Legends Summarized: The Trojan War
The grandest epic cycle this side of the Aegean! Today let’s talk about the tale of which The Iliad only makes up a tiny (if impressive) fraction!
Pst! Wanna know more about Quintus Smyrnaeus’s Posthomerica? Watch Blue’s Historymaker video about him HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfHGQAzwEKo
And if you want to know more about the historical, archaeological precedent that indicates some form of this story REALLY HAPPENED, watch Blue’s video on Mycenaean Greece HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cki-9ANZTLg&t=40s&ab_channel=OverlySarcasticProductions
PARTIAL TRACKLIST: Mars The Bringer Of War, Wind Queen, Gradus Vita, Starfall, Reign of Vengeance
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“They came back
To widows,
To fatherless children,
To screams, to sobbing.
The men came back
As little clay jars
Full of sharp cinders.”
― Aeschylus, The Oresteia
Aeschylus had fought the Persians during The Persian Wars (and was awarded for how brave in battle he was). He knew about the horrors of war.
@Marco G. Verbruggen I am sorry that such a tragedy has befallen them. But i hope that they can persevere and build themselves good lives in spite of the tragedy.
We live in a state and War is the dance upon which states are born, live, prosper, decay and finally die to. You can not have a state without war. You can also not have a state which dislikes wars. Wars are integral, and much necessary for the survival of the state and it’s power (power which can be used to the benefit of the people). The war need not be bloody, it need not be fair, it can be acts cloudy or unknown.
“The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.” – Sun Tzu
It would be best if we could always fight a wars like sun tzu advocated by beating the enemy without fighting them but that is not realistic and is naive at worst. Just like the belief that diplomacy will always prevail. There is no single path through life thats right, fair and does no harm.
@Mikael Anton Kurki Thanks Mikael I’ll be sure to inform my crippled grandfather who saw his friends’ corpses torn apart and saw their parents scream over their coffins and their children grow up without fathers that war is not hell and good actually because the country got to keep some of its colonies for a few more years, whatever would we do without your incredible wisdom
@Tomyironmane
I don’t know that much about Liechtenstein.
But i was thinking of the German unification and Roman conquests which brought prosperity through war. There are the imperial conquests which brought europe resources from around the world.
USA despite its monroe doctrine sought to expand primarily its markets through wars also and america doesn’t seem to be down in dumps. Certainly they have not suffered the same fate rome suffered because of it.
@yamiyomizuki Invasion of panama compared to World wars and mongol conquests.
But ultimatelly it should be remembered that the objective in ALL war is that you bring back something for the collective good of your nation in exchange for all that you invested in a war.
States should not fight for something that does not concern its own interests. Show me a objective worthy of war and i will go along with you” “Woe to the leader whose arguments at the end of a war are not as plausible as they were at the beginning.” – Otto von bismarck
Can we all take a minute to appreciate how far Red’s style, in both her art and commentary, has come since her original Trojan War videos?
For sure
agreed
@Yet Another Yes, we can 😉
I will, but not now. Gimme a minute to crack a cold one first…
Okay.
Can we also appreciate how the “Odysseus = Solid Snake” bit has managed to stick with us for this long?
Eris, the goddess of “It’s getting too chummy around here”, wakes up and chooses violence.
I love how you chose to phrase that.
Now I see why Eris the dwarf planet was named how it was; its discovery is what got Pluto kicked off the planets list
@professorbutters Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!
Now, seeing as it’s Friday, I must go commemorate the Great Snub by consuming a Hot Dog [without the bun, natch].
And started a minor religion.
The goddess of doing a little trolling
It actually was. They don’t know how to actually have *fun*
Could you possibly do a whole video on Cassandra herself? She’s such a tragic character
I also would love a video on Clytemnestra
I like that but I also want a whole video on Helen
Or Philoctetes, specifically because it’s a great way to show off that Odysseus absolutely fucking deserved what came to him later, and because Philoctetes is metal as hell in his own right, literally blessed by a god because he had the balls to stand up and kill said god.
