen and Menelaus will be reconciled (but there are so many versions of that legend that the Greeks seemed not entirely certain themselves) and what will happen to the unfortunate Paris.

Paris, indeed, is treated far better by most people than he would have been had the setting been different. After all, he did accept a bribe and follow it up by committing adultery, and then he precipitated a war that destroyed his country.

Several things save him from ignominy. One is the fact that, no matter what Agamemnon says about returning quietly to Greece if Helen is returned to her rightful husband, and however beautiful Helen was, a thousand ships did not cross the sea to save Menelaus’s marriage. Another is the fact of Paris’s upbringing; you cannot expect him to think like a prince when he’s been bred as a shepherd.

The main thing, though, is the prophecy that accompanied the birth of Paris. The moment the words were spoken, he was absolved of all blame for the eventual fate of Troy. What was prophesied, so the Greeks believed, was the work of a power even higher than Olympus, and Zeus himself could not hinder what an Oracle had said would come to pass. A mortal, if he were condemned to a predestinate ill fate, might suffer, but he was more to be pitied than censured.

That, in fact, may be said of most of those who fought and died at Troy. They were caught up in a war that was not of their making, doing battle to decide whether a woman they had never known had the right to commit adultery. There were some who could rise past that to find a battle for honour or glory. They were the reason the tale of Troy endured long after the city fell, until Heinrich Schliemann should discover in Mycenae ruins that proved Homer’s epic more than just legend.

(Aditi is in B-School, where she divides her time between being the despair of all who teach her, catching up on the reading and movie-watching she missed in her first year, and giving people cause to question her mental health. She is currently contemplating starting an NGO to protect the rights of the apostrophe.)

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