Hot Cup of History - As Seen on Xena - The Trojan War Episode 3

Last time we got as far as the beginning of the Iliad after getting through all of the setup leading into the part of the Trojan War that Homer actually wanted to tell the story of, which is basically the last few months.

And I don't think it's a surprise that when people... do feel compelled to retell versions of the trojan war over and over because actually there are a lot of gaps it's perfect for fanfic uh there are all these spaces where we know elements of the stories but they've been told by lots of different people because this one big famous version of the story they said it's Basically, this is Star Wars.

We're coming in at episode four and it's possible nobody did give you the backstory.

So when we say the Iliad, we are talking about the long epic poem, which was created out of an oral storytelling tradition under the byline of Homer.

It's generally regarded as the most famous and important chronicle of the Trojan War.

And like I said, it's just a slice of the story.

It kicks off in the final year of that 10 year war where legendary hero, and please be aware that whenever I say that word hero, I'm putting a lot of inverted commas around it, wrapped in another blanket of inverted commas, which is not to say that Achilles was not a hero, but what the word hero meant in the ancient world is just so distant from what we think of when we use the word.

Um, it it would require a whole other podcast to explore that uh though I think I did come at it in a Discworld essay that I wrote a couple of years ago on the history of the anti-hero and um Why we assume now that heroes are actually positive figures rather than very complicated, angry, evil little men.

It was, yeah, one of my Pratchett's men described essays.

It will be in a book eventually.

Let's move on.