The Trojan War: Difference between revisions

{{Useful Notes}}

'''The Trojan War''' is one of the most famous armed conflicts in all of history. It's [[Older Than Feudalism]], and so is the subject of more stories and songs than you can shake a stick at and is the [[Trope Namer]] for a whole lot of stuff. It was fought between the Greeks (roughly) and the Trojans, who lost. But that's not all there is to the story. (And [[Continuity Snarl|not all the legends are consistent]].)

 

The Trojan War, [[The Trojan Cycle|taletellers and storyspinners]] would have us believe, actually began at a wedding. The mortal man Peleus was marrying the sea nymph Thetis, and Zeus was throwing the wedding feast. On the guest list: everyone. Yes, ''everyone''—every single living thing, mortal or immortal. (Just how much the wedding invitations cost, one can only imagine.) Just one person—well, goddess, actually—wasn't invited: Eris, the Goddess of <s>[[Chaotic Stupid]]</s> Discord. Frankly, it's understandable why you wouldn't want ''her'' at a wedding. But the gods of [[Classical Mythology]] are nothing if not [[Pride|prideful]], and [[Revenge SVP|she kind of took it personally]].

 

Eventually the argument got narrowed down to three final contestants: Hera, the queen goddess of the Achaeans<ref>which is what [[Homer]] called the Greeks; since we are primarily concerned with his telling of the story, we will do the same</ref>; Athena, goddess of wisdom, cunning and craft; and Aphrodite, goddess of mad hot sexx0rs. Since none of them could come to a decision (and Zeus, for once, wasn't stupid enough to get involved), they decided to pick an impartial judge, a young man who had recently shown fairness in a contest against Ares. His name was Paris and he was, at the time, herding sheep on the outskirts of Troy. There was this prophecy, you see, that he would cause Troy's destruction, which was why he stayed away from there as much as possible; plus he was shacking up with a nymph at the time. Anyhow, the three goddesses appeared to him on Mount Ida and asked him to decide who ought to own that stupid [[MacGuffin]] apple.

 

 

[[All Men Are Perverts|Oh, Paris.]]

Achilles is ''still'' in his tent, so Agamemnon swallows his pride and offers him a ton of gifts (including Briseis), but Achilles refuses. So, to help put some heart into his allies, Achilles' best friend and protégé Patroclus puts on Achilles' armor and leads the Myrmidons into battle. This all ends up [[Gone Horribly Wrong]]: Hector, [[Hero Antagonist|crown prince of Troy and Paris's older brother]], manages to kill Patroclus in battle.

 

 

 

 

And that journey was [[River of Insanity|its own piece of insanity]]. Because the Achaeans had gone a little overboard in the rape of Troy and desecrated a lot of Olympian temples, the gods decided that a lot of them [[Shoot the Shaggy Dog|wouldn't make it home]], and those that did would [[Sidequest|suffer on the journey]]. It took Menelaus and Helen eight years to get back. (It's on record that Helen and Menelaus had a daughter, Hermione, who was nine years old when Paris came to visit. When re-united, Hermione was ''37''. If not for the fact that she wasn't married yet, having been promised to somebody who was fighting the war, she would've had children and maybe ''grandchildren'' to show her mother by this time.) Odysseus took ten, as chronicled in his [[Spin-Off]] adventure ''[[Odyssey|The Odyssey]]''. A lot of other major heroes either died during the return or were eventually forced out of the city-states they ruled; one, Agamemnon, was flat-out murdered by his cheating wife (as was his new sex toy, Cassandra—talk about Woobiedom), with order only restored when his son Orestes offed his mom and her lover and assumed his father's throne (after sorting out The Furies, who do not take kindly to matricide, in a process which involves quite a bit more than paperwork and community service; as [[Aeschylus]] would have it, it [[Just-So Story|ended up with a significant reform of the Athenian judicial system]]). Suffice to say that the Trojan War was a huge mess for everyone involved.

