By Margaret A. McGurk
The Cincinnati Enquirer

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• Movie review • Trailer, show times

When Hollywood turns to history, the results often make scholars roll their eyes. Between artistic license and flat-out ignorance, most historical films contain enough mistakes to flunk a high-school history test.

The sword-swinging adventure Troy travels back in time more than 3,000 years for inspiration and is based largely on The Iliad by Homer, an epic poem that itself took liberties with historical fact.

To see how well the movie depicted that era, the Enquirer asked University of Cincinnati classics professor C. Brian Rose, an expert on ancient Troy, to share his picks for the top historical hits and misses in the film.

Here is his report card:

WRONG

• The war as described by Homer lasted 10 years; the movie condenses it into three weeks.

• The movie has Hector (played in the film by Eric Bana) killing Menelaus (played by Brendan Gleeson) in the middle of the movie; in The Iliad, Menelaus survives the war.

• The coins on the eyes of the deceased are a problem; coinage wasn't invented until 600 years after these wars.

• The movie shows colossal statues at Troy in gold and stone; such statues did not exist in the late Bronze Age in either Greece or western Asia Minor. The ones they've used were copied from sixth century B.C. Greek statues.

• In the Greek story of the Trojan War, Odysseus (played by Sean Bean) and Achilles (played by Brad Pitt) were draft dodgers. To get out of the war, Odysseus pretended to be insane, and Achilles disguised himself as a woman.

• There is no evidence that late Bronze Age Greece was ever united under the command of one king. (The movie depicts Agamemnon, played by Brian Cox, as king of most of Greece.)

RIGHT

• The walls (surrounding Troy) were quite high (more than 27 feet), and even though the walls in the film were higher than that, they conveyed well the strength of the fortifications.

• The coastline would have been about one mile from the citadel in the late Bronze Age, which is the distance they used.

• The form of the shields - large and rectangular or figure-eight - coincide more or less with what would have been used by warriors at that time.

• Some of the Trojan earrings were relatively close to jewelry actually uncovered at Troy (although dating about 1,000 years earlier than these wars).

• In the late Bronze Age, there was a settlement in the Lower City of Troy, outside the main citadel, which is one of the most important discoveries of the new excavations. The movie got that right.

What's Next

Oliver Stone's Alexander, starring Colin Farrell as the Macedonian conqueror, is set for release Nov. 5. Leonardo DiCaprio is signed to star as Alexander in a movie directed by Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge) which does not have a completion date.