Complete Guide to Greek Mythology | The Illiad | Human Voiced, No Ads

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]Hello everyone and welcome back to part five of our complete guide to Greek mythology. Thank you again to those supporting the channel giving everything ad free. Links are in the pinned comment and description. And thank you for those following along with the playlist. Let's kick off from where we were last time when we opened with a bit of a teaser for one of the great works of Greek literature.

[00:00:26]In the opening lines of the Iliad, 27 syllables of ancient Greek that have been called the most famous words in Western literature, Homer tells you exactly what the poem is about.

[00:00:39]Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Pelos.

[00:00:46]It's not about the war. It's about the wrath, the meis. A word so extreme that in all of Greek literature it is used almost exclusively for the rage of the gods. A different kind of anger, one that mortals should really fear. And so Homer takes this divine word and applies it to a mortal, a young man, barely more than a boy, who sitting there in his tent by the black ships on the beach at Troy, refusing to fight because his commander has humiliated him. And in doing so, he announces the subject of the poem and the subject of his entire installment of our series. What happens when the most powerful human being in the world decides that his honor matters more than the lives of everybody around him?

[00:01:40]The Trojan War is a central event in Greek myth. It's the narrative around which all other narratives arrange themselves. The conflict that gathers the greatest heroes of the age into a single catastrophe.

[00:01:54]And most of them don't make it out.

[00:01:57]The climax of that heroic age we talked about in part four. The moment when the children of the gods are assembled in one place and thrown against each other.

[00:02:07]There's no real lasting peace and the triumph is only shadowed by his shame.

[00:02:15]Troy falls. We all know that. A little late for spoilers at this point. But the Greeks who sack it are cursed. They're scattered. They're shipwrecked. murdered and driven mad on their journeys home.

[00:02:29]The winners lose almost as much as the losers.

[00:02:32]The Trojan War reads from the beginning to end like a typical Greek tragedy, but this time it's on a civilizational scale. It's not just one unlucky hero meeting his doom, but everyone.

[00:02:48]Well, today we're going to trace that war from its frankly absurd beginning. a beauty contest judged by a shepherd on a hillside. We'll get into that in a minute. So, it's 10 years of grinding slaughter and that devastating conclusion that turns the city to ash.

[00:03:07]So, let's get straight into it.

[00:03:12]The war begins at a wedding. That is the wedding uh wedding rather of Pelus, a mortal king to Thetus, a sea goddess, a nerd, the most beautiful of the daughters of the old sea god Naas.

[00:03:28]And of course, this was not a simple little contract signing ceremony, not at the registry office. It was a grand affair attended by all the gods of Olympia except for one. Ays, the goddess of strife. No invite for Aries, I'm afraid.

[00:03:47]But there was a reason for that. You don't invite Strife to a wedding. But it was also dangerous because Aerys, uninvited, decided to show up anyway.

[00:03:57]She walked into the banquet hall and rolled a golden apple across the floor.

[00:04:03]On it was inscribed a single word, Khalisti, for the fairest.

[00:04:10]Three goddesses claimed the apple. Hera, queen of the gods, Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love and desire.

[00:04:23]The problem was each believed that she was the fairest one. And as all three of those hands touched the apple, they kind of looked at each other. awkwardly.

[00:04:34]What are you doing? I'm the prettiest.

[00:04:38]Of course, they were all too proud to yield.

[00:04:41]Zeus was watching from the corner, and he sensed a catastrophe that would follow any judgment that he made. No matter who he chose, the other two would become his enemies forever.

[00:04:54]So, he decided to not make a choice at all. He was saying, "No, I'm not getting involved." pretty smart on Zeus's account. Unfortunately, he was delegating this decision to a mortal, a young Trojan prince named Paris, also named Alexandros, um who was at the moment tending his father's flocks on the slopes of Mount Edah, just outside the walls of Troy.

[00:05:22]Paris had been exposed at birth. Again, the recurring motive because prophecy had declared he would be the ruin of Troy. When we mean exposed, basically just left out in the sun, left to die.

[00:05:37]Kind of way the Spartans would throw them off cliffs. Of course, the Spartans weren't the only ones doing that, but the most famous motive perhaps.

[00:05:45]Well, his mother, Hecuba, had dreamed while pregnant that she gave birth to a flaming torch that set the city on fire.

[00:05:56]The seers interpreted the dream that the child would destroy Troy.

[00:06:03]The infant was given to a shepherd and left on a mountain to die.

[00:06:08]But he survived. He was raised as a shepherd, and now the three most powerful goddesses in the universe stood before him on his hillside, and each offered him a bribe.

[00:06:21]He had to make a choice. But they had something for him in return. A sweetening of the deal. As for Hera, she offered power. Dominion over all of Asia, kingship over the greatest empire in the world.

[00:06:37]That's a pretty good deal. A hard act to follow. Well, Athena chimed in. She offered wisdom and military glory. He would have the ability to win every battle to be the greatest warrior alive.

[00:06:53]Also sounds good. But it was Aphrodites offer that was really tempting. She offered the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta.

[00:07:07]Problem was, Helen was already married to King Menaus.

[00:07:11]She was the daughter of Zeus and later, a woman whose beauty was so extreme that every king in Greece had once competed for her hand.

[00:07:21]Well, Paris was a red-blooded young man like anyone else. He chose Aphrodite.

