Wrath.
Sing, o goddess, of the wrath of Peleus’s son Achilles, murderous, doomed, who cost
the Achaeans countless lives, hurling down to the house of Hades so many sturdy souls.
So begins the Iliad, quite possibly the most famous epic poem in the world.
It’s a song, a tragedy and a treatise on the destructive power of fury.
It’s no accident that the first word is “μῆνιν” [menin], wrath.
The Iliad is the story of wrath - of achilles, of the gods, of me at myself for making it
the first big project I illustrated on this channel and thus by consequence the worst
video I’ve ever made that hurts me to think about even though it was a valuable experience
without which the channel wouldn’t exist as it is now - it’s a very emotionally loaded
text, basically.
And there’s a reason it’s so well-liked - it’s genuinely an incredibly good story.
Barring a few boat lists it’s a masterfully-crafted
ride, absolutely loaded up with dramatic irony
and emotional stakes.
But it’s also just a thin slice of a much larger story.
The Iliad takes place in the final days of the ten-year Trojan War, but the Trojan War
is a much bigger beast than just what Homer retold.
So today let’s pull together a big pile of sources and talk about the bigger picture.
The placement of dominos that’ll eventually topple into the Trojan War begins with the
birth of Helen of Troy - previously just Helen.
This is also one of the pieces of the story that has the least consistency across different
versions, since practically speaking all that matters is that she exists, not the specifics
of where she comes from.
In the Iliad and Odyssey, Helen is the daughter of the Spartan king Tyndareus and his wife
Leda, and her brothers are Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri - a pair of badass horse-ridin’
twins and the subject of the constellation Gemini.
This is corroborated in Pseudo-Apollodorus’s bibliotheca with the additional detail that
Leda’s children are the result of a wild
night where she slept with both Zeus and Tyndareus,
with Zeus in the form of a swan - a concept that was bizarrely popular with renaissance
artists and perverts of all stripes.
This biological nightmare produced four children, with Pollux and Helen the semi-divine children
of Zeus, and Castor and Clytemnestra - Agamemnon’s future wife and axe-murderer - as the fully
mortal children of Tyndareus.
Helen’s parentage continues to be disputed in the lost epic the Cypria, where it’s
suggested that Helen was adopted by Leda but was actually the child of Nemesis, the greek
goddess of divine retribution for hubris.
Now that kinda reframes the whole thing, doesn’t it?
Some of these stories also state that Helen hatched from an egg on account of the whole
“zeus was a swan at the time” thing, and in Pausanias’s descriptions of greece he
describes a temple that contains shards of the eggshell that Leda supposedly laid.
Look, I let a lotta this stuff slide, but that’s weird, right?
Anyway, skipping ahead a couple decades, the next domino is the marriage of Helen.
Helen is, according to some sources, the most beautiful woman in the world, and is thus
unsurprisingly a very desirable bride, and a whole bunch of Greek kings roll up in Sparta
to try and claim her hand.
The exact roster varies a lot depending on who’s telling it, but you better believe
those storytellers loved them some tedious lists.
Anyway, specifics aside, Tyndareus is pretty worried about having this many big personalities
competing for his daughter out on his front lawn, and he’s extra worried that picking
one of ‘em might make things exponentially worse and trigger a full-on war when the rest
of the suitors get cranky about being snubbed.
This is when one of the suitors sidles up to him - a young man by the name of Odysseus
- and he offers to help Tyndareus resolve his little suitor problem if he helps him
with something else, by putting in a good word for him with the Spartan king Icarius
so Odysseus can woo his daughter Penelope.
Tyndareus agrees, and Odysseus suggests that Tyndareus make all the suitors swear a binding
oath to protect the winner’s marriage against any kind of interference, so that none of
them can try to grab Helen and run off without the rest of them declaring war.
The suitors agree to the oath and Tyndareus ends up choosing Menelaus for Helen - represented
in absentia by Agamemnon, who must’ve been on his absolute best behavior to make that
kind of a good impression - and the rest of the suitors pack up and go home, though not
before Tyndareus keeps his word and arranges for Penelope and Odysseus to get together.
In Euripides’s Hecuba the format of the oath is the same, with the minor change that
Tyndareus lets Helen choose her own husband, and she chooses Menelaus.
Very egalitarian!
But meanwhile, somewhere completely different, the gods are setting up a domino of their
own.
According to Pseudo-Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca, Eris, goddess of “it’s gettin’ a little
too chummy around here” wakes up one morning and chooses violence, lobbing an apple at
Athena, Aphrodite and Hera and saying it’s a prize for whichever one of them is the most
beautiful.
