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In our earlier lecur, lectures we
took a look at ideas about myth.
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We traced back from antiquity all
the way up to the present time as,
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in terms of what people have thought
about myth over vast stretches of time.
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In this lecture were going to
turn the clock backwards and
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move from our present-day period into the,
the times that are going
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to be represented in the mythic stories
that we are going to be turning to next.
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A few time periods are important for
us to keep in mind.
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Now, obviously is an important one.
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What's happening in the world today is
going to color and influence the way we
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appropriate and read these myths and
we want to pay some attention to that.
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Roman times.
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Here I've picked out the 1st
century BCE as classical Rome,
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so if you hear me referring to classical
Rome I mean Rome during that time period.
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Rome obviously had a lot of years before
and after during which they were top
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dog in the Mediterranean, but when I talk
about classical Rome, I'm going to be
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roughly referring to 1st century BCE, 1st
century CE, roughly in that time period.
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Another important, moment for us,
is going to be classical Athens,
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5th century BCE, so when I say
classical Athens, that's what I mean.
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And then when I say Homeric times,
I'm referring to the 8th century BCE.
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Homer wrote around 750,
as best we can tell, so
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we say 8th century as a general target for
what that date's all about.
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And Homer himself was writing
many years after the fact,
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as you can see from our graph here.
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He's actually writing nearly 500
years after the topic he is covering
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the Trojan War which in,
according to the legendary materials,
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took place right around
in the 13th century BCE.
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Tracing back over these periods,
we're going to be looking at Homer
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in the first big chunk of this course,
focusing on The Odyssey.
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When we get past that,
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we'll move into some other epic poets
from early time periods including Hesiod.
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We'll look at some Homeric hymns that
emerge during this Homeric period.
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Moving on to classical Athens,
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we're going to look especially
at the Greek tragedies.
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The tragedians remake stories that they
knew from Homer and earlier poets in,
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in ways that are definitive for
later time periods.
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And then we,
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when we move into the Romans we're
going to be looking at Virgil and Ovid.
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The stories that we're going to see,
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populating this long arc of time have many
similarities but also many differences.
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Classical Athens is not
the same as Homeric Greece, and
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Homeric Greece is surely not
the same as classical Rome.
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So we'll keep an eye on all of these
particulars as, as, as needed.
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The Trojan War we go ahead and
say took place in the 13th century BCE,
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and the reason we go ahead and say that
has to do very much with this man.
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Befo, if this course were being taught 150
years ago, assuming there was an internet
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the professor at that time would say,
well, the Trojan War is a legend.
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We don't really have any evidence
that it actually took place.
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Heinrich Schliemann was
curious about this.
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His dates were 1822 to 1890.
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He took a team over to the north
coast of Turkey Asia Minor and
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found that in the sites where there was
supposed to be a great citadel of Troy,
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he actually found that yes,
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indeed there were the ruins of
a marvelous very wealthy city.
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And it looked like that
city had been conquered
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over many times over
the course of history.
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And there was a kind of great
cataclysmic conquest of this citadel
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that wa, took place right around
roughly corresponding to the time
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that Greek legend said the whole,
the, the Trojan War took place.
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So after Schliemann, we know say that,
you know there likely was
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a Trojan War about which Homer and
his legends are being told.
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Now Schliemann never found
anything that said, you know,
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this shield belongs to Agamemnon or
here lieth the sword of Achilles.
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We don't have anything that got recovered
in the archeological evidence that
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verifies any of the details, including
characters, personages, events, any of
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the details that are recorded in the
Homeric legends and in later materials.
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But we can go ahead and
say that there was a Trojan War.
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And Homer's version of it may or
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may not correlate to any historical
event that actually took place.
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Now, diving into Homer's world is
something that we need to do with
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a bit of perhaps warning.
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It's, it's a dark world, and
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a world built on the coursing energy of
war, the coursing negative energy of war.
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It's a very stark place where things that
need to be dealt with get dealt with,
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sometimes very abruptly and summarily,
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and oftentimes with violent and
quick kinds of endings.
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We're talking about
a place that's going to be
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where human the exhibition of human
talents are typically taking place
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in the field of one dimension
of human experience.
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That's the field of conflict.
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Now all of us are going to think
about the, the, the, whether,
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was Homer's epic an anti-war epic or,
or a pro-war epic?
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It actually doesn't answer to
any of those kind of categories.
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Homer's epic I think
floats above all of them.