[00:07:29]Maybe love, desire, beauty, lust. Well, that's up to you. depends on your interpretation of his choice.

[00:07:39]He chose the personal over the political. And in doing so, he chose the destruction of his city, the death of his brothers, the enslavement of his mother, and the end of Trojan civilization.

[00:07:54]The judgment of Paris is the founding act of the Trojan War. And it is an act of breathtaking selfishness.

[00:08:02]You see, it was one man's desire for one beautiful woman weighed against the survival of an entire people.

[00:08:11]And the desire wins. The personal devours the political. And the myth puts this across in no uncertain terms. They don't really dance around the issue of it. Paris is not put across as somebody who's chosen a prudent choice. But really, he was shoehorned into a bad decision, whatever he was doing.

[00:08:34]Anyway, before we uh get into that, you've got to pause for a moment, because you've got to think about what this story tells us about the Greek understanding of war.

[00:08:46]The Trojan War is not caused by a just grievance. It's not uh something by uh economic necessity or land or anything like that, but rather about vanity and desire.

[00:09:00]Three goddesses quarreling in a beauty contest and a young man chooses.

[00:09:06]That's it. This is the cause of a 10-year slaughter of the destruction of one of the great cities of the ancient world.

[00:09:16]And not to mention the deaths of Achilles, Hector, and Patrick, and Ajax, and thousands of unnamed soldiers whose bones were just scattered across the Trojan plane.

[00:09:28]Well, the triviality of the cause is the entire point. The Greeks did not believe that great wars require great reasons.

[00:09:38]They believe the great wars require only small passions amplified by power and the machinery of obligation until a quarrel between three goddesses at a wedding becomes a continent on fire.

[00:09:53]But then there's a deeper layer to the wedding of Pelus and Thetus. The reason Thetus was married to a mortal in the first place.

[00:10:02]You see, Thetus was a goddess, an immortal, a nari of extraordinary beauty.

[00:10:09]How on earth did she end up with Pausm?

[00:10:13]After all, both Zeus and Poseidon had a bit of a thing for her. Why not choose them?

[00:10:21]Well, a prophecy delivered by Prometheus, who was uh still chained to his rock at this time, still bargaining with his knowledge, warned that Thetus's son would be greater than his father.

[00:10:36]So, if Zeus fathered a son on Thetus, that a son would uh well, that son rather would overthrow him just as Zeus had overthrown Kronos and just as Kronos had overthrown Oruranos.

[00:10:50]the cycle of divine succession. That pattern we traced in part one. Well, that's still operative, still threatening.

[00:10:58]Zeus's response to all this was to ensure that Thetus married a mortal instead so that her son would be a mortal hero. Now, that doesn't mean that he's not going to be great. Sure, he would be quite great, but he would not be a god and not a threat to the Olympian order.

[00:11:18]And so Achilles is the product of this calculation.

[00:11:23]He's born to be extraordinary, but not to be divine.

[00:11:28]Born to be the greatest man who ever lived, but condemned by the politics of Olympus, never to be more than just that, a man.

[00:11:38]His mortality was engineered. Zeus traded Thetus' child's divinity for his own survival, ensuring that her extraordinary son would be magnificent, but at the end of the day, just a mortal, never enough to threaten Olympus.

[00:11:55]And Achilles suffers because Zeus was afraid.

[00:12:02]Paris went to Sparta. He was received as a guest by Menaus, the institution of Zenya, guest friendship. the most sacred social obligation in the Greek world.

[00:12:14]Good hospitality basically. It required a host to protect and honor his guest as a oh and a guest to respect his host's household too.

[00:12:24]Well, of course, Paris was going to violate this obligation, not just in, you know, an accident way like breaking a dish. He was there to steal Menaaus's wife, which is generally not good to your guest.

[00:12:42]Well, depending on what story you go with, he either seduced or abducted her.

[00:12:50]He fled with Helen to Troy.

[00:12:53]He took her, and he took a substantial portion of Menace's treasury with her, too. The violation was triple. He had a breach of guest friendship, a theft of a wife, and a robbery.

[00:13:07]It was an offense against every code the Greeks held sacred, and it demanded retribution on the scale that matched the offense.

[00:13:16]But Helen, she was not merely Menaaus's wife. You see, remember, she was a daughter of Zeus, conceived when Zeus came to her mother later in the form of a swan, and she was the most beautiful woman the world had ever had.

[00:13:32]And before her marriage to Menaaus, every king and prince in Greece wanted her. And her stepfather Tindarius, terrified that the rejected suitors would start a war among themselves, had made them all swear an oath that whoever won Helen's hand, the rest would come to his defense if Helen were ever taken from him.

[00:13:54]That was the oath of Tindarius. It was the mechanism that transformed a domestic dispute into this continental war that we're dealing with. So when Paris took Helen, guess what? Dust off the oath. Every king who had sworn it was bound to it. And they all joined the expedition to recover her.

[00:14:16]But then of course there is this question of Helen's agency.

[00:14:21]Did she actually go willingly or was she forced?

[00:14:26]Very good question. And when you look at the ancient sources, they don't give an answer. They leave it deliberately open for your interpretation.

[00:14:36]Now, Homer's Helen in the Iliad is a figure of extraordinary complexity.