 

Or if you want to just skip that and see the essentials [[Brevity Is Wit|in a minute]], just watch [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb_39kgx844 this].

 

== Actual History ==

So off Helen goes, and Menelaus rallied his forces. This would have been a ''lot'' more difficult than it sounds, because the Hellenes<ref>This is what the Greeks called themselves; even today the word for "Greece" ''in'' Greek is "Hellas"</ref> were not particularly united at that point in time. This was the age of [[Blood Knight|"Heroic Warfare"]], which is rather like the bronze-age version of feudalism: any central authority was pretty weak, so while a king like Agamemnon might theoretically command the loyalty of his vassals, it would be a real pain in the neck trying to get them all pointed in one direction and going off to fight the Trojans rather than feuding among themselves. Getting ''multiple'' kings to do this would have made cat-herding look easy. (Frankly, what's surprising is not that it took them eight years to land at Troy, but that it didn't take them ''longer''.) The military setup was rather medieval as well. In [[The Middle Ages]], you had knights: professional soldiers, who spent all their time either fighting one war or training for the next one. In Mycenaean Greece, you had ''equeta'', chariot warriors who filled much the same role. So, if these boys spent all their time sword-slinging, how did they eat and have a home to sleep in and clothes to put on their backs? They had a bunch of civilians<ref>slaves. Euphemistic language aside, Archaic Greece was heavily dependent on slaves, treated anywhere from 'as one of the family' to absolutely terribly</ref> who worked for them to provide all these things, which in Medieval Europe were called "peasants" or "serfs" and in Ancient Hellas were called... Umm, something. [[Critical Research Failure|We don't know. Sorry.]]<ref>The "freedom-loving" Spartans of the Classical era called them Helots, but that's just Sparta; every city had its own terminology.</ref> But in any case: when you read [[Homer]], you see this [[Redshirt Army]] of [[The Dead Have Names|names that are mentioned once]]—[[He Had a Name|when they die]]—[[Long List|and it seems kind of pointless]]. But [[The More You Know|now you know]] that each one represents years of training and the collective effort of many people; the effect on Hellenic audiences would have been similar to your reaction to all those Jedi dropping like flies in ''[[Attack of the Clones]]''. This gives you a sense of just how wasteful the war was. Finally, this also creates a rather amusing [[Real Life]] [[Continuity Snarl]]: since a semi-feudal society is presented in this war, feudalism is now officially [[Older Than Feudalism]]. Oops. <ref>Achaeans! There is feudalism under your feet! [[The Last Airbender|Why don't you fight?]]</ref> But yes, older than the post- Roman European' feudalism that everybody knows better, anyway.

 

* It embodied the concept of "paying it forward." Life in ancient Hellas was pretty chaotic, and you never knew when you were going to find yourself at the mercy of strangers. (Seriously, the heroes of Greek myths are ''constantly'' washing up on distant, unmapped shores and having to beg help from the natives.) So do unto others as you would have them do unto you, right?

* It kept open the lines of diplomacy. Let's say you're at war with someone—the Spartans, to grab a name out of thin air. During the war, Menelaus comes to visit. ''Xenia'' requires that you treat him with honor and respect, even though he's your [[Arch Enemy]]: the best food, the best wine, the place of honor, blablahetc, as opposed to (say) murdering him in his bed. And a good thing too, because what if he was coming to sue for peace? (Besides, a fellow Hellene was much more likely to be a [[Friendly Enemy]] than anything else. Warfare was more genteel in these days.)

