Homer's Iliad covers only the 10th year of the war up through Hector's death and his funeral. The Odyssey is concerned with the adventures of Odysseus on his homeward voyage. No other accounts as old as these two have survived, but other very early works were available to writers of the classical age in Greece and Rome. A group of these works known as the Epic Cycle consisted of poems written presumably between the eighth and fourth centuries B.C. They supplemented Homer's account of the war and its aftermath.

The noted Greek dramatists of the fifth century B.C.Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripidesall made liberal use of the Trojan legends. The Roman author Virgil, of the first century B.C., recounted in the Aeneid the legend of Aeneas, a refugee Trojan prince whose descendants supposedly founded Rome. A prose work of the early Christian Era attributed by its author to an ancient writer, Apollodorus of Athens, adds detail to the Trojan story.

Two highly questionable sources were the supposed eyewitness accounts of Dictys of Crete and Dares of Troy. They were discovered in the classical era, and were published in Latin about the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. They were accepted enthusiastically by medieval scholars and were the source for many written works, including the 12th-century Romance of Troy by Benot de Sainte-Maure. From Benot came the story of Troilus and Cressida used by Boccaccio (in Il Filostrato), from whom it was adopted by Chaucer, through whom in turn it passed on to Shakespeare. Meanwhile, historians relying on Virgil as their source were claiming Trojan origin for most of the countries of western Europe.

The masterpiece of the French dramatist Racine, Andromaque (1667), was about the wife of Hector, and another of his plays was Iphignie (1674). Goethe used the Trojan legends for Iphigenia in Tauris (1787), the unfinished Achileis (179799), and Helena (1827). Helen of Troy also appeared in his Faust, Part II (1832), as she had in Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1588).

A drama by Jean Giraudoux, The Trojan War Shall Not Take Place (1935), translated by Christopher Fry with the title Tiger at the Gates (1955), dealt with the causes of war using Troy as an example.