[00:14:42]She regrets what she's done. She despises Paris. She mourns the suffering that she's caused, but she does remain in Troy. She even calls herself a quote [ __ ] The word is hers, not the narrators. And she weaves a tapestry depicting the battles being fought over her as if she is simultaneously the cause of war and its historian.

[00:15:08]Uripides in his play Helen proposed a bit of an alternative and that was that the real Helen never even went to Troy at all. the God center Phantom and Idolon, a copy made of cloud, and the Greeks and Trojans for 10 years over what was basically an illusion.

[00:15:28]The real Helen waited in Egypt the entire time, innocent and faithful and ultimately safe.

[00:15:38]or the possibility that the war was fought over nothing. That's one of the most destabilizing ideas in Greek myth.

[00:15:46]Really, it suggests that the entire heroic enterprise was just some kind of cosmic joke. The men basically died for a hologram in spiritual form.

[00:15:59]Ellen's own voice in the Iliad is rare, but when it does pop up, it's pretty powerful.

[00:16:05]In book three, she stands on the walls of Troy with Pry, identifying the Greek warriors below. A scene called the viewing from the walls, by the way. And her descriptions are marked by a weary precision.

[00:16:20]The voice of a woman who's seen too much and well judged herself quite harshly.

[00:16:25]In book six, she tells Hector that she wishes she had died before coming to Troy and that she in Paris are cursed.

[00:16:33]The line goes like this. Set to be the subjects of song for generations to come.

[00:16:41]Well, quite self-aware, isn't it? Helen even knows at this point that she's going to be a character in a great myth.

[00:16:50]She knows that her suffering will become a kind of story and entertainment. And she knows that future generations will sing about her beauty and catastrophe.

[00:16:59]And she hates that. He hates being reduced to a story. Doesn't want to be this agit prop. Resents the Cleos that will immortalize her shame.

[00:17:11]Talk about the meat in the sandwich, huh? Forgo.

[00:17:16]Helen is the most famous woman in Greek mythology. And she doesn't want to be.

[00:17:22]Her fame is her punishment.

[00:17:25]Well, there's another question to a more historical one. Was there a real Troy or was there a real war? Well, that's been quite fascinating, too. And if you've watched our video on it, you'll know that Hinrich Schleman excavated the site of Hiselic in northwestern Turkey in 1870s, and he announced that he had found Homer's Troy. The site is real. It is. There's not really any argument about that anymore. The city existed and was destroyed violently around 1180, the approximate date the Greeks uh themselves assigned to the Trojan War.

[00:18:05]Whether that destruction was caused by a Greek military expedition, earthquake or civil unrest remains debated. After all, 1200 B.CE was pretty much bad for everyone. the upheaval at the collapse of the Bronze Age, the first end of the world since the Ice Age, I suppose.

[00:18:25]But that's not really what we're here to talk about. All we can say now is that some conflict, some siege, some catastrophe involving the city at Hisleik lies behind the Home tradition.

[00:18:40]And the myth is not a pure invention, but rather memory transformed by oral transmission into something grander and perhaps more terrible than whatever actually happened.

[00:18:55]Well, let's get to the war itself. The Greek fleet gathered at Olis on the coast of Boidia. over a thousand ships.

[00:19:04]According to the catalog of ships in the book two of the Iliad, one of the oldest and most detailed military rosters in Western literature, by the way, the commanders were the greatest of the age, a star lineup. You had Agamemnon of My, the king of kings, the supreme commander whose authority rested on his wealth and lineage mourn on his personal courage.

[00:19:28]Then there was his brother, Menaaus, the wronged husband, whose cause was the war's official justification. And he wasn't going to miss it for the world.

[00:19:38]You had Achilles of Pythia, the son of Pelus and the goddess Thetus, the fastest and most deadliest warrior alive, who had been given a choice by the fates. A long, peaceful and forgotten life or a short one, but one of imperishable glory.

[00:19:57]Guess what he chose? Well, there's a reason why we still talk about him. He chose that short life, glory of a homecoming, Troy over the quiet years that might have followed.

[00:20:10]Then there was Odicius of Ithaca, a man of cunning who had tried to avoid the war by feigning madness, plowing his fields with an ox and a donkey yoke uh yolked together and sewing salt instead of seed. His deception was exposed when Palamedes placed Odysius's infant son, Telmarcus, in front of the plow. Odysius swerved to avoid his child, proving that he was just making the whole thing up.

[00:20:40]Imagine calling a sick day for the war, huh?

[00:20:44]Well, it tells us two things about Odysius. One, that he's clever enough to devise an elaborate ruse, which we'll get to that in part six. And that he loves his son enough to uh abandon it.

[00:20:57]He will spend 20 years trying to get back to that son.

[00:21:06]Well, then we had Ajax of Salamus. Yes, that Ajax, the biggest and strongest of the Greeks after Achilles. An absolute mountain of a man. Veritable brick [ __ ] house, if we can use layman's terms.

[00:21:21]Probably shouldn't, but you know. Well, he fought with a shield as large as a tower. and he never received any divine help. He didn't need it. He never had a god come in and save him. He relied entirely on his own massive mortal strength, and there was plenty of it.

[00:21:41]Then there was old Netor of Pilos, the counselor, the voice of reason. He had fought in the previous generation's wars and was now offered advice that was sometimes wise and sometimes merely long- winded.

