Barry Strauss is a classics and history professor at Cornell University. He is a leading expert on ancient history and ancient military history, so he knows what he is talking about. His book, The Trojan War: A New History, is filled with his own interpretations and opinion, based on research and newly found discoveries, about the Trojan War. When it happened? How it happened? These are some questions that Strauss answers. Before Strauss many respected authors have written about the Trojan War, such as Homer and Heinrich Schliemann, but Strauss is basically saying that what we the readers know about the Trojan War, so far is incorrect and for those of us that know nothing of the war, we are about to find out what really happened. .
Strauss has laid out this book into thirteen chapters including the introduction and conclusion. In each of these chapters he talks one or two aspects of the Trojan War, keeping the book organized and easy to follow. In the Introduction Strauss starts to talk about how troy had been forgotten by the time of Homer. He talks about how the Trojan War was said to be a poetic story kind of like fiction but he also supports that new evidence has come to show that Troy in fact was real and really did exist. He says that Troy was not a Greek city but it was actually an Anatolian city that happened to be sometime in the Bronze Age. He shows evidence that Trojans spoke the language close to Hittite and was also a Hittite ally. He points out that the Trojan War did in fact happen but the meaning and direction Homer gave to it was a false/fictional interpretation. According to Homer the war had started with the abduction of the queen of Sparta, Helen but Strauss claims that that wasn't the only thing that lead to the great 10 year war of troy (as said to be by Homer). Strauss says that in the Bronze Age, Personal terms were held on higher grounds than abstract ones, so when homer based the cause of the war on Helen being abducted he is giving support to the idea of the Bronze Age and Trojan War being connected.