“No one is so foolish as to prefer war to peace, in which, instead of sons burying their fathers, fathers bury their sons.”Herodot · Istorii · -430 · Herodot, «Istorii», I, 87, cuvintele lui Cresus către Cirus, în traducerea lui George Rawlinson (1858); versiunea românească e o redare a textului lui Rawlinson
Whoever holds the strait holds the price of everything that passes through it.
Hisarlik, the hill identified with Troy, sits at the entrance to the Hellespont (Dardanelles), the strait leading from the Aegean into the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea. Northerly winds and the current make the passage hard; ships waited for weeks in the bay below the citadel, and whoever held the bay could tax, host or block them. Grain, horses, metals and slaves from the north came through that corridor. Troy VI, the city with sloping walls and towers, is rich precisely because of its position. Hittite tablets from Hattusa name a kingdom of Wilusa — probably (W)Ilios, Ilion — a vassal of the Hittite great king, with a surviving treaty (Alaksandu of Wilusa, thirteenth century BC). The same archives mention Ahhiyawa, a power from over the sea with which the Hittites had friction in western Anatolia — almost certainly the Achaeans. The Trojan War thus becomes plausible as one episode in a long rivalry between the Mycenaean world and the Hittite sphere over the Anatolian coast and its strait. Today's parallel: straits remain causes of war. The Bosphorus, Hormuz, Malacca, Bab el-Mandeb — whoever controls a chokepoint controls the price of everything that passes through it. Croesus, in Herodotus, states the simple truth: no one prefers war; but when the strait is at stake, "no one" quickly becomes "almost everyone".
Location does more than enrich a city; it also shapes its politics. A city living on transit tolls cannot stay neutral for long, because every great power wants an ally there, not an arbiter. So Troy could not choose between Achaeans and Hittites without paying for it with its independence. Think of a small hotel, the only one at the entrance to a mountain pass: it lives off traffic, but any big company wanting the route must buy it out or bypass it. A wealthy fortress becomes, paradoxically, prey precisely because it is useful. Location-born wealth attracts the insurer and the thief on the same day. That raises the next question: what happens to such a city when the power protecting it weakens?
Why it matters Whoever looks for Troy's cause on the map rather than in myth finds a strait — and finds the same cause in today's wars.