[00:21:58]Then there was Domedes of Argos, the most underrated hero of the war in my opinion. He wounded both Aphrodite and Aries on the battlefield, a mortal that drew divine blood, a feat almost without parallel in mythology at all.

[00:22:15]Then there was Patrick, the companion of Achilles, his closest friend, whose relationship with Achilles is the emotional center of the Iliad and whose death will trigger the catastrophe that defines the poem.

[00:22:30]The exact nature of their relationship is debatable, too, whether they were brothers in arms, friends, or maybe something a little more.

[00:22:41]Asalus in a lost play treated them as something more. Home is a bit more ambiguous, describing an intimacy so intense that transcends easy categorization.

[00:22:55]What is not ambiguous is the depth of the bond. Achilles loves Patrick more than he loves his own life. And when Patrick dies, his response is a grief so extreme that it defines the final act of the war.

[00:23:11]But before the fleet could sail, the wind died.

[00:23:16]The goddess Artemus, offended by Agamemnon, who had boasted that he was a better hunter than she was, or who had killed a sacred deer, depending on the source, be calmed the fleet at all.

[00:23:31]The ships sat motionless.

[00:23:34]The army grew restless. The seer calculus delivered the oracle. Artemus demanded a sacrifice. She demanded the life of Agamemnon's eldest daughter if again.

[00:23:48]Well, Agamenon agreed. Not getting any father of the year awards for that one.

[00:23:54]He sent a message to his wife Clemenstra.

[00:23:58]Clemenestra, excuse me, telling her to bring Ifagena to Olas on the pretext of marriage to Achilles.

[00:24:05]The girl came excited, believing she was about to marry the greatest warrior in Greece.

[00:24:12]Instead, she was led to an altar and killed like an animal. Or in a more merciful version of the story told by Uripides, snatched away at the last moment by Arteimus, who substituted a deer on the altar and carried Ifagenia to Taurus, where she became Artemis' priestess.

[00:24:31]In any case, the damage was done.

[00:24:34]Agamemnon had killed his own child to get a favorable wind. He chosen the war over his daughter.

[00:24:43]Not good. Not good at all.

[00:24:47]Well, Glam Ministra never forgave him.

[00:24:51]Understandable, of course. She waited 10 years through the entire war, nursing her rage in a palace at Mason, planning her husband's destruction with the patience of a goddess. And when Agamemnon finally came home, she drew him a bath and once he was nice and relaxed, killed him. The murder of If Fagenia is the first domino in a chain of retribution that will consume the house of Atreas for generations.

[00:25:22]Well, eventually the fleet sailed and the Greeks arrived at Troy.

[00:25:28]And for 9 years, nothing happened. or rather everything happened, but nothing was resolved.

[00:25:35]The Greeks put the city to siege. They raided the countryside, sacked the Allied towns. Plenty skirmishes and duels. But the walls of Troy, built by Apollo and Poseidon, if you believe the myth, they held. And the wall ground on year after year in a stalemate that mirrors the 10-year stalemate of the Titanamaki, if you didn't notice. M well the parallel is deliberate. Of course it is. The war at Troy is a human echo of the war of the gods. And like the titanarchy, it will be decided not by endurance but by a crisis that changes everything.

[00:26:22]Homer does not depict the early years of the war. These events were told in Kipria and other poems of the epic cycle which are and before you ask now lost.

[00:26:34]Fingers crossed we'll find them. But from summaries and fragments we know that the Greeks raided extensively.

[00:26:42]Achilles sacked 12 cities by sea and 11 by land accumulating plunder captives the war prizes that would later cause such catastrophe.

[00:26:53]It was during these raids that Achilles captured Gracius, his prize, his t-re, and Agamemnon captured Gracius.

[00:27:04]The war prizes were not merely wealth, but they were the currency of honor, a visible proof that the warrior was valued by his community, kind of showing off a trophy, this kind of thing. To take a man's war prize was to take his standing, his identity, and his place in the hierarchy of worth.

[00:27:23]The quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon is not at bottom about a woman, but it's all about recognition, about whether the community will acknowledge the warrior's value or treat him as a resource to be exploited and discarded.

[00:27:39]The Iliad covers only a few weeks near the end of the 9inth year. A tiny slice of the timeline, and its subject is not the war itself.

[00:27:50]Sure, that's important, but the main thing is the wrath of Achilles.

[00:27:56]The crisis begins with a quarrel over plunder. Agamemnon has taken as war prize a woman named Cus, a daughter of a priest of Apollo.

[00:28:08]Well, Apollo is not happy about that. He didn't really ask for permission, didn't he? So, Apollo sends a plague on the Greek camp.

[00:28:17]Alkas the seer identifies the cause. He tells Agamemnon that he has to return the girl.

[00:28:26]Well, Agamemnon agrees, but he demands compensation.

[00:28:30]He takes Brecius, a woman who had been awarded to Achilles as his prize.

[00:28:37]Well, that insult is devastating.

[00:28:39]Preseus is not merely a captive, but a symbol of Achilles's honor. His t, as we said, is public recognition, a tangible proof the community values him above others. So that's why the insult runs so deep. By taking Brusius, Agamemnon isn't just stealing a woman, but he's declaring that Achilles honor is subordinate to his own. that the greatest warrior in the army is in the hierarchy of the camp just another subordinate.

