Troy was a real place. Its remains lie on a hill called Hisarlik in north-western Turkey, near the Dardanelles, and they have been dug since the 1870s. What the diggers found is not one city but a stack of them, rebuilt on the ruins of the last again and again. People have argued for a century over which layer, if any, holds the Troy of the poems.
Hittite tablets from the same era mention a western land called Wilusa. Some scholars connect that name to Ilios, which is Homer's other word for Troy, but the link is debated. I will say both things plainly: the city is real, and the war as told is a poet's version of something we cannot fully recover.
The first fall
The city actually fell once before the famous war. King Laomedon hired Poseidon and Apollo to build its walls, and when the work was done he refused to pay them. Poseidon sent a sea monster to ravage the coast, and the king agreed to chain his daughter Hesione to a rock as an offering.
Heracles arrived, killed the monster, and was promised a pair of immortal horses as payment. Laomedon cheated him as well. So Heracles came back with an army, sacked the city, and killed the king and nearly all his sons. The only one spared was a small boy, who was ransomed and renamed Priam, meaning the bought one.
That is the king we meet in the Iliad. The walls that Priam defends were built by gods, and the man who sits behind them is the one who survived because of a ransom.
An apple, a verdict and a woman
The long war starts, in the later tellings, with a wedding party. Eris, the goddess of strife, was not invited, so she threw a golden apple among the guests inscribed for the fairest. Hera, Athena and Aphrodite each claimed it. Zeus did not want to choose, so he handed the decision to a Trojan prince, Paris.
Each goddess offered a bribe. Hera offered power, Athena skill in war, and Aphrodite offered the most beautiful woman alive. Paris chose Aphrodite. The woman was Helen, wife of Menelaus of Sparta, and Paris took her back to Troy.
Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon gathered every Greek king who had once sworn to defend Helen's marriage, and a fleet assembled at Aulis. There, the winds failed until Agamemnon agreed to give up his daughter Iphigenia, and that cost is the start of a family disaster back in Argos.
Ten years in a few weeks
Most people think the Iliad is the whole war. It is not. The poem covers only a few weeks in the tenth year, and it begins with a quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles over a captive woman. The sack of the city is never shown. The poem ends with the funeral of Hector, the Trojan prince killed by Achilles.
Both sides had gods behind them. Hera, Athena and Poseidon backed the Greeks, and Aphrodite, Ares and Apollo backed Troy. Zeus tried to stay neutral and was not very good at it. The river Scamander, a god himself, even rose up and fought Achilles for filling his stream with corpses.
I read the poem as an argument over what a short life is worth. Achilles is told he can go home and live long and unknown, or stay and die young and famous. He stays, and sits out the fighting, and the choice stops being theoretical when his friend Patroclus dies wearing his armour.
The horse
The wooden horse is not in the Iliad. We hear about it in the Odyssey, where a bard sings it at a feast and Odysseus has to turn away and weep, and later in Virgil's Aeneid. A craftsman named Epeius built the horse, a hollow thing packed with fighters, and the Greek fleet pretended to sail away.
A man called Sinon stayed behind and told the Trojans it was an offering to Athena. The priest Laocoön warned them not to trust it, and two sea snakes killed him and his sons, which convinced the city the horse was sacred. Cassandra, whom Apollo had cursed never to be believed, said it was a trap. Nobody listened.
That night the fighters climbed out, opened the gates, and the city burned.
After the fall
The victors did not get away clean. They sacked temples, and Ajax the Locrian dragged Cassandra from the altar of Athena. The goddess punished the whole fleet with storms on the way home, and many of the kings never reached their homes at all. Odysseus took ten more years. You can read what the sea did to them on the Aegean page.
The Trojan side has its own ending. Aeneas carried his father out on his shoulders, and in the Roman version he sailed away to found the line that built Rome.
What the city stands for
Here is how I see it. Troy is the place where the gods' interests and human lives touched in the plainest way. Nearly everyone in the story is acting out of a fair motive, a promise or a debt or an insult, and that is exactly why it cannot be repaired. Even the gods who started it did not control it for long.
Nearby in the myths