The Trojan War, with Mary Beard

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Hello, everyone, it's Tom Holland here, and I have teamed up with the great Mary Beard to bring you four episodes on what we together have decided are the four most iconic themes in ancient history.

And today we are looking at the Trojan War.

Here's a short extract of that episode.

Hello everybody and welcome to Leighton House in Kensington in London.

It's a gorgeous, beautiful, very grand house

full of Arabic touches and classical touches, gorgeous garden where we we had an Athelstan party.

And we've come here because we need a sumptuous location for an imperious guest.

And that guest is the most famous classicist in the world

and a woman to whom I owe personally an enormous amount because she was the person who first read Rubicon,

my first book on classical history in manuscript.

And so ever since I've been incredibly grateful to her, as well as being her biggest fan.

And it is, of course, the great, the one and only Mary Beard.

Tom, thank you very much.

I mean, Leighton House is my favourite place in London, and it's great to talk to you.

And you've just done what you always do.

You always said when you introduced me, she was really kind to me back in the day before I'd written Rubicon.

You were Professor of Classics at Cambridge.

You've written a lot of wonderful books aimed at the more popular market as well as all your academic studies.

So you've written books on the Parthenon, the general reader,

Pompeii, the Caesars.

And we're meeting here because we thought it would be fun, the two of us,

to discuss

the four most iconic subjects.

in ancient history, classical history, say the history of Greece and Rome specifically.

And we've kind of had to and fro and we've come up with four subjects, haven't we and what did you decide we should do well we thought we had to do sort of two greek two roman yeah

um and how could you not do the trojan war you know where it all begins and so that's what we're doing today we then thought how could you not do alexander the great

certain reservation on my part it has to be said but you persuaded me that we should do that um and then

And these do link in a way, as I hope people listening will discover.

Then we go from Alexander to Julius Caesar

and then gladiators and with a special lookout for Spartacus of the movie all four of those kind of they're very masculine aren't they and they're very much focused on people killing each other they are and

I think we thought that it would bring out some of our differences of opinion as well as things we hold in common.

And I think also they're not just loads of men killing each other that they are that

most of them all of them I think they kind of occupy that funny fuzzy boundary between what's myth and what's history yeah and

that is one of the things I think is most interesting to explore in ancient history how do we know what's true or not and does it matter if it's true and some of the most important aspects of all these some of the most important aspects are the mythical ones, whether or not they're strictly true.

So we're kind of, it's going to be a great tightrope, actually, up between.

Well, it always is when you're going to fall off.

Yeah, you're trying to kind of tell stories that people want to know what actually happened.

But often it's the fact we don't know entirely what happened that is the real fascination.

And I know that you think I'm going to be a downer.

You think I'm going to be a downer because you think, Mary Beard, what's her trademark?

Her trademark is scepticism.

So we're going to have some great story, and then I'm going to come in and say, none of it's true, you know.

So I'm going to try and hold myself in a bit.

You will make it much more interesting than just saying it's all rubbish.

I know, I have absolute confidence in that.

But some of the best history is not true.

I think that's.

Well, so on that topic, would it be fair to say that really Greek and Roman civilization, in a sense, begins with this?

Yeah.

The way the Greeks and Romans think about themselves

goes back to what they think about the Trojan War.

I mean

it's both a kind of almost cosmic clash which ends up

slightly indirectly with the foundation of Rome because Aeneas, one of the Trojan warriors, flees and founds the Roman race in Italy.

The Trojan War is the place where Greeks and Romans start to debate about the morality of war, what the cost of war is, whether we think heroism is being a warrior or not.

And for me, that's why the stories of the Trojan War are so interesting.

Yeah, brilliant.

Well, could we, but before we come on to the kind of the broader cultural context and what it meant for the Greeks and the Romans, and of course, in due course,

the question that I'm sure lots of people will want to know your opinion on, did it actually happen?

Can you tell us the story of

the Trojan War itself?

And I'm aware that there are multiple versions of it, so feel free to kind of complicate it.

But a general sense of, you know, what's going on?

Why did the Greeks and the Trojans come to fight?

What's

the sweep of the narrative?

Where did it start?

That's the question.

Here we've got this, you know, semi-cosmic conflict.

How did it begin?

Well,

it began with a wedding party from hell, really.

But

the goddess Thetis

is getting married to a mortal man called Peleus.

Now, these in the end are going to be the parents of Achilles, but Achilles hasn't been born yet.

Great hero of the Greek side.

Now, they made a terrible error.

We all know about this.

They didn't.

There was somebody they should have invited, but they didn't.

And they should have invited the goddess Discord, conflict.

Eris in Greek.

So, like a sort of mad grey aunt, Eris turns up anyway, determined to have her say.

And she throws into this

divine wedding party, really,

a golden apple, which says on it,

to the most fair.

It's written on this apple.

It could be to the best, to the finest.

Calliste.

is the word in Greek, which can mean beautiful, but can mean

morally good too.

And three goddesses start to squabble about who owns the apple.

And

there's Hera, the quotes, queen of the gods, there's Athena, the oversimplifying goddess of wisdom, and there's Aphrodite, who is the goddess of beauty.

And they can't work out who owns the apple, therefore.

And in order to adjudicate, and I think the...

quite hard to see the details of how this adjudication

came into being, it was decided that Paris,

who was the, at that point, estranged son of King Priam of Troy and his wife Queen Hecuba, should decide which goddess had the apple.

So he meets them and they all kind of each one tries to sort of bribe him, saying if you choose me um I'll give you something you really need.

Hero's going to give him power.

Athena's going to give him wisdom.

Paris chooses Aphrodite as the fairest because her bribe is the best.

She is offering him the most beautiful, desirable woman in the world for himself.

And that woman is Helen.

What is going to happen

is that Paris is going to go and get Helen.

That's what he does.

Now, Helen was so beautiful and had been so lovely and had been such a prize for Menelaus when he won her as his wife, that in order to kind of stop future trouble and civil war amongst the Greeks, they had agreed that if anybody came and pinched Helen, all the Greek kings and leaders would gang up and support Menelaus and go and get her back.

And in a nutshell, that is what happens.

That's what the Trojan War is all about.

Paris takes Helen back to his city of Troy and he arrives back in Troy with Helen, his new trophy bride.

And all the Trojans think, wow, she's great.

We're never giving her back.

And so that then sets up the war.

Thanks for listening.

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Mary and I will be back next week with Alexander the Great.