Homer s Trojan War Dawn of War DOCUMENTARY

In the swirl of blood and dust, on the plain before Troy, the mighty king Agamemnon, commander of a gigantic army of Greeks, spies two of the enemy making their way across the battlefield in their chariot. They are brothers, Pesander and Hippolycus. Fate would not be kind to them. As Homer tells the story, now the glittering reins escaped from the hands of both of them. And they were stunned with fear, for against them rose like a lion, Atreus' son, Agamemnon, and they supplicated him out of the chariot. Take us alive, son of Atreus, and take appropriate ransom. In the house of our father, the treasures lie piled in abundance. Bronze is there, and gold, and difficulty wrought iron. And our father would make you glad with abundant repayment, were he to hear we were alive by the ships of the Greeks. But Agamemnon wasn't interested. He spurned Pesander to the ground from the chariot, with a spear stroke to the chest, and he crashed on his back to the ground. Then Hippolycus sprang away, but Agamemnon killed him dismounted, cutting his arms away with a sword stroke, free of the shoulder, and sent him spinning like a log down the battle. This violent encounter occurred during the tenth and final year of the Trojan War, an epic conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans. As time went on, the fighting had grown ever more brutal, bloody, and desperate. But what exactly had brought the Greeks to this faraway city in northwest Anatolia? Why had their massive fleet of a thousand ships sailed across the Aegean Sea to wage a war against the Trojans? In this series, we will be reliving the epic tale of Homer's Trojan War. This video is brought to you by A Total War Saga, Troy. It's a brand new strategy game set during the Bronze Age Mediterranean, which dives into the legendary ten-year conflict between the kingdoms of Troy and Mycenaean Greece. Dominate your enemies through a blend of grand, turn-based empire management and spectacular real-time battles. For more information, check out the link below or stick around to the end of the video. The story of the Trojan War is known to us from ancient texts as well as from ancient art. As far as the texts are concerned, the story was recorded in a series of poems that are referred to as the Epic Cycle. Of this set, there were eight poems that dealt with the story of the Trojan War. For most of these, nothing remains except scattered fragments and summaries of their contents in later sources. Only two, the Iliad and the Odyssey, have survived. Both were attributed to Homer. However, we don't exactly know who Homer was or if this was even a proper name rather than a title. There is also disagreement about whether the Iliad and the Odyssey are the same poet or composed by two different poets. For our purposes, however, we'll continue to refer to the author of the Iliad and Odyssey simply as Homer, who most likely lived around 700 BC and was a native of either the island of Chios or the Anatolian city of Smyrna. When it comes to art, the Trojan War appears quite often in depictions such as figurative vase painting, sculptures, and reliefs. Many focus on famous scenes that are easily recognizable and which even come with handy captions, but this is not always the case given the sheer amount of artwork in question. While all this literary and artistic information is valuable, it can also become quite confusing as their contents are never entirely consistent. After all, this was a time when stories were passed down orally, which can easily generate diverging versions which might rise and fall in popularity. One can perhaps think of this as a cinematic universe where the general story arc and key characters are fixed but the adventures can change. The setting for this cinematic universe was the Age of Heroes. For the ancient Greeks, however, this was not merely an exercise of fantasy but rather an exploration of what they believed to be their distant past. Let's now consider this idea. The ancient Greeks believed that the Trojan War had been a real event that had taken place long ago. Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer, placed these events at the very end of the so-called Age of Heroes. The heroes in question had either a divine ancestry or were outright demigods, the offspring of a deity and a mortal human being. This heroic age was followed by the Age of Iron, which was Hesiod's own time and, according to the poet, a much more wretched time to live. While modern archaeologists have a better understanding of these two periods today, when the Greeks spoke of the past, they often carried over much of their own understanding of the world around them. Thus, the Age of Heroes becomes a fascinating setting which largely mirrors the contemporary world of Homer, while at the same time containing some elements of the real past that seem alien to archaic and classical Greece. Heroic Greece was carved up into a multitude