[00:29:10]It's kind of like he's telling him, "Know your place." Kicking him back down. You might be the best warrior, but I'm the king.

[00:29:21]But guess what Achilles does? He doesn't fly into a rage. He just withdraws.

[00:29:27]He goes to his tent. He refuses to fight. He asks his mother, Thetus, to petition Zeus. Let the Trojans win. And the Greeks realize how much they needed him in the first place. No Achilles, no victory. Let them suffer and die.

[00:29:48]Agamemnon's arrogance should cost him everything, right?

[00:29:53]Well, Zeus agrees reluctantly, though, because supporting the Trojans will put him in conflict with Hera and Athena, who favor the Greeks, and the tide of the battle turns. The Trojans, led by Hector, push the Greeks back to their ships. The situation becomes desperate.

[00:30:12]Agamemnon sends an embassy to Achilles.

[00:30:15]Ajax, Odysius, and the old tutor Phoenix offering an extraordinary ransom. The return of Brusius, seven tripods, 10 talents of gold, 20 cauldrons, 12 horses, seven women skilled in crafts, and one of Agimemnon's own daughters in marriage.

[00:30:34]Achilles refuses all. His wrath is beyond comprehension. No amount of treasure can repair what was taken.

[00:30:44]The honor cannot be bought back because it was not sold, was stolen. And that theft revealed the truth about Achilles position in the army. That he's valued not only for what he produces. Well, not for what he is, but that no gift can unsay any of this.

[00:31:05]Well, unfortunately, Achilles refusal is one of the controversial moments in the Iliad.

[00:31:11]Do you think he's justified?

[00:31:13]I mean, for me, I would refuse. There's no way. I mean, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube after that insult. It's kind of like getting fired and then all of a sudden they call you in for a shift. I think a few of us have had that kind of situation.

[00:31:28]He was publicly humiliated and violated.

[00:31:31]But his withdrawal means the death of his comrades. You see, there's Greeks dying now because Achilles isn't going to fight. And his demand that Zeus help the Trojans is in effect. Well, it's treason, isn't it? It's a demand that his own allies and friends be slaughtered to satisfy his pride.

[00:31:55]Well, moving on.

[00:31:59]Is the honor worth more than lives?

[00:32:03]Personal dignity more than collective survival? That's the question that Achilles is grappling with. The Ilia doesn't resolve the tension either.

[00:32:13]presents both sides with an equal force leaves the reader there to decide.

[00:32:19]The Greeks who first heard the Iliad performed would have recognized this question as urgent and unanswerable because it is the question that every warrior culture has to face. What do you do when the system that rewards courage also produces injustice?

[00:32:38]While doing his withdrawal, Achilles does something extraordinary.

[00:32:42]He sings.

[00:32:44]Homer tells us that Achilles was found by the embassy sitting in his tent playing the liar and singing the glorious deeds of men. Clear Andrron, the very songs that constitute the epic tradition of which the Iliad is itself a part of.

[00:33:02]Achilles in his tent performing the Iliad before the Iliad even exists.

[00:33:09]He's singing about the heroes while refusing to be one. He stepped outside of the heroic system. No longer participating in the war. He doesn't care anymore. He just contemplates the system from the outside.

[00:33:25]The image is one of the most psychologically complex in Homer. You see, the warrior is playing this poet role, a man of action just in reflection.

[00:33:36]and he understands his own mythology well enough to critique it.

[00:33:42]In his speech to the embassy, Achilles does something even more radical. He questions the value of Cleos itself.

[00:33:50]He says, "Cattle and fat sheep can be seized. Tripods and horses can be won, but a man's life that can never be won back once it's crossed the barrier of his teeth."

[00:34:05]He's saying what no other heric hero ever says, that life is worth more than glory.

[00:34:12]That the system that trades life for fame is a bad deal.

[00:34:17]Perhaps there's a rational choice, that long, quiet life. Maybe it would have been better.

[00:34:25]For a moment in his tent, Achilles sees through that heroic code and he looks at that reality beneath it. That glory is the compensation for death. But if you can avoid it, you would not need the compensation.

[00:34:40]What's the point in fighting anyway?

[00:34:43]This is the kind of stuff that he's grappling with at the moment. Talk about a demoralization.

[00:34:49]It's a devastating insight, too, especially within this context of Greek heroism.

[00:34:55]And Achilles will ultimately reject it.

[00:34:58]He will choose to fight and die and be remembered. But at least for one extraordinary passage, the greatest hero in Greek mythology considers just packing up and going home.

[00:35:12]And I suppose after he got treated by the king, you can't really blame him.

[00:35:20]Now the crisis breaks when Patricklas begs Achilles to let him fight. Unable to watch the Greeks being slaughtered while Achilles is sulking in the tent, Achilles agrees, but Patrick must wear Achilles armor. He may lead Achilles men, the Mermodons, into battle. But he must only drive the Trojans back from the ships. He must not pursue them to the walls of Troy. He must not seek glory for himself.

[00:35:51]Well, guess what? Patrick breaks the conditions. He fights brilliantly and so brilliantly that the Trojans believe Achilles himself has returned.

