There are two Mount Idas in Greek myth, which is a nuisance. One is on Crete and holds the cave where baby Zeus was hidden, and you can read about that on the Crete page. This page is about the other one, the long wooded range in north-western Turkey that rises behind the plain of Troy. Its high ground is known today as Kaz Dagi.
Troy's two rivers, the Scamander and the Simois, both come down from it. A Trojan looking up from the city walls saw Ida every day, and so did every Greek in the camp by the ships. In the Iliad it is the best seat in the house, and Zeus knows it.
The viewing platform
Zeus goes to Ida when the fighting starts to go the way he wants it to. From a peak called Gargaros he looks down on the city and the ships, with the whole plain spread out below. In book eight he takes the scales of fate and weighs the two armies against each other, and the Greek side sinks. He then sends a flash of lightning into their camp, and they panic.
I find that picture a strange one when you set it beside Olympus. The great king of the gods is not in his palace giving orders. He is sitting on a hillside outside the action, like a man who bought a ticket. He has told everyone else to stay out of it, and from Ida he can check who is obeying.
Hera tries the old trick
Hera obeys for about as long as you would expect. In book fourteen she decides to get Zeus out of the picture so Poseidon can help the Greeks without being noticed. She borrows a magic embroidered band from Aphrodite, the one that makes anyone who sees it fall in love, gives a made-up reason for needing it, and goes up to Ida.
She also visits Sleep, Hypnos, and asks him to put Zeus to sleep. He is reluctant, because he remembers the last time he did it and how angry Zeus was, so she promises him one of the young Graces as a wife. He agrees. Disguised as a bird, he waits in the branches of a tall pine, and once Zeus is lulled by love and sleep, the way is clear for the sea god to help the Greeks.
The scene is almost comic. The mightiest god, with no human servants about, is tricked by his own wife on a mountainside, and she needs help from two other deities to manage it. The Library has an article on Hypnos that is worth reading beside this passage.
A baby left on the slope
The mountain's earlier stories explain why the war was fought at all. Before Paris was born, his mother Hecuba dreamed that she gave birth to a burning torch that set the whole city alight. A seer said the child would destroy Troy. When the baby arrived, Priam gave him to a herdsman and told him to leave the infant on Mount Ida to die.
Five days later the herdsman came back and found the baby alive, nursed by a she-bear in the version most often told. He took the child home and raised him as one of his own. The boy grew up among the flocks, handsome and clever, and he was known as Paris or sometimes Alexandros, the defender of men.
A shepherd's verdict
This is where the famous judgment takes place. By the time the golden apple reached Zeus, he did not want to choose between his wife and two of his daughters, so he sent Hermes to lead the three goddesses to Ida. A young shepherd, he said, could be trusted to rule fairly.
Paris was at that time married to a nymph named Oenone, who knew the future and warned him. He did not listen. Each goddess made her offer, and he gave the apple to Aphrodite. When the war came and he was struck by a poisoned arrow late in the siege, Oenone refused to heal him, and then, in grief, died on his funeral fire. Even the small stories on this mountain are painful.
The boy who was taken
One more person was taken from Ida. Ganymede was a Trojan prince, described in the Iliad as the most beautiful of mortals, and Zeus had him carried up to Olympus to serve the gods' wine. In the best-known version the god took the shape of an eagle and seized him while he was out with the flocks. His father Tros was consoled with a gift of immortal horses.
It is a story about a divine choice that cannot be refused. It also shows how many of the main figures at Troy had a relationship with these particular slopes, as though the gods had always been watching that corner of the world.
Aphrodite on the hillside
Aphrodite has her own story on Ida. In the Homeric Hymn to her, Zeus makes her fall in love with a mortal, as a payback for the way she had been making gods fall for humans. She chose the Trojan cattle-herd Anchises, who lived on the mountain, appeared to him as a young woman, and spent the night with him. In the morning she told him who she was and made him promise never to say that a goddess was the mother of his child.
The child was Aeneas, who would carry his father on his back out of burning Troy and, in Roman tradition, found the people who built Rome. That is why Ida shows up in Latin poetry as well as Greek.
A mother goddess on the mountain
One more figure belongs to the mountain: Cybele, a goddess from the region the Greeks called Phrygia, worshipped as the Great Mother. She was linked with Ida's wild land, and her worship was formal in the Roman period. In 204 BC, during a long war with Carthage, the Romans brought her sacred stone from Asia Minor to Rome.
It shows what the mountain was to the people who lived near it. For the Greeks it was where the gods looked down on a war. For local people it was an older sacred place, with traditions that were there before the Greeks started telling their stories about it.
Why it matters
Ida is the place from which the Trojan story can be seen whole. Every event that sets it up, the dream, the abandoned child, the judgment, and the god who watches it end, happens within sight of one mountain. If Troy is the city where the gods' quarrels reach humans, Ida is the balcony.