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Instead what he looks at is,
is a real human experience, that is,
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the experience of armed conflict
between groups of our species that
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decide to launch that kind of
thing against each other, and
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then tries to figure out what
is the human experience of this?
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What does it mean for us in our humanity?
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Looking at the Trojan War we're going to
meet lots of people who are coursing
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around in the background of it especially
in our engagement with the Odyssey.
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And it's important for
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us to know some of these characters
that emerge in Homer's Iliad.
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This is his account of the Trojan War.
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The Iliad is a poem about rage.
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And thinking about rage,
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it's obviously fronted in this
epic that is about the war.
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But what's interesting is that Homer
talks about rage of a specific kind.
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It is the rage of Achilles
that he is most interested in.
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Achilles, yes, is having war, as a Greek
is having war rage against his Trojan
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foes, but the rage that really drives
the epic is actually an inter-Greek one.
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It's Achilles versus Agamemnon.
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Achilles and Agamemnon have
an argument that starts off The Iliad.
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And these two great Greek warriors,
Agamemnon the older general and
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Achilles the younger,
extremely talented warrior have words.
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They can't quite settle them
in the appropriate way.
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Agamemnon's leadership is not up
to snuff to handle this situation.
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And so he loses, Agamemnon loses
his greatest warrior because he
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decides to go ahead and insult
Achilles in front of all of his peers.
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And when that happens,
Achilles decides to withdraw.
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Achilles sits out most of the action
of the epic in his tent, and
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when he does he wishes death
upon his own Greek comrades.
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His rage is a rage that is so bitter and
so awful, he now hates Agamemnon,
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his own Greek leader, and so
wishes that all of his compad,
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compatriots should pay the price
of Agamemnon's stupidity.
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His rage then is directed
against one of his own.
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And the business end of
that rage gets worked out
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on all of the Greek warriors as they
suffer under the onslaught of the Trojans.
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We see great characters in this fighting.
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Again, Achilles is in his tent,
but in his place arise other
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great Greek warriors to take the place
of top dog among, among the fighters.
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We have people whose names are Ajax,
Diomedes on the Greek side.
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We're going to meet another of these
figures called Odysseus pretty soon.
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On the Trojan side, the princes and kings
that marshal the forces there are led by
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King Priam with his sons Hector and
Paris as the leaders of the other side.
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The war is dark, it's nasty,
death on every page,
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and it's also unbelievably
a beautiful piece of epic poetry.
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When we close out this story Achilles
does finally put away his rage.
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He can't quite bring himself to make
up with the old, old man in his life,
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the authoritative Greek figure.
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He never does quite
reconcile with Agamemnon and
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the awful things that Agamemnon had
done to him to publicly humiliate him.
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But instead there's a moment that
Achilles gets at the end of the epic
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in order to reconcile himself in a certain
way and put away some of his rage.
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And when he does,
it is not with his superior Agamemnon.
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Instead, and strangely,
Achilles has a moment
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to express other dimensions
of his humanity than his
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warp spasm war rage with
the greatest of the Trojans.
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Priam has a moment with Achilles
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where he has a chance to ransom back
the body of his beloved son Hector,
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whom Achilles has treated with all
the vengeance of his war rage.
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And Priam comes over to Achilles's tent,
kisses the hands that killed his own son,
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and begs Achilles to show some mercy.
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Achilles decides that there's his, his
own Greeks, and particularly Agamemnon,
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are not worthy of it.
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But Priam, the Trojan general,
Trojan king,
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actually happens to be
worthy of Achilles's mercy.
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So he does relent with the kiss of
the hands gives back the body and
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Priam can bury Hector, and so ends
the Trojan War according to Homer's Iliad.
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Now you'll see here that it seems
like I've glossed over some things.
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You might say to yourself, well,
what happened to the Trojan horse?
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There's stories that we have about
Odysseus and his involvement in the war.
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There's other kinds of
stratagems that come in.
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It's a ten-year war and we've only
talked about one little part of it.
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Well, it's true Homer's Iliad focuses
on only a very short period of time.
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Most of the epic has to do with just three
days of action out on the battlefield.
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And it does not talk about a synoptic
overview of the whole Trojan War.
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Instead, that filling in of the story
comes from other epic poets
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around Homer who dig into this story and
start to tell the further pieces of it.
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And in fact there's a back story.
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We're going to find in myth
there's always a back story.
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And if you want to use the language of
contemporary cinema, we're talking about,
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you know, prequels that, that show up
after the kind of main one appears.
