The Trojan War provides a thread connecting three thousand years of history, myth, fiction, music, drama, and the visual arts. Dominant Troy themes include: the inevitability of war; questions about who is to blame; heroic glory and heroic excess; human sacrifice and murder; and the consequences of war, especially to women and children.

The purpose of TROY is to gather and organize a substantial body of material about selected Trojan War stories and their historical and cultural background. The stories include: the Iliad and Odyssey; the Oresteia; the Aeneid; the Roman de Troie, the Eneas; the story of Troilus and Cressida as told by Chaucer and Shakespeare; the story of Iphigenia as told by Euripides, Racine and Goethe; and several late 20th century feminist retellings of the story of Troy. The final section of TROY deals with the surprisingly various uses of Trojan themes in contemporary and/or popular culture.

Each section of TROY includes links to relevant reference materials, sites, images, and etexts on the www, as well as to my own bibliographies, and activities. The Troy Web is the core resource for this course .