No I want Gilgamesh
So are most women in Greek mythology.
What’s kind of interesting is the implication that the Trojan war is just a hugely mythologized version of a real conflict that happened just prior to the Bronze Age collapse and beginning of the Greek dark ages.
Similar stuff happened in the Norse/Germanic world around the great migration. Most Germanic stories like Siegfried are basically “set” at the end of the Roman Empire. Atilla the hun plays a huge part in the Siegfried stoey
@Roban mind blowing! That makes so much sense
I mean, it would be tonally appropriate for events depicted in the myths to lead directly to the fall of Greek civilization.
@TwinkMaster69 blue mentions some french anthropologists who dug right where Homer said it was and they actually found the ruins of Troy.
Speaking of the Amazons that showed up on the side of Troy, another group showed up to help the Trojans: the Ethiopians. Memnon, a prince and demigod from Africa, shows up to help Troy and kills a bunch of Greeks, one of which was Antilochos, a friend of Achilles. Nestor, the dude’s dad, tells Achilles, so he hears up again and meets Memnon to fight to a stand still. This was after Hector died, so it was a battle of two dudes trying to avenge their fallen comrades. After a long battle, Achilles gets a lucky blow and strikes him through the heart. The Gods were so impressed by Memnon doing so well in battle that they turned his burial ground into a river and all his loyal soldiers into birds… Cause Greek Gods honor warriors in very weird ways. The story of Troy is filled with a lot of cool stuff that is sadly never adapted in most stories. Like, the fact that Fate GO is the only piece of media that I’ve seen that even references the fact that Amazons showed up in the war should speak to how little these other parts of the story get mentioned.
Yeah, this is the first time I can remember ever hearing about Amazons during the Trojan War at all, much less Ethopians even though I think I’ve heard of Ethopians popping up in one or two other Greek mythology tales. Either way, the idea of being turned into a bird to honor *someone else* is totally in keeping with Greek gods’ myopic sensibilities though:
Random Ethopian Soldier: “Hey wait can we–?!” [becomes a bird]
Zeus: “Nope. I always did like swans.”
[Insert picture here of Hera glaring at Zeus from behind, especially since she would be against anyone who helped Paris anyway.]
@Zeph Lodwick While I agree that television would be the most appropriate medium, the track record for adapting beloved works of literature to modern television speaks for itself.
@omar salem I don’t disagree but movies can be complicated on their own without Magic Or mythology. Think you could really tell a good story from the concept of a woman or man in their lover being in the war. In that time. And then playing up there praying to Gods ! But you never see them. Making it more about faith and love ❤️
Some network needs to make a teleprogramme adapting the story–not just _The Iliad_ , but the whole story of the Trojan War, from Helen’s birth the sequels like _The Oresteia_ and _The Aeneid_ . Television is the only way to adapt such a sprawling, tangled web of tales. The closest thing we have is _Troy_ , which isn’t very good. Fact is there are hardly any good mythological films made these days. Greek myths are super metal, and there’s a huge audience for this content. If Jeff Bezos can throw one bn bucks at an adaptation of _The Silmarilion_ , then I’m sure someone can throw a fat or three at adapting the Epic Cycle.
@omar salem people who think this is what deconstruction is and them doing more “realistic version” of famous tale makes theme smart.
In Paris’ defense, he was forced to choose between three ultra powerful, spiteful goddesses, so there was no way this was gonna turn out well for him.
@Thomas Christenson yeah just give it to folks close to Hades for varying degrees of a cushy afterlife.
Comedy option: Ask Aphrodite to bring Helen to you, then give the apple to Helen because by Aphrodite’s own admission *she’s* actually the fairest. Then hope that instead of being insulted, Athena and Hera are amused enough at you clowning on Aphrodite that they keep her from annihilating you then and there.