[00:36:02]He drives them back. He kills the Trojan ally, Sapedon, a son of Zeus, by the way, whose death Zeus himself cannot prevent. And in the heat of battle, he forgets Achilles warning.

[00:36:15]He charges toward the walls of Troy and it's there that Apollo strikes him. A god hits him from behind, knocks the helmet from his head, the armor from his body, the spear from his hand. He's stunned. He's stripped Achilles uh of Achilles divine armor. Patrick is wounded by Euphorus and then killed by Hector who drives a spear through his belly as he lies helpless on the ground.

[00:36:47]Achilles grief is one of the most shattering passages too in the tale. He tears his hair out and he throws himself on the ground pouring dust over his head screaming. And the scream is so terrible that Thetus in the depths of the sea hears it and rises. He lies in the dirt weeping and his companions hold him because they're afraid that he will cut his own throat.

[00:37:12]The language Homer uses to describe Achilles mourning is that used to describe the mourning of a woman for her husband.

[00:37:19]Achilles mourns Patrick with the grief of a panicked widow. The grief of the most intimate, most total loss that imagination could conceive.

[00:37:31]The consequences are immediate and apocalyptic.

[00:37:35]Achilles returns to battle. He's not doing it for any honorable Greek cause.

[00:37:40]This time it's personal. He wants revenge.

[00:37:44]Thetus commissions Hefistas to forge new armor, the shield of Achilles. On one of the uh most famous passages in the Iliad, they do this which the smith god depicts the entire known world. Cities at peace, cities at war, weddings, sieges, the ocean, everything. As if Achilles was carrying the whole weight of the world into battle on one arm.

[00:38:08]The shield is a cosmos in miniature. You see, the whole world beautiful and terrible.

[00:38:15]Aisus placed it in two cities. Oh, what places on it? Two cities rather, excuse me. One at peace where a wedding procession moves through the streets and a law case is being settled in the agura and one at war where armies clash and women watch from the walls between the cities the countryside plowing harvesting all the normal stuff and around the rim a great riveros encircles everything.

[00:38:46]Achilles carries this into battle, knowing that everything depicted on it will not be his. He's chosen the short life, and he's sure about it now. The world on the shield is a world he will never inhabit.

[00:39:02]The cost of glory rendered in bronze.

[00:39:05]He fights with a fury that terrifies both sides. He fills the river Scamander with so many Trojan corpses that the river itself rises against him, flooding its banks, trying to drown the man who is polluting it with death.

[00:39:20]The gods themselves enter the battle, Aries against Athena, Aphroditi against Hera, Apollo against Poseidon, and for a moment, the Trojan War becomes a second title, a war between gods fought on a human battlefield.

[00:39:37]And then Achilles finds Hector.

[00:39:40]The duel between them, the climax of the Iliad. That was one of those great confrontations.

[00:39:48]Well, Hector runs. The greatest Trojan warrior, the defender of the city, the man who killed Patrick. runs from Achilles in terror three times around the walls of Troy with the entire city watching from the battlements and his father Pry and mother Hecuba screaming from the gates. Achilles is behind him, silent, relentless, and unstoppable.

[00:40:13]Athena steps in. She tricks Hector into stopping, disguising herself as his brother, Deopus, offering to stand with him. And when Hector turns to face Achilles, this Dopobos has vanished.

[00:40:28]Hector then understands what happened.

[00:40:31]He says, "The gods have called me to death."

[00:40:36]He fights and he dies.

[00:40:39]But Achilles, his revenge still unsatisfied, ties Hector's body to his chariot and drags it around the city of Troy, round and around in full view of everyone. even Hector's family. He does this day after day, desecrating the corpse of the man he has killed.

[00:41:01]The Iliad does not end with Achilles triumph, but rather an act of grace.

[00:41:06]Pry, the old king of Troy, comes to the Greek camp at night. He's alone and unarmed. He's only guided by Hermes.

[00:41:17]And when he gets there, he kneels before Achilles, kisses the hands of the man who killed his son, and begs for Hector's body.

[00:41:27]He tells Achilles, "Remember your own father." And Achilles does remember. He remembers Pelus, whom he will never see again. He remembers that Pry is a father, too. And for a moment, the war stops.

[00:41:45]The enemy becomes humanized.

[00:41:48]The killer and the bererieved sit together. Both of them have lost something. Achilles weeps for Patrick.

[00:41:56]Pry weeps for Hector.

[00:41:58]And the weeping is the most human thing in the poem.

[00:42:02]So Achilles returns the body and the truce is called. The Trojans bury Hector and the Iliad ends with a funeral.

[00:42:12]The bone that begins in wrath ends in mourning, and the mourning is shared between enemies who have for one night finally recognized each other as human.

[00:42:24]The ending is perhaps one of the most remarkable artistic decisions in literature.

[00:42:30]Homer could have ended with triumph.

[00:42:33]That would have been the more Greek style, don't you think? He could have ended with the death of Hector and Achilles standing victorious.

[00:42:41]But instead, it's just an old man weeping and a young man who understands.

[00:42:48]The Iliad resolves none of the problems, not the war, not the cause of the wrath, and it pointedly refuses to offer a moral. It offers something more precious, I think, but a little disturbing, too. That shared moment of humanity in the middle of the violence.

[00:43:07]It's grace, I suppose. the grace of seeing a person within the enemy.

