Forging the Timeline of Troy

There was a time when I used to joke that I wished I could date Achilles. Strong. Golden. Fierce. Ruthless when it mattered. The kind of man myth remembers, and the kind history warns us about. Achilles is both the glory and the grief of the Iliad, the warrior whose brilliance burned as hot as the fires of Troy itself.

As I began writing The Homeric Chronicles, I quickly realized the story I wanted to tell was far larger than enthusiasm alone could carry. I was not ready, not yet. I needed years of reading, years of writing, and the courage to confront the full scope of these stories: war and love, blood and longing, triumph and ruin. Greek myth does not flinch from the extremes of human experience, and neither could I.

From the beginning, my vision was to create a sweeping narrative, one vast and interconnected epic in which the lives of heroes and heroines converge at Troy and ripple outward into the generations that follow. That vision demanded structure, and structure demanded chronology. I found myself pulling at strands of myth, tracing lineages, comparing fragments, and piecing together events that had never before been fully aligned into a continuous historical arc.

The late George Shipway, author of Warrior in Bronze, once warned readers that “...it would be a rash scribbler who ventured on definite dates.” I became that rash scribbler, though not recklessly. With sources spread across my desk and timelines scratched into notebooks, I began the long labor of ordering myth into sequence. Shipway’s own timeline falls only about seventeen years from mine, a reminder that serious minds approaching the same material often arrive at strikingly similar conclusions.

Writing realistic mythology is no simple task, especially Greek mythology, where the broad outlines of the stories are already familiar to so many readers. The challenge is not invention, but interpretation. Not distortion, but illumination.

From the outset, I made a deliberate choice. I would not twist the myths into alternate endings, nor shift the focus onto minor observers to retell familiar tales from the margins. I had no interest in merely repeating the Iliad and the Odyssey in prose. Those stories already exist in their immortal form.
Instead, The Homeric Chronicles was conceived as something different: a chronological epic that follows the rise of kingdoms, the forging of alliances, the breaking of oaths, and the relentless pull of prophecy that draws heroes toward Troy and beyond.

To build this world, I relied not only on myth, but on history. Archaeological data from Troy, Asia Minor, and mainland Greece shaped geography and culture. Scholarly literature informed political structure and material life. My own training as a historian became the foundation beneath the narrative itself.

The result is a living synthesis of myth and history, an unfolding saga in which legend walks alongside evidence, and prophecy collides with human choice.

If you are ready to step into that world, begin where destiny itself begins, with the births of Paris and Achilles in Song of Princes, Book One of The Homeric Chronicles.

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Copyright © 2016, revised 2026 Janell Rhiannon. All rights reserved.