(Or, if Nemesis *is* actually Helen’s mother, hope that your praise of her daughter either motivates her to somehow help you, or, since this stunt is probably such an act of hubris that she’d be obligated to deal with you herself if the others don’t get you first, that she intervenes and makes your downfall relatively painless before one of the goddesses you spurned can do something *much* worse to you. Probably the latter since *helping* people isn’t really in Nemesis’s portfolio as far as I know.)
If you ignore the bribes offered and look at things in terms of how you’re going to survive the aftermath of the horrible situation Hermes has put you in, I think it’d come down to how you weigh Athena being the best ally of the three against Hera potentially being the worst enemy if she sets her mind to it. Aphrodite can get mean too but she tends to stick to her “sphere” at least, from what I can recall, while Hera will dedicate herself to making you suffer in whatever the worst way she can think of is if she’s sufficiently pissed off.
So, I’d probably pick Athena while doing my best to soften the blow for the other two, or at least for Hera (while hoping that Athena will have my back if/when Aphrodite comes for me, since I think she’d easily be able to adequately protect me from Aphrodite’s wrath if it was just the two of them), like by saying that as beautiful as she may be I couldn’t possibly take Helen because she’s already happily married to someone else. Given that Hera’s the goddess of marriage, and that Zeus cheating on her with women he thinks are pretty is her number one problem in at least half the myths she seems to show up in, she might look favorably enough on you respecting what’s important to her that she can’t be *that* mad at you for not picking her. Even if she’s not *happy* afterwards, if you can keep Hera from reaching the levels of anger that led to things like what she did to Io, then that’s a victory and you’ve *significantly* increased your chances of making it out alive and without having to endure various horrible agonies.
@Kayeka And yet, glory on the battlefield or leadership of a great empire could have also won him love with a woman who wouldn’t have provoked every other kingdom in Greece to come after him and burn his city to the ground.
@Kayeka Unfortunately both he and the woman he chose were already married, which led to his own wife refusing to save him after he was poisoned due to him spurning her for someone else solely because she was prettier, so. He might not have been the best at this “love” thing either, on top of clearly not being the best long-term planner given that of the three goddesses he picked the one clearly least able (or even likely to *try* for that matter) to defend him from the other two when they inevitably sought revenge out of spite.
The guy’s pick was shallow, selfish, and short-sighted, is what I’m saying.
Odysseus still just literally being Solid Snake because of the silly “stealth mission” joke Red made SEVEN YEARS ago is very heartwarming to me.
Literally all of Odysseus’ expressions made me burst out laughing, goddamn
It’s amazing they kept Agamemnon around. He seems to just make EVERYTHING worse!
@Tiny Etoile Oh no! Anyway.
It’s very funny reading the odyssey and everyone talks about what a tragedy it is that Agamemnon was murdered by his treacherous wife and I’m just there like [cdi Zelda voice] “Good.”
A combination of inertia and political acumen. If Agamemnon wasn’t leading, they either had to give up on Troy (the sunk cost fallacy rears its head) or find someone else to lead. It helped that Menelaus, the wronged husband of Helen (and therefore excuse for the war) and king of Sparta, was his brother and had Agamemnon’s back. He was also king of arguably the most powerful city-state, to the point that even today we refer to that culture as Mycenean.
That’s monarchy, baby!
I think we’ve all had bosses like that
Fun fact: Australia’s defence headquarters once let in a literal Trojan horse.
Once in, the warriors fell from the breach and were not arrested for funni reasons
Even funnier: the Turkish consulate rejected them. They learnt their lesson.
classic enviro-queen craig reucassel
@Betula
Can you give me the source?
australia’s full of funny stories for such a new nation, all the stories of what prisoner colonists did to get sent there, the bandit who made bullet proof armor that made the deputies opposing him think he was a supernatural entity until they noticed his legs where unarmored, emu wars, your story and the time an active PM fucking vanished after going for a swim.
@Will Davidson I swear to god I thought that show was some dream I had