The face that launched a thousand ships
Posted on 12/23/2010 8:35:56 PM PST by SunkenCiv
...In the earliest days of their history, so the Greeks recorded, a city in Asia by the name of Troy had been besieged by their ancestors for 10 long years, captured, and burnt to the ground. Why? Responsibility for the conflict was pinned on Paris, a Trojan prince whose abduction of Helen, the fabulously beautiful daughter of the king of the gods, had set in train a truly calamitous sequence of events. Not only Troy had ended up obliterated, but so, too, had the age of heroes. War had consumed the world.
No wonder, then, that the Greeks should have been torn between a desire to find some meaning in this terrible conflagration and a suspicion that it had never had any meaning at all. In the 5th century BC, the historian Herodotus concluded that "the utter ruin of the Trojans, and their annihilation, had served to demonstrate to humanity how terrible crimes will always be met, courtesy of the gods, with a terrible vengeance". Elsewhere, however, he reported an entirely contrary view: that the rape of Helen had been barely a crime at all, and that the Greek response had been grotesquely disproportionate. The implication of this was potentially most unsettling: that the destruction of Troy, far from demonstrating the workings of a divine order, reflected instead a chill and unheeding universe. "Why should I call to the gods?" Such was the question that the Athenian tragedian, Euripides, put into the mouth of the queen of fallen Troy in his tragedy, The Trojan Women. "Long have I raised my voice to them, but they do not listen."
...it is hard to escape a nagging feeling that the image which Alexander sees reflected in the Iliad is too much her own...
(Excerpt) Read more at guardianbookshop.co.uk ...
The real Helen would be much younger.
Was assigned to Izmir 79-80 when I was in the army. Met several archaeologists during my travels.
They were interested in Sardis, Ephesus, Miletus and others...not the site believed to be Troy.
Homer..the Illiad and Virgil the Aeneid.
Two years..in the area was a dream for me..
Mmmm.... Genevieve Bujold...
And her face launched ships, not lunches.
Maybe blaming the snatching of Helen for the Trojan War is like blaming the assassination of the archduke for WWI.
It’s also simpler when you’re sitting around the campfire singing. Running off with the king’s wife makes for better lyrics than a long dissertation about socioeconomic disequilibrium.
On the other hand, they could’ve sung Rock Island Line ;)
IMO the big factor was Troy sitting at one end of the Dardanelles (access to the Euxine cities), pinching everybody for tolls both ways.
But when a queen is taken, the story takes on heroic dimensions you just can’t apply to being fed up with paying off a gauntlet of pirates.
Hattusas and the Hittites are interseting too.
Anatolia is a treasure trove of ancient history.
Thanks for the reminder, I have been meaning to read “War Before Civilization” for a couple of years. This thread jogged my memory just down loaded the kindle edition.
I’d seen it at a public library; it sounded good on the dust jacket!
Achilles? He was such a heel!
Achilles? He was such a heel!
I liked the Brad Pitt version.
Michael Wood's "in search of the trojan war" speculations are now considered accurate 20 years later...you might want to buy the series (I downloaded it from a Chinese yuku video site, if you google you might find it) or watch it on streaming video .
and check out LINK
The face that launched a thousand ships
The face that sunk a thousand ships!
By the time we left, the poppies were growing just past the base fences and there was no love for Americans if they ran out of dollars.
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