[00:43:12]And then the moment just passes and the war resumes.

[00:43:17]Troy will fall.

[00:43:20]But for one night, at least the killing stopped, and that was enough to make a point. That was everything.

[00:43:29]Now, as for the Iliad, that ends before this fall of Troy, but the story continues in the poems of the epic cycle. lost. Now, just a few summaries and later sources, but we get the picture. The events that follow Hector's funeral are a cascade of loss.

[00:43:49]Achilles killed Menon, the Ethiopian king, son of the Dawn goddess Eos in single combat, and wept for her son. Her tears are the morning dew in Greek tradition.

[00:44:04]Achilles killed Penthylia, the Amazon queen, who came to Troy's aid, and she died. And their eyes met at this time, Achilles falling in love with her at the moment of death.

[00:44:19]Well, then there was Paris, the weakest of Pry's sons, the man who started this whole war, the shepherd who judged the goddess, shot an arrow at Achilles, and Apollo guided it to the one place that Achilles was vulnerable, his elbow.

[00:44:39]I'm just kidding. His heel, of course.

[00:44:43]Well, Thetus had dipped her infant son in the river sticks to make him invulnerable, but she had held him by the heel, you see, and that heel remained mortal. The greatest warrior in the world, killed by the least impressive man in the war, with divine assistance to a vulnerability so small it seems almost comic.

[00:45:04]The Achilles heel, the fatal weakness of the hero, well, that's become a permanent metaphor in our western language. It lies in the power of its absurdity. All that strength, glory, and suffering undone by an inch of unprotected skin.

[00:45:21]Well, the death of Achilles completes the bargain he made with fate. He chose the short life. He chose Cleos over nost. That is glory over homecoming.

[00:45:33]The fate kept its end of the deal with precision.

[00:45:37]The glory is immeasurable and life is short. Achilles is killed before Troy falls and he never sees that victory.

[00:45:45]Never goes home. Never sees his poor father Pelus again.

[00:45:50]But he gets exactly what he chose, you see. The imperishable fame.

[00:45:56]And well, here we are still talking about him 3,000 years later.

[00:46:01]So that's something surely.

[00:46:05]But he also gets what he chose to pay.

[00:46:08]Everything else. The Iliad's deepest insight is not that glory is good or bad. It's just that glory is exactly as expensive as it claims to be. The price is non-negotiable.

[00:46:23]No bargaining with fate. No escaping destiny.

[00:46:29]Well, after Achilles death, Ajax and Odysius quarreled over his armor. Hot ticket item, the divine armor forged by Heristas. Everybody wanted that. The Greeks voted and the armor was awarded to Odysius.

[00:46:46]Ajax, the great warrior who had carried Achilles body from the battlefield, but fought with nothing but his own strength.

[00:46:54]Well, he went mad. He was not impressed.

[00:46:58]Neither was Athena, though, because she struck him with, excuse me, the uh same divine madness that afflicted Heracles.

[00:47:10]In the madness, he slaughtered a flock of sheep, believing them to be Odysius and Agimemnon.

[00:47:18]And when the madness lifted, he saw the sheep's blood on his own hands, and he took his own life because of it.

[00:47:26]Sophagles Ajax dramatizes this with devastating restraint. The strongest man in the army who never needed any divine help is destroyed by the one thing that strength cannot combat and that's shame.

[00:47:42]Thus the war entered its 10th year. Troy still stood and Odysius well he devised a strategim that would end it.

[00:47:53]He ordered the construction of a great wooden horse, hollow, large enough to hold a company of soldiers. The Greeks hid their best warriors in there.

[00:48:04]Odysius, Domedes, Neopelamus, Achilles son, by the way, and others. And then the entire Greek fleet sailed away, leaving the horse on the beach, apparently an offering to the gods, a sign of retreat.

[00:48:21]While the Trojans debated, lots of scratching of heads and rubbing of chins.

[00:48:28]Cassandra Pry's daughter, the prophetess cursed by Apollo to speak the truth and never be believed, screamed that it was a trap.

[00:48:37]Leon, the priest of Poseidon, held a spear at the horse and declared, "I fear Greeks, even bearing gifts."

[00:48:48]Well, in Virgil's Latin, it was donos adona ferentes. One of the most quoted phrases in Latin.

[00:48:58]Well, Athena sent two serpents from the sea that crushed Laon and his sons. And the Trojans, interpreting the serpents as divine punishment for attacking a sacred offering, dragged the horse inside the walls.

[00:49:12]That night, while Troy slept, the Greeks climbed out.

[00:49:17]The Trojan horse is well, it's pretty famous, right? Everyone knows about it metaphorically and literally.

[00:49:26]It's a generic term for any deception that invites the enemy to destroy himself.

[00:49:33]It's Odicius's masterpiece, truly, a triumph of uh intelligence over brute force. It's worth noting what the horse represents in the larger mythology.

[00:49:44]The war that force could not win in 10 years was won in a single night by a pretty clever trick. The warriors who could not breach Troy's walls from the outside were carried inside by Troy's own citizens who dragged the instrument of their destruction through the very gates of their city with their own hands.

[00:50:06]The horse is the ultimate expression of Greek conviction that intelligence is the real power. The clever man's more lethal than the strong one, and the most devastating weapons are the ones you can't see.

