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Originally posted by AnthonyS
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and they compensate you. would you do it for free? -
Right. I'm so tired of people trying to use it as some sort of special entitlement.Originally posted by dsrtuckteezy View PostComment
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If this were ancient times, you'd be telling the greeks not to fight the trojans. Better just to let 'em on in. No need for them to use that big wooden horse.Originally posted by GSRGuy94 View PostComment
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That's an excellent comparison. Especially considering that was a useless (and by some accounts, nonexistent) war.Comment
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Dead serious. A war fought over a woman for 10 years? Sounds totally legit. And some historians have discussed that it was never actually fought between Greece and Troy.Comment
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I'm guessing what he's getting at is the idea that the historical core of the Iliad is based in truth, but pretty much everything in there is either Greek mythology or Homeric literature written for his time for various reasons at the end of the Greek dark ages. You can take many points out of the Iliad as examples that don't fit with the time frame of the Trojan war.Originally posted by Denny View Post
1)Ancient Greece didn't have as defined a polis system as Classical Greece, the region was dominated by the Mycenae ans and later towards the end of Ancient period the Dorians from up North. There weren't the strong city states that we know today existed in Greece circa 750-400ish at the height of Classical Greece. Also, even during times of legitimate, historically documented crisis in Classical Greece such as the Persian invasions the entire Greek island never fully allied itself together because they were all very petty and concerned with their own personal city state alliances, there's very little chance the entire culture of Ancient Greece organized together in a nationalist form to invade some city in Anatolia.
2)If you look at books 23 and 24 of the Iliad in which they describe the funeral games held by Achilles for his deceased friend Patroclus, during the discus event the discus itself is A) described as iron and B) the prize is a chunk of pig iron which had been historically passed around circa the story behind it for a very long time. 1200-1150 BCE was the very beginning of Iron smelting in the ancient near east and it's highly speculative if it had even reached Greece by this point in history much less been around so long that it was casually given out as a prize for funeral game which was about as popular the modern equivalent to speed walking. The discus event was only mentioned as Homeric literature to tie up a loose end from an earlier game and disgrace a non elite which had one a previous game (remember the Greeks are very petty people who are only concerned with the aristocracy despite what tv tells you)
3) Right after the fall of Troy, most of the Mediterranean experienced troubles which retarded many cultures for hundreds of years. The Mycenae ans were no longer around, the Hittites disappear, and Egypt undergoes some turbulence around this time. We have 400-500 years of oral transmission before the first written account of the Trojan war which was written more for literary sake than for history. Even if the historical core is correct and there was a large scale Dorian or Mycenaean war against a city in the area of Troy most of the details are going to be way off.
4)If you spend alot of time studying ancient Greece, you'll see the Iliad not as historical evidence but as a piece of Archaic Greek literature meant to help end the Greek Dark Ages. There are hundreds of metaphors through out the work about young deferring to the old, rashness deferring to wisdom, etc. If you read the book and not the movie, in reality the funeral games which were discussed earlier are Achilles way of getting back in the good graces of Agamemnon by showing some humility, and reentering society after his barbarous rampage earlier in the book. Hector is dead, Partoclus is dead, in the story foretold for Achilles earlier in the book he is next; he's attempting to regain his humanity before he crosses over to the next world. All of it is very good literature, but if you look at it in the context of what year it was written you'll see it makes a lot more since as a piece of philosophical literature rather than a true historical account. 750 BCE was right about the time the Greek Dark Ages were coming to an end, people all over the Greek mainland were returning to "civilized" society and forming modern city states as we know them in Classical Greece. The Iliad was written to impress upon people the importance of returning to civilized society like "the greater city states" of the past rather than living in the aforementioned dark ages being young and brash.
The idea that there was a major battle between a Greek city state or alliance of Greek city states and one in western Turkey isn't just plausible it's quite possible especially given the time frame discussed earlier. (The end of the ancient period) The entire Mediterranean was experiencing turbulence and warfare. However, pretty much everything detail wise in the Iliad probably has little grounding in reality other than mythology which was passed down for centuries. Now, I assume that's what he was getting at, but I may have gone off on another history tangent. History majors are known to do that.
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Nope, that was pretty much it. There are also some geographical discrepancies, but you definitely understood what I was talking about.Comment
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Of course there's geographical discrepancies lol it was more than 3000 years ago and 500 of it went unwritten.Originally posted by GSRGuy94 View PostComment
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Haha yeah definitely. Some experts actually put the real war somewhere in the area of The United Kingdom. But we'll never know, so it's to be taken as a nice story. Not historical fact.Comment
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Possibly... I just wish we knew more factual information about what actually happened.Comment
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Sooooo... Muslims don't suck?Comment
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Nice way to dodge a point. By saying that some analogy may not actually be true. Since you're so concerned with semantics, do you want me to come up with the other 10k references to one society trying to infiltrate and change another? But let me guess... those never happened, and even if they did it was ok, right?Originally posted by GSRGuy94 View PostComment
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