and the Sea of Marmara. Troy was located slightly
inland from the southern opening of this water-
way. In this extended conflict, the Greeks were
victorious, and Troy was burned to the ground.
Across subsequent centuries, the events and
historical figures associated with this ancient con-
flictbecamethestuffofnationallegendandmyth.
Through these centuries of telling and retelling,
these stories were elaborated and enhanced; they
took on epic proportions, involving Greek gods
and supernatural events, all intended to honor the
Greeks, depicting them as great warriors and
bestowing on them the blessings of the gods.
Before poetry was written, these stories were
transmitted orally, but sometime about the eighth
centuryB.C., they were written down. The ancient
Greek poet Homer, who may have died about 750
B.C., is credited with writing the tales down in two
epic poems,Iliad, which tells the story of three
weeks during the ten-year siege of Troy, and
Odyssey, which tells the story of the ten-year jour-
ney of Odysseus from Troy back to his island
home of Ithaca, in the Ionian Sea off the west
coast of Greece.
Through the early centuries of the Christian
Era, many people enjoyed the stories of Troy as
examples of ancient Greek mythology and given
the supernatural elements that the epic poems
contained assumed the works were fiction. But
Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890), an extraordi-
nary self-educated German and early archeolo-
gist, read Homer as incorporating historical facts,
and he set out to prove it by locating the site of the
destroyed city of Troy, using theIliadas his guide.
Schliemann’s discoveries proved that the epics
were indeed based on actual events.Critical Overview.
Before he emigrated from the USSR to the West
in 1972, Brodsky was a struggling underground
poet, and the bulk of his work, published both in
Russian and in English, appeared after that
departure.Selected Poemsappeared in 1973 to
rave critical reviews in the United States. In his
assessment of this work and Brodsky as a poet,
Arthur A. Cohen first listed how many great
Russian poets and poetry have been lost because
of Soviet tyranny, and then he stated: ‘‘Among
us, by the accident of history...is thegreatest
poet of his generation, the Soviet Jewish exile,Fragment of an intricate design depicting Telemachus and Penelope(Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images)
Odysseus to Telemachus