I saw Troy the other day, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The fighting was so accurate, down to the way Brad Pitt leapt in the air to stab people in the neck. Very Greek Urn, very Ancient Wall-painting look and feel to the whole thing. The only problem was the way they wrecked the story! Hugely irritating.

The original Iliad, most scholars agree, was an oral history passed down from nearly the time of the Mycaeneans (i.e. Agamemnon's people, whose highly centralised Greek empire collapsed, leaving a Dark Age in Greek history, until the rise of Classical Greece, which lasted until Alexander the Great's father, Phillip II of Macedon, conquered a Pelopponnese - the pointy mainland bit - greatly weakened by the wars of Athens and Sparta.  Thucydides wrote a History of it.  Check it out.)  Homer was the epic poet who put a final polish on the story and wrote it down.  We don't know if Homer really was blind, or even exactly who he was, but what we do know is that he was the finest culmination of the Greek oral history genre, and his poetic genius has left us a legacy that has been vaunted and wept over for its beauty from the Greeks to the Romans, and everyone else down to the present day.  The maturity of the authorship, even then, is marked by the way that judgement is not passed on either side of the conflict, but the narrative itself has been made the supreme focus.  The encounters between "swift-footed" Achilles and Hector, "tamer of horses", the great battles, the machinations of various Muses and Fates, the madness of Ajax, the folly of Agamemnon, the glimpses of Aeneas and, of course, the Horse.  A decade-spanning narrative that held the ancient world, enthralled, in thrall.

The movie seems to have chosen a pared-down, washed-out version of the original, and has turned the entire war into a fifteen-day muddle of Love vs Greed or Glory vs Bloody Death, and the characters into flattened types whose actions and motives are unconscionably simplified.  Except for Paris, whose mad escapade of wife-stealing was apparently not for love, but probably just "because she was there".  I have absolutely no sympathy for the cad.  In Hollywood the hero (in this case, the coward) must get the girl;  in Homer, the "hero" was shot to death with the arrows of Hercules.  And deservedly so! The selfish little twerp with an eye for a peach caused the entire war.

I can understand why the movie had to leave out large chunks of the story - otherwise it would have been at least six hours long! - but the storyline should have been written with a lot more finesse, and an eye for the original plot.  Menelaos was not killed by Hector in front of Troy - in fact, he is reconciled to Helen and the two of them tour the Mediterranean together, having the odd adventure, and finally return to Lakedaemon, and lay the foundations of Sparta.  (They were not king and queen of Sparta! It didn't exist yet!)

Ajax dies by committing suicide.  For some unknown reason he went completely insane, killed all the sacred sacrificial animals (a terrifying act of sacrilege), and then killed himself.  So he wasn't killed by Hector either.  In fact, Hector didn't do quite as much killing as Achilles.

There is absolutely no mention in the movie of Iphigenia at Aulis.  Iphigenia was Agamemnon's daughter;  when no wind arose for quite some time to carry the fleet to Troy, Agamemnon sacrificed her to Poseidon, probably, and thereby obtained his wind.  Whether he was manoevred into it or did it willingly, it is still absolutely a heinous act.  Agamemnon survives the Trojan War (and isn't killed by Briseis in Troy!)  In fact, he goes home with Cassandra, a priestess of Apollo, who is cursed with being able to foretell the future correctly, but is always disbelieved.  She predicts that Agamemnon will be murdered if he goes home, but he ignores her and swans into his palace, happy little moron that he is, and Clytemnestra - his wife - and her lover do him in, in the bath with an axe (*appropriate choppy splashy sound effects*).

Hollywood interfered with Homer's narrative with a vengeance, although why I was surprised I don't know.  The young lovers live happily ever after, Andromache (Hector's wife) escapes with her young son... in the Iliad Odysseus throws Hector's children from the walls of Troy, so that they can't grow up to take revenge, I suppose.  Brutal yet effective, like most ancient problem solving.  And Andromache is carried off to be a slave in another man's house;  the Greeks saw this sort of thing as the way of the world, and women as cattle.  Or slightly less important than cattle.  Women, children, slaves and the insane could not vote in ancient Greece, or in Rome either.  There's most of their problems encapsulated, I suppose.  Although it makes me appreciate people like Susan B. Anthony, who worked so hard to get suffrage for women.  Ave atqe vale.

I think my biggest annoyance with the lack of a sense of authenticity to this movie is in the use of the Latinised names:  Menelaus for Menelaos and Patroclus for Patrokles being the most obvious.  Brad Pitt shouting "Pattro-CLUS, Pattro-CLUS!" really got on my nerves.  (I noticed that no mention is made of the fact that Patrokles was Achilles's lover, it being common in those days for comrades in arms to share each others's beds.  The Romans also did their best to gloss over this fact).  Neoptolemos, Achilles's son, isn't seen at all.  How expensive would it have been to hire an historical consultant in the formative phases of the script?  If they do something like this to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe I will be livid!

The "sword of Troy" was an interesting sub-theme in this movie.  Priam declares that Troy will never be defeated as long as this sword is wielded by a Trojan.  (Paris subsequently loses his one-on-one armed combat with Menelaos whilst wielding said sword.)  However, Paris later gives the sword to a boy amongst the Trojan refugees before gallolloping back to shoot Achilles.  Who is this boy with his father leaning on one shoulder and a statue of Athena under his arm?

