A City the Gods Took Sides Over

What makes Troy a religious site rather than only a battlefield is that the poem set there is the fullest surviving picture of how the Greeks imagined their gods behaving. In the Iliad the Olympians are not neutral. Hera and Athena work for the fall of the city, Apollo and Aphrodite for its survival, and Zeus holds the balance without ever fully settling it. The war is fought twice over, once by men on the plain and once by gods who intervene in it, and the human characters know this and act accordingly.

Walter Burkert reads the epic as the point at which a scattered set of local cults was given a single shared cast of characters, which is why later Greek religion could be recognisably one thing across hundreds of independent cities. The rituals shown inside the poem are ordinary Greek ones performed under extraordinary pressure: the priest of Apollo who curses the Greek camp and is answered with plague, the libations poured before oaths, the hecatomb offered to buy off a god already angry, the failed procession of the Trojan women who carry a robe to Athena and are refused. Nothing in it is invented for the story. It is the religion of the audience, staged at the walls of a city they believed had really stood.