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And may have already been, there have been
versions of prequels that were floating
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around before Homer, but much of
the legend that we know starts to fill
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in the blanks after a great poet like
Homer makes his or her statement.
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Then the others come in round and fill in
all the details that need to be filled in.
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For example, how in the world
did this whole Trojan War start?
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Well, we wind up with a,
a legend that actually predates Homer.
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It gets encoded in his epic, but
it's not one that he concentrates on.
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There is this figure, Paris.
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You'll know him from the previous slide
as a prince and a, a son of Priam.
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He's also a little bit
of an embarrassment.
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He's not such a great warrior.
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He's more of a master of the arts of
love than he is of the arts of war.
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And in fact, he goes over and decides
that it would be the right thing for
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him to do to steal the wife of Menelaus.
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The wife of Menelaus
just happens to be Helen,
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who's the most beautiful
woman in the world.
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And when he does that, he upsets the
greatest of the Greek generals, Agamemnon,
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who just so
happens to be the brother of Menelaus.
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When Paris kidnaps Helen and
takes her back to Troy, well,
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that's the end of things.
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Off we go into the Trojan War.
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The shame that is visited on Menelaus is
visited by proxy on his brother Agamemnon,
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and Agamemnon at that time
calls in all of his chits.
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He's the most powerful of the Greek kings
of the day, pulls in all of his chits and
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says to all of his local fellow
leaders that it's time for
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us to go clobber those Trojans.
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And off they go.
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Helen, in case you may
well have heard this,
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is indeed the face that
launched a thousand ships.
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A medieval rendering of what one of
these ships might have looked like.
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Pretty good actually.
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We've got archeological evidence that
confirms what a Greek war ship looks like,
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and it's not so bad.
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And so Helen is the face that
launches a thousand ships.
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In the legend that's the number of ships
that are needed to contain the grandeur,
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the hugeness of Agamemnon's army.
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Thanks to parts of The Iliad, the detail,
all of the people that are involved,
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the famous catalogue
of ships of The Iliad,
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we can count up roughly the number of
people involved and it's about 100,000.
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Homer's claim is that an army of
100,000 leaves the shores of Greece and
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goes over to Troy to do
the dirty work over there.
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Now some people then walk into
the picture, those interested in myth, and
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say, well, wait a minute!
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There must be a back story to this one.
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How is it that Menelaus lost his
bride Helen to this guy Paris?
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Why did Paris think it
was okay to go over and
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steal the wife of the brother
of the greatest of the Greeks?
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Well, a story starts to percolate in
to fill in that kind of question and
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we have a story about
the Apple of Discord.
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Some of you all will have heard this.
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You can see here in a, a lovely painting
giving us the whole background.
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Peleus and Thetis have a wedding.
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Peleus is a great mortal a well-known and
prominent man.
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He actually gets to have
a wedding to a goddess, Thetis.
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And the two of them get together,
Peleus and
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Thetis and when they do, they have
a party and they invite everybody.
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This is one of those times when gods and
humans could actually live face to face,
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so the gods came,
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the humans came, and they all had a great
party together in this very early time.
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Peleus and Thetis,
all are invited except this goddess, Eris.
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Who is the god of discord,
who is upset about not being invited.
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She is not allowed to come, so she decides
to take an apple and inscribe on it
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a single Greek word that translates
into the English for the fairest.
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Tosses it into the middle
of the wedding and Athena,
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Hera and Aphrodite instantly
think the apple must be for them.
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They start to argue.
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They look around and say, here is a human.
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Let's make him solve the dilemma for us.
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Paris agrees.
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Again, not a very smart thing to do.
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A more clever man would have probably
put off that judgment on someone else.
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And Paris makes his judgment,
his famous judgment, saying that well,
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looking at the three of you,
yes, you're all beautiful.
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Hera, you have offered me
great power across the earth.
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Athena, you've offered me infinite wisdom.
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Aphrodite, though, you've offered me
the most beautiful woman in the world, and
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I'm going to make you now the winner
of this apple, and you need to
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give me my prize, which is going to be
the most beautiful woman in the world.
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So at that point,
Paris thinks Helen's all mine.
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Off he goes in starting
this whole thing off.
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So the whole Trojan War,
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the grandeur of this magnificent event
all boils down to an affair of the heart.
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A small thing that
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you can imagine the heartstrings
being plucked of one human being.
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That's the passion that moves
this whole grandeur that
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winds up being exhibited in war
rage that really is definitive
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of what the Greek experience is
going to be of their mythic past.