of kingdoms. Each territory contained multiple towns and sometimes impressive cities, including Mycenae, Athens, Thebes, and Knossos. Most of the regions familiar from the historical era are encountered in this setting such as the Argolid in the Peloponnese and Boeotia in central Greece. Heroic society was divided into four main social groups. At the very top there was an aristocracy, referred to in Greek as the Basileis. They own sizable tracts of arable land and large numbers of livestock. They consider themselves better than the rest of the population. Indeed, they refer to themselves as aristoi, the best. Nearly all the main characters familiar to us from the story of the Trojan War belong to this social group. Within this aristocracy was a pecking order. The highest among them were kings, who ruled larger swathes of territory, such as Agamemnon, who ruled Mycenae, and Odysseus, who was the king of Ithaca. Beneath them were the princes or chiefs, some of which assisted the king in his duties and formed a council of elders who would offer advice. The next and largest social group consisted mostly of farmers, as well as a smaller number of specialist craftsmen. Farmers usually owned a small piece of land that they worked and engaged in a barter system to acquire goods that they didn't produce themselves. The specialist craftsmen most notably included metal workers, such as weapon and armour smiths. The lowest run on the social ladder was occupied by the landless poor and the slaves. The former earned a living as hired labourers, for example as helpers on farms. They are referred to as thetes. Another group, the slaves, were usually captives acquired during raids and wars, who were now considered the property of their owners. With this context in mind, let's return to the question we asked at the start of the video. Why did the Greeks decide to wage war against the Trojans? It all started with Zeus, the father of gods and men, wanting to start a war against Troy for reasons that are obscure to us. To achieve this, Zeus sent the goddess of strife, Eris, to sow discord among wedding guests by rolling a golden apple into the crowd that featured the inscription, for the most beautiful. No less than three goddesses felt that they were entitled to have this apple. They were Hera, Zeus's wife, Athena, daughter of Zeus and goddess of wisdom and warcraft, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love. They turned to Zeus to settle the issue, but he instead decided to pass on the responsibility. Zeus told Hermes, the messenger god, to take the three goddesses to Mount Ida in Anatolia, where they would come across a young man who would be the fairest judge among all mortals. This young man was called Alexander, but you might know him better as Paris. Why did he have two names? Glad you asked. Alexander was the son of none other than Priam, the king of mighty Troy, and his wife, Queen Hecuba. Right before Alexander was born, Priam had a nightmare, a prophecy that foretold that this child would bring about the fall of Troy. The king had to prevent this, but murdering someone outright was forbidden as it would create the stain of miasma or religious pollution. However, putting someone in a position to die was perfectly fine in the heroic world. So, shortly after Alexander's birth, Priam gave the boy to a herdsman, with the explicit instructions to leave him out in the open to die of exposure. But a bear nursed the boy and when the herdsman returned, he decided to take the boy into his own family and raise him as his own. It seems likely that the herdsman, to keep the boy's identity a secret, had given him a different name, thus explaining why this character is referred to in the story as both Alexander and Paris. We'll just call him Paris from here on out. In any event, the goddesses asked Paris to decide which of them deserved the apple the most. Naturally, each of them tried to bribe the young man. Hera promised him wealth and power, while Athena promised him wisdom. Aphrodite, however, said that if he were to award the apple to her, he would marry the most beautiful woman in the world. Without a moment's hesitation, Paris gave the apple to Aphrodite, making mortal enemies out of Hera and Athena, who would later side with the Greeks during the Trojan War. Shortly after rendering his judgment, Paris' royal parentage was revealed, and he was reunited with Priam and Hecuba. There were some at Troy who had misgivings about this, of course, but by and large he was embraced as a prince of Troy. At one point, he travelled across the Aegean Sea and was entertained by Menelaus, the king of Sparta, and his wife, Helen. Helen, of course, was none other than the most beautiful woman in the world, the one that Aphrodite had promised Paris in marriage. She was also, as it turned out, a daughter of Zeus, who had raped her mother, Leda, in the form of a swan. Helen had long been sought after by the men around her, and when