Imagine accounts of the Trojan War from those who actually fought there, long before Homer wrote The Iliad. Dictys’s A Journal of the Trojan War and Dares’s The Fall of Troy: A History tell in gritty detail the bloody siege of the fabled, doomed city. Intricate politics and memorable personalities, rather than the quarreling, intervening gods of Homer’s epic, dominate these tales.

Archaeological discovery and subsequent scholarship have established that both accounts were originally written in Greek, probably during the first century AD. Their reimagined, godless Trojan War tales became important sources on the subject during the Middle Ages, greatly influencing such legendary works as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. This new edition of the first English-language publication, translated by R. M. Frazer, brings together both narratives.