The Trojan War was a legendary conflict between the ancient Greeks and the city of Troy, said to have been fought around 1200 BCE according to Greek mythology. The war supposedly lasted ten years and involved some of mythology's most famous warriors and clever strategies.

The most famous story from this war is the Trojan Horse. After years of fighting outside Troy's massive walls, the Greeks pretended to sail away, leaving behind a giant wooden horse as a “gift.” The Trojans rolled it inside their city, not realizing Greek soldiers were hiding in the hollow belly. That night, the soldiers crept out, opened the city gates, and Troy fell. This is why we still say someone has used a Trojan horse when they sneak something dangerous inside something that looks harmless, like a computer virus hidden in a normal-looking email.

For centuries, people thought the Trojan War was pure fiction, just exciting stories told by the ancient Greek poet Homer in his epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. But in the 1870s, archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann helped identify ruins that many scholars think are the site of ancient Troy in modern-day Turkey. While we can't prove every detail from the myths, we know there was a real city there that was destroyed and rebuilt multiple times. That makes it possible that some great conflict really happened, even if the stories grew more dramatic over thousands of years of retelling.