[00:50:20]Achilles spear couldn't take Troy, but Odysius's mind could.

[00:50:26]And the price Odysius will pay for his cleverness, 10 years of wandering, the loss of all his companions, the near destruction of his household, will be the subject of our final chapter.

[00:50:42]The ilio pierces, the sack of Troy as the Greeks called it, was one of the most frequently depicted and most deeply felt subjects in Greek art and literature. And it was, of course, depicted not as a triumph, but a complete horror. The Greeks were not celebrating the fall of Troy. They mourned it. Or rather, they used as a mirror, a kind of agit prompt to examine their own capacity for cruelty and sacrilege through the lens of a mythological event that laid bare the worst of what a quote civilized people could do.

[00:51:19]The Greeks opened the gates and the fleet returned under cover of darkness.

[00:51:24]That's when the slaughter began.

[00:51:27]Old King Pry who had came to Achilles in the night who had kissed the hands of his son's killer and granted the dignity of a truce. He was murdered at his own altar by Naoptoos, Achilles son. The boy killed the old man in a sacred precinct, a crime against every code of warfare and religion that the Greeks possessed.

[00:51:51]Astanox, Hector's infant son, was taken and thrown from the walls of Troy because the son of Hector might one day seek vengeance. And because the men who sacked Troy, well, they understood with terrible clarity that the cycle of retribution would never end as long as Hector's bloodline survived.

[00:52:14]And then there was Cassandra.

[00:52:17]She was dragged from the temple of Athena by Ajax the lesser, the other Ajax, not the great one who had taken the selfch checkout line.

[00:52:27]And he did things unspeakable right at the goddess's altar, clinging to the sacred statue.

[00:52:36]The violation of a sacred space, the assault on a woman under divine protection, an act so sacrilegious that even the victorious Greeks were appalled.

[00:52:48]Athena, whose own priestess had been violated in her own temple by her own allies, turned against the Greeks entirely.

[00:52:58]And her rage would pursue them across the sea on their journeys home, wrecking ships and drowning men, ensuring that the victory at Troy would cost the victors more than the defeated.

[00:53:09]Hecuba Pry's queen who had dreamed of the fire brand had lost her husband as sons a city in freedom and she was taken as a slave in Uripides the Trojan woman. She sits in the ruins of her palace and the play is nothing but her grief. The grief of a queen reduced to slavery and a mother who outlived every child she ever had.

[00:53:38]Well, let's uh think about it in terms of an anti-war piece of art. It's performed in Athens in 415 B.CE.

[00:53:48]The year that the Athenians were preparing their expedition to Sicily, by the way. An expedition that would well not work out very well for them at all.

[00:53:57]Uripides held up the mirror of Troy and showed his audience what conquest looks like from the other side.

[00:54:06]The Athenians watched. They understood.

[00:54:09]And then they just sailed to Sicily.

[00:54:11]Anyway, Andromark, Hector's wife, the woman who had stood at the walls and watched her husband chased to death, who had begged him not to fight, and who had told him that he was her father, mother, brother, her husband all in one, was awarded to Naamus as a concubine, the wife of the noblelest Trojan, becoming the property of the son of the man who killed him.

[00:54:39]A precise and deliberate cruelty. It's not enough to kill the enemy. You have to take his wife, child, legacy, and future. Erase him completely so that nothing remains.

[00:54:51]But there was one who escaped.

[00:54:54]Anias, the son of Aphroditi, the Trojan prince who would carry his aged father Ankises on his back throughout the burning city, leading his young son Ascanius by the hand, fleeing westward across the Mediterranean to found a new city, a new civilization, a new Troy.

[00:55:17]Now the Romans would claim Anias as their ancestor and Virgil's Anid that great Roman national epic would tell the story of his journey from Troy's ashes to Italy's shores.

[00:55:31]Troy fell but the soul of its people survived. The city burned but the bloodline didn't. And the war that destroyed one civilization became the founding myth of another. The fire that consumed Troy lit the forge of Rome.

[00:55:46]So the heroes who sacked it are all scattered now. Agamemnon will go home to be murdered by his wife. Menaaus to wander for 8 years. Ajax the lesser to be shipwrecked and drowned. Good riddance to him. Diomdes will find his kingdom usurped.

[00:56:05]And then there's Odysius, the architect of the horse, the entire mind behind the victory. He will spend 10 years trying to get home, pursued by the anger of the gods he offended.

[00:56:20]Tested in every way possible.

[00:56:24]The war is over, but not for him. The consequences, the homecomings, the long, bitter aftermath of a victory that was also a crime, they're just beginning.

[00:56:36]And the longest, strangest, most human of all of those homecomings is the subject of the sixth and final part of our series.

[00:56:47]Well, I hope you enjoyed today's one about the Iliad. It's complicated piece, isn't it? Surprising cuz everyone thinks it's uh you know, I like like the film.

[00:57:00]And I tell you what, you know, the film Troy was really good. I liked it. I don't really care about this accuracy thing. I don't expect it from Hollywood in the first place.

[00:57:13]I just try and take it for what it is and enjoy it.

[00:57:18]Anyway, thank you for joining me. I hope you enjoyed the video. Thank you to all subscribing and uh liking, commenting, and supporting on the Patreon memberships, donations, all that sort of thing. See you in the next one. Goodbye for now.