Finally, there's often talk about what kind of relationship, precisely, existed between Achilles and Patroclus. The easiest jump to make is to the Hellenic custom of pederastic patronage; in the ''[[Erastes Eromenos]]'' relationship, the older man (the ''erastes'') traded advice, networking and business connections to a younger man (the ''eromenos''), who would in return make himself available for various sexual favors. The historical objection to Achilles and Patroclus having this kind of relationship is that it might not have ''existed'' at the time; this was a feature of ''Classical'' Athens, not Heroic Athens, and first developed in the 7th century BC, long after this war was fought. ([[Exact Words]] time: this is merely to state that Achilles and Patroclus did not have an ''[[Erastes Eromenos]]'' relationship. Whether they were ''actually'' lovers is not known to history or fiction; there's nothing in the tale that talks about it one way or the other. Note that Patroclus was probably ''older'' than Achilles, and that Achilles had a canonical son, who fought alongside him in the war. In fact, that's who married Hermione at the end of things, which would have created another [[May-December Romance]] with him being maybe 17 and her at least twice that. But that's another story.)

 

* [[Achilles' Heel]]: Does ''[[Dead Unicorn Trope|not]]'' show up in ''[[The Iliad]]''.

* [[Achilles in His Tent]]

* [[Watching Troy Burn]]: At one remove; this is a cinematography trope, something Homer wasn't playing with.

* ...And anything that shows up in spin-offs, sequels, etc. (Those are covered in their own work pages.)

* [[Aluminum Christmas Trees]]: The conflict was long believed to have been pure fiction until the ruins of Troy were actually discovered by archaeologists.

* [[Ancient Greece]]: [[Trope Codifier]].

* [[World's Most Beautiful Woman]]: Helen.

* [[You Can't Fight Fate]]: When Paris is born his parents are told he is destined to start a war that will kill them all. His father orders him killed, but, as is always the way in these tales, the servant charged to do it can't get up the courage and raises him as his own son. Of course, Paris returns to Troy, is hailed as the lost prince, and--starts the war.

 

* Naturally, [[Homer]]'s ''[[The Iliad]]'' and ''[[Odyssey|The Odyssey]]''.

* Also, the six other lost epics of the [[The Trojan Cycle|Trojan Cycle]].

** The ''History of the Fall of Troy, by Dares Phrygius'' (''Daretis Phrygii de excidio Trojae historia'', also known as ''Acta diurna belli Troiani''). Dares Phrygius ('Dares of Phrygia') is mentioned in ''The Iliad'' as a Trojan priest at the time of the war; the ''Acta diurna'' are supposed to be his eyewitness account. However, as the Latin work uses 5th century CE language and there is no mention of the work prior to that time (let alone of the purported Greek original), it must be inferred that the true author was an anonymous Late Roman writer. This work is notable for telling the story of the war from a Trojan viewpoint, and it may be [[Perspective Flip|directly inspired]] by the ''Chronicle of Dictys of Crete''. The ''History of Dares Phrygius'' was, together with the ''Aeneid'', the most influential work on the Trojan War for the Middle Ages, as medieval Western Europe tended to side with the Trojans, on account of the ''Aeneid'' which glorifies Aeneas and the survivors of Troy as the forefathers of the Romans, and thus, indirectly, Western European civilization.

 

* After the Franks had taken over much of the former Western Roman Empire, Frankish historians came up with a [[Based on a Great Big Lie|pseudohistory]] that traced the origin of the Franks back to survivors of Troy. This, of course, was in imitation of the ''Aeneid'' and served to elevate the Franks to an "equal level" with the Romans.

* The ''[[Historia Regum Britanniae|History of the Kings of Britain]]'' by Geoffrey of Monmouth, another "chronicle" that traced the ancestry of the pre-Saxon Celtic Britons to (you guessed it) Trojan refugees that were led to Britain by Brutus, a survivor of Trojan nobility.

* ''[[Troilus and Cressida]]'', by [[William Shakespeare|Shakespeare]], a play set during the events of the ''Iliad''.

 

* Dan Simmons' novel, ''Ilium'', which recreates the events on an alternate Earth and Mars.

* ''[[Troy]]'', the Hollywood version of the war.

[[Category:Hollywood History]]

[[Category:Military and Warfare Tropes]]