Several historical wars took place at Hissarlik in Anatolia, situated near the strategic Dardanelles. The literary Trojan War, as known from Homer's Iliad and related legends, was fought when Paris, son of the Trojan king Priam, kidnapped Helen, the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon led an expedition, joined by Achilles, Odysseus, Ajax, and other Greek heroes, to recover her. After ten years of siege, Odysseus hid warriors in a giant wooden Trojan horse who crept out at night and opened the city gates to the Greeks, which brought an end to the siege and to the city itself. It is believed that the seventh of nine layers at the site near Hissarlik, first unearthed Heinrich Schliemann, was the Homeric Troy, which would date the historical Trojan War around 1200BC; a Phyrigian city existed there at the center of the Troas region. Troy was also known as Ilion in Greek, hence the Iliad, and Latinized to Ilium by the Romans, who by Vergil's Aeneid claimed descent from the Trojans.
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