 but definitive proof is hard to find, due  largely to the historical practice of constructing one city on the  ruins of another. Homer (I) (qv)s Illiad (and other similar epics  depicting the Trojan War) were written hundreds of years after the  Trojan War supposedly occurred, and are of little use in determining  factual historical events as they included many mythological  elements: gods such as Apollo, Zeus, and Hera were central  characters in the story who drastically affected the course of the  war by killing and/or saving individual people during the conflict.  There is also the theory that the Troy of Homers lifetime was  destroyed by a sea earthquake and that the Illiad is a symbolic  reinterpretation of this event, since a horse is the symbol of the  Greek god of earthquakes. The producers decision to eliminate all  mythological elements from the story gives their film an air of  historical authenticity not present in the original works.