All routes

The Achaean expedition

How the army got there. The Iliad begins in the tenth year and takes the journey for granted, so this route is assembled from the Catalogue, from Aulis and from the camp on the shore.

IdentificationAcceptedPlausibleSpeculativeMythical· Dot size = confidence score

Scroll to zoom, drag to pan

The Catalogue of Ships names where the contingents came from; Odysseus' speech in Book 2 remembers the omen at Aulis; the camp on the Troad shore is the poem's second setting. Between them they describe an expedition without ever narrating its voyage.

Thucydides read the same material as evidence of scale and logistics — how a force that size could feed itself, and why the siege took as long as it did. He was doing, in the fifth century BCE, what this atlas does: treating the poem as testimony to be weighed rather than believed.

Reconstructions

Muster at Aulis, crossing to the Troad

Proposed by: The Catalogue of Ships and the Iliad's own assumptions · Antiquity

Plausible11/12High

The outward journey the Iliad assumes rather than narrates: contingents gather at Aulis, cross the Aegean, and camp on the Troad shore. Every stop is an accepted or plausible place, which makes this the best-anchored route in the atlas after the Telemachy.

  1. 01Mycenae· The citadel at MycenaeThe Catalogue of Ships
  2. 02Aulis· The bay of Aulis, BoeotiaThe Catalogue of Ships
  3. 03Tenedos· Bozcaada (Tenedos)
  4. 04Troy (Ilios)· Hisarlık (Troy VI / VIIa)The Achaean camp and the wall
  5. 05Chryse· The southern Troad coastChryse and the plague
Confidence
11/12 · High confidence
Textual
3
Archaeological
2
Scholarly
3
Geographic
3
  • ScholarshipRichard Hope Simpson and John F. Lazenby, The Catalogue of the Ships in Homer's Iliad (Oxford, 1970)
  • Primary textThucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.9-11
  • ArchaeologyManfred Korfmann, Troia/Wilusa excavation reports, Studia Troica (1988–2005)
  • Primary textHomer, Iliad 2.484-760 (the Catalogue of Ships)

What is disputed

Whether a coalition expedition of this scale happened at all. The route's stops are secure; the campaign they describe is exactly what the archaeology cannot confirm.

Sources

  • Primary textHomer, Iliad 2.484-760 (the Catalogue of Ships)
  • Primary textThucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.9-11
  • ScholarshipRichard Hope Simpson and John F. Lazenby, The Catalogue of the Ships in Homer's Iliad (Oxford, 1970)
  • ArchaeologyManfred Korfmann, Troia/Wilusa excavation reports, Studia Troica (1988–2005)

/api/homeric/routes/achaean-expedition