Aeneas (Aineas in Greek) was one of Homer's central characters.  Another inveterate traipser-around of the Mediterranean (at least in the Roman tradition), he drops past Carthage (on the north coast of Africa - modern Tunisia, I think) where he meets queen Dido, who falls for him like a ton of bricks.  Or marble columns.  Or carved stone blocks.  Or something.  This doesn't stop Aeneas from sailing on his merry way, thereby breaking her heart.  She commits suicide.  Eventually Aeneas ends up on the east coast of Italy, - near to where a very famous city had not yet been founded...

Yup.  You guessed correctly.  Rome.

Aeneas is said to have married the daughter of the king of Latium (Lavinia) and settled down, after fighting a war, to raise his son Iulus.  Who became king of Alba Longa;  his descendant was overthrown and cast out of the city - and fled to Rome.  The Romans encouraged this ancestor of Julius Caesar to settle in Rome, and Alba Longa was subsequently conquered, all its nobles being relocated to Rome to add to the lustre of Romulus's Senate.  And so Julius Caesar had the best ancestry in all of Rome, and was therefore suspected of wanting to overthrow the Republic, especially by his most obdurate enemies - who can be confidently expected to have had a monumental inferiority complex when they held themselves up to one of the greatest Romans who ever lived.  Probably the greatest. So the whole stupid and un-historical sword of Troy sub-saga was to hint at the future Gaius Julius Caesar, and how Troy "was to give birth to a great nation."  How extraordinarily clever.  Wiseasses.

What the movie didn't mention was that Aeneas's mother was supposed to have been the goddess Venus;  when Caesar died, therefore, he was worshipped as a god - and all his imperial successors after him.  How strange.

--Adapted from Colleen McCullough's Song of Troy and her Masters of Rome Series.  If you want a broader knowledge about Rome and things Roman, the Masters of Rome books are the most enjoyable and informative means towards acquiring it.  The final book has at last been released, much to my huge satisfaction.  The October Horse chronicles the death of Caesar and the fall of the Republic - including the rise of Caesar's heir, Octavius, who later became Augustus, first Emperor of Rome.  (This is not to say that Augustus actually admitted that he was Emperor; for generations the fiction that the Emperor was "First among Equals", primus inter pares, was zealously kept up.  If you're interested in The Caesars, download Suetonius's defining work from www.mit.edu/classics.  It's gossipy, captivating and quite bizarre in places.  I particularly enjoyed Nero's last words about himself:  "To die so young, and such an artist!")

I was deeply disappointed in the way Troy's storyline was handled.  That said, I can find no other fault with the movie.  The battle scenes were awesome!  The armed combat (I will not debase it by calling it a fight) between Hector and Achilles was one of the highlights of my whole movie experience.  The amount of research that went into every piece of armour, every weapon, every stroke, counterstroke and movement, made it superlative.  (I don't think shields back then were quite that small, though. I may be wrong, but didn't Homer speak of man-high 'wasp-waisted' shields, like two tear-drops joined at the tips to form the middle?)  There was a laudable attempt to differentiate clothing and armour styles between the Trojans and the Greeks, which appreciably reduced confusion in the big battle-scenes.  Even if the same extras led the same horses past the same ships a few times...

"Myrmidons" means 'ants', and implied that Achilles's Larissan troops were so well armoured and fought in such tight unision that they were as strong and unbeatable as a column of ants would be to other insects.

A note on the womans's jewellery.  The "Trojan women" - standing on top of the walls towards the end of the movie - all wore replicas of the jewellery found by Schliemann in the hill of Hisarlik in modern Turkey.  While it is agreed that Hisarlik is the site of ancient Troy, the shaft-burials from which the golden artifacts were taken weren't old enough to equate with the time of Helen!  So they were not "Helen's jewels" as Schliemann called them, and neither were they likely to adorn Trojan women at the time of the Trojan war - another goof that any archaeology major could've set right, had the production team just asked.  (The golden "funeral mask of Agamemnon" dug up at Mycaenea that has become so famous was also not traceable to Agamemnon's time. Sorry.)  Heinrich Schliemann, the Great Amateur, also managed to lose the skull of the woman to whom the jewellery had belonged.  Whilst also throwing away irreplaceable mounds of "useless rubbish" that could've given us priceless information about the real inhabitants of Troy.  It's no wonder modern archaeologists sometimes scream, sob, and pull their hair out for no apparent reason. At least, that's my theory.

(Incidentally, these items of jewellery, which went missing from their cellar in Soviet-occupied Berlin during or after World War 2, have turned up in a museum - I forget whether in Russia, Georgia, Estonia or somewhere else in the old USSR - and so were not destroyed as was largely believed.  Isn't that Nice?).

All in all, a good time was had by all, although I'm still recovering from those battle noises, particularly the sound of a sword slicing across flesh.  I wonder:  will there be an Odyssey as a sequel to Troy?  And will it be accurate?  Here's hoping....  But don't get me wrong;  I didn't let my irascible sense of purism get in the way of my enjoying a cracking good movie.