she reached the age of marriage, many kings and princes sought her hand. Among them was the king of Ithaca, Odysseus, who convinced Tyndareus to have all the suitors swear a solemn oath to abide by whoever Helen chose to be her husband and to defend that husband against whoever would quarrel with him. All the kings and princes of Greece swore this oath. Helen picked Menelaus as her husband, binding the rest of the suitors to his defense. Fast forward some time and Paris has arrived in Sparta. When Menelaus decides to head off for Crete purpose unknown, Paris seizes the opportunity and takes Helen aboard his ship and sets off back to Troy. Whether she was abducted or went with him willingly is a point of contention. But to add insult to injury, Paris also stole a large amount of Menelaus' treasures. According to both the Cypria and the Iliad, the journey to Troy was not without its problems, as Hera conjured up a storm that blew the ship off course. As a result, Paris and Helen apparently spent some time in Sidon, a Levantine city, before reaching the safety of Troy. When Menelaus discovered that Paris had left with his wife, he flew into a rage. The king immediately went to his brother in Mycenae and demanded that Agamemnon support him in avenging this offense. The two brothers then traveled around Greece and reminded all the kings and princes of the oath that they had sworn to defend Helen's chosen husband. But not all the Basileis were eager to join Menelaus and Agamemnon in a war against Troy. The wily Odysseus pretended to have gone insane, as he had no desire to leave his wife Penelope and their newborn son Telemachus. But the emissaries soon discovered that Odysseus faked his madness and thus he had no choice but to join them in the expedition. According to the Cypria, the fleet of the combined Greek army, with Agamemnon at its head, assembled at Aulis, a city on the coast of Boeotia in central Greece. In Book 2 of the Iliad, in a passage known as the Catalogue of Ships, Homer gives a complete overview of the Greek forces. The list features 29 contingents, 44 leaders, and 175 named towns and other important places. The total number of ships brought out for the war numbers 1,186. The typical Homeric warship appears to have been a low galley of 50 oars, with the warriors probably serving as rowers themselves. This means that the Greek army consisted of around 60,000 souls, although some commentators have suggested that there may have been as many as 100,000. Keep in mind that in addition to the actual warriors, the Greek army also included servants, slaves, and dependents. The fleet set off and eventually arrived at a city that they believed was Troy, but was in fact a place called Teuthrania, situated further south along the Anatolian coast. Sadly, the mistake wasn't discovered until the Greeks had already leveled the city, but when the Greeks tried to set course north to attack the real Troy, a storm scattered the ships and they were forced to regroup at Aulis once again. This was not an auspicious start of the Trojan War, and things would not immediately get better. At Aulis, the Greek fleet was prevented from leaving due to unfavorable winds. Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, had been enraged by some slight. She could only be placated by a terrible offering. Agamemnon had to sacrifice his own daughter Iphigenia. Apparently she was lured to Aulis on the promise of marrying Achilles, the greatest of all the Greek warriors. But once she arrived, she was taken to the sacrificial altar, where her father himself stabbed her in the throat and killed her. Or at least, this is what the playwright Aeschylus tells us happened. Other sources, including Euripides and the Cypria, claim that Iphigenia was replaced at the last moment by a deer. In any event, satisfied by Agamemnon's actions, Artemis influenced the winds to change direction. The fleet could now sail for Troy. The journey across the Aegean Sea was not without any further mishaps or adventures, but those needn't detain us here. After a long journey, the shores of Troy finally came into view. The fury of Greece was about to be unleashed. If you enjoyed this episode, then definitely check out Total War Saga Troy, Creative Assembly's first entry of their award-winning series to be set in the Bronze Age Mediterranean. Explore the epic ten-year Trojan War from the perspectives of the Trojans and Greeks through a blend of grand turn-based empire management and spectacular real-time battles, where you can lead armies with eight playable legendary characters, including the heroes Achilles and Hector. Get a Total War Saga Troy on the Epic Store by clicking the link in the description below. A huge thanks is owed to our supporters on Patreon and the many talented researchers, writers, and artists who made this video possible. Please consider contributing to fund future content and let us know what you want to see covered next. Thanks for watching!