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The Trojan War 1. The Trojan War took place a long time ago, and after it was over, there were the dark ages for a while. 2. The parties involved were the residents of the resort town of Mycenae, on the sunny Aegean coast (being the Greeks), and the natives of a town (now quite covered in ash, debris, and the like) in some ambiguous part of Turkey, on the Black Sea (which I’m told is quite cold, as Lord Byron swam it a long time ago, despite his club foot), which was not at all a resort town, but a large fortress built to defend hostile peoples such as the Greeks (the residents of said fortress being the Trojans). 3. The Greeks sailed to Troy, where the war was going on. 4. Really, it wasn’t a war at all, in the beginning, but a wedding party for the estranged prince Paris, who had been living on a mountain, but had gotten tired of his nymph girlfriend, and had gone and found himself a Greek wife, who was actually given to him by a Greek goddess (despite his Trojan lineage). So, really, the war started as a celebration, and everyone was quite happy, except, of course, the prince’s ex-girlfriend, and the goddesses he had called ugly, and his sister Cassandra, who generally was never very happy. 5. Of course, the Greeks weren’t very happy either, as the said Greek wife’s husband wasn’t really Paris, but a Greek king named Menelaus. Now you’d think a king could cause quite a big problem for anyone who took his wife and that would be enough to deter Paris, but, unfortunately for the Greeks, Menelaus was a bit of a cuckold and didn’t really scare anyone. 6. Paris married Helen. 7. Helen was the most beautiful woman in the world, and back then women were a bit more like cars than sentient beings, so owning the most beautiful woman in the world was quite an honor. 8. Of course, we only have Homer’s word to go on here, so perhaps Helen was really an ugly old hag who happened to be a witch and cast spells on everyone she met until they were all cross-eyed and so confused they thought goddesses were ugly and Helen beautiful. Perhaps if they hadn’t waited so long to invent photography, or somebody had been smart enough to paint a picture of her, the war never would have happened, and poor Troy wouldn’t have burnt down and we’d all speak Trojan instead of English (which is based on Latin, which equals the Romans, who took all their ideas from the Greeks and the idea of conquering everyone from Alexander the Great, who was really a Macedonian, but that’s right north of Greece, and, anyways, Aristotle was his tutor), but maybe not because the Trojans weren’t really a hostile people. But neither were the Romans until after they won Punic Wars and found out how much fun conquest was. And the photograph probably wouldn’t have worked anyways, because if Helen was a witch powerful enough to trick the whole Mediterranean and half the Black Sea, she probably could have tricked a camera, even a digital one. 9. But that doesn’t really matter because the whole war was really over gold. 10. See, the Greeks were too lazy and greedy to pay the toll to get across the Black Sea, and they didn’t like how the Trojans charged shipping on the stuff they sold in Troy, so they went and beat them up and razed the city and sure taught them a lesson. Of course, then the Greeks had no stuff to buy in Troy, because they burnt it down, and they had to wait until the city was rebuilt to buy anything interesting. But maybe the Trojans didn’t charge a toll to pass the Hellespont anymore. 11. Ironically, the word Hellespont comes from the name of a little girl who fell off a magic sheep as she was escaping from her wicked stepmother with her brother (the sheep was magic because it was golden and could fly). She fell off right around Troy (only her name was Helle, not Helen), but the sheep kept going and landed smack in someplace else, and, for some reason, they killed the sheep and hung its skin up on a tree and found a dragon to guard it, and that became the golden fleece that Jason came to get with the Argonauts. That was before Troy, and maybe that’s where Agamemnon got the idea of destroying foreign countries, instead of trading with them as most people do. 12. Agamemnon was Menelaus’s brother. His wife was Clytemnestra, who actually was Helen’s sister, or at least they both were in the egg their mom laid, and some people say that Zeus had gotten dressed up as a swan and was really Helen’s father (which would explain the egg, although not well enough for their mother’s husband, who was very much not a swan, or really a bird of any kind). 13. Agamemnon was not a cuckold, at least before the war. He was more of a bully, and convinced all the Greeks to go to war because his brother was an imbecile and had married a witch. And because he didn’t like pay shipping on foreign goods. 14. Well, he must have really wanted to go to war, because he had to kill his daughter to get to winds to blow his ships there (why he didn’t go by land is beyond me… maybe he didn’t much like his daughter… besides, he had another, but the other one was much more of a whiner). 15. And once the Greeks got there, they fought for nine years, so you’d think they wouldn’t have needed to be in such a hurry to leave home. Most of the time they just sat in camp and fought over money and women and who was a better soldier, and sometimes sacrificed a virgin, or maybe fought a battle a two. 16. Well, eventually, once all the best soldiers were dead, the Greeks realized how stupid the whole war thing was, and decided they’d better leave. Only, they wanted to win the war first. So (for the first time all nine years) they asked Odysseus what he thought, and he made this really clever plan that involved gods and sea serpents eating prophets and a giant wooden horse. And then they pretended to leave, but really just sailed around a corner and crouched there giggling, waiting for the Trojans to find the surprise inside the horse. 17. It wasn’t a nice surprise. 18. Actually, it was pretty awful. 19. How’d you like to be having a party and open up a wooden horse and find a bunch of guys with swords inside? Mean ugly guys with swords. Cassandra was probably the happiest Trojan, because she had told them all so, but she still wasn’t all that happy because she had to be Agamemnon’s girlfriend, and after having Apollo for a boyfriend, Agamemnon would be a bit of a let down. 20. So the Greeks beat the Trojans, but they were stupid and got really into it, and killed a few more people than they should’ve, and really were nasty and evil. It might have been all right, but then they got really stupid and disrespected the gods. And the gods are all friends, even though they fight, because, when you’re immortal, there are only so many other immortals to have as friends, so none of their arguments last forever, because forever is a really really long time to an immortal, and they get bored of arguing eventually. 21. So even though Troy lost the war, the Greeks had a pretty awful time afterwards, and it didn’t really pick up again until Athens got its stuff together and invented democracy, but that’s a whole other mess of problems. back |