The Roman author Hyginus adds a little more detail in his text Fabulae by specifying that
this is happening at the wedding of Achilles’s parents, and Eris is pissed she didn’t get
an invite.
Zeus recognizes disaster when he sees it and quickly has Hermes tow the goddesses somewhere
very far away to work things out, so he takes them to Mount Ida where Trojan prince Paris
is hanging out.
Paris has had an eventful childhood of his own at this point - in Hyginus’s Fabulae
again it’s briefly mentioned that Paris’s mother Hecuba had a dream where she gave birth
to a burning torch that exploded into snakes, and everyone agreed that was a bad omen and
a half, so when the baby was born they handed him off to a servant to kill him.
The servants choose the much more humane option of dumping him on a mountain to die, but luckily
he’s rescued by some shepherds who take him in.
A few years and several shenanigans later Paris reclaims his status as prince and everyone
accepts him back with open arms, because it’s probably fine, right?
It’d be crazy if this random kid was singlehandedly responsible
for triggering the downfall of troy.
Anyway, that’s been Paris’s life so far, and meanwhile back in the present, Hermes
tells him to pick which goddess gets the apple.
Each goddess offers Paris an incentive to vote for her - Hera promises to make him king
of the world, Athena offers him glory and victory in battle, and Aphrodite promises
him Helen as his wife.
Paris chooses Aphrodite and sails off to Sparta to collect his already-married prize while
Hera and Athena start plotting revenge.
In the Cypria the story continues, with Paris and company first hosted by the Dioscuri and
then by Menelaus and Helen.
When Menelaus has to leave for Crete, Aphrodite intervenes to get Helen and Paris together
and they load up Paris’s ships with stolen treasure and sail off into the night.
Despite a storm sent by a pissed-off Hera, potentially due to her role as the goddess
of marriage, Paris and Helen make it to Troy and are married.
However, this story isn’t quite universal - in Euripides’s play Helen, the Helen that
Paris brings to Troy and marries is actually an illusion crafted and brought to life by
Hera, while the real Helen is brought to egypt to keep her safe during the war.
Pseudo-Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca also mentions this version, so it must’ve been decently
well-known.
Anyway, the questionably consensual abduction of Helen kicks off the next big step in the
process - namely the mustering of armies.
See, all of Helen’s former suitors are still bound to that oath to defend her marriage,
so pretty much every important Greek king is now honor-bound to go storm the gates of
Troy and get Helen back.
In the Cypria, Menelaus is informed of Helen’s loss by the goddess Iris and returns home
to get Agamemnon to start mustering an army.
They go collect the various Greek kings who are honor-bound to side with them - and also
Achilles, who, unlike the rest of them, doesn’t actually have to be there, since he was too
young/too not-even-born-yet to be one Helen’s suitors, so he’s not bound by the oath.
It’s referenced briefly in the Iliad that Achilles’s mother Thetis prophesied that
if he went to troy he’d definitely die there, but his name would be remembered forever,
but if he stayed out of it he’d live a very long life but die in obscurity.
He chose to join the greek kings and storm troy for the immortality of glory, not because
he had to be there.
In contrast, Odysseus DOES have to be there, but really, really doesn’t WANT to be there.
In the years since the marriage of Helen he and Penelope have gotten married and had a
baby son, so now he has a lot to lose.
In order to escape his own oath he pretends to have gone mad, but gives it up when Agamemnon
threatens his son.
Because Agamemnon's a real piece of shit.
Who knew?
The gang reluctantly muster at Aulis and prepare to sail for Troy, but then Agamemnon pisses
off Artemis for no reason and she sets the wind against them.
Euripides’s tragic play Iphigenia in Aulis recounts this part of the timeline - the only
way to appease Artemis is for Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, which he
feels briefly bad about and then does almost immediately.
However, in the Cypria, Artemis actually spirits Iphigenia away and makes her immortal, replacing
her on the altar with a deer, which is nice of her.
With Artemis appeased the wind turns and the fleet can officially sail for Troy.
The surviving summaries of the Cypria explain in brief what happens when they arrive at
Troy: a few minor skirmishes happen, the Achaeans send a message to Troy demanding the return
of Helen and the stolen treasure, Troy tells ‘em to get stuffed and the war begins.
Achilles pretty much singlehandedly sacks the surrounding towns and the Achaeans besiege
Troy.
This part of the process evidently takes about nine years, but it’s nine years of ferocious
ass-kicking that basically destroys every part of Troy that’s not safely behind the
walls.
Zeus decides to give the Trojans a break and works out a plan to take Achilles out of the
equation for a little while… and that’s how we get the Iliad.
To very quickly speed through it, during the raiding around Troy, most of the Achaeans
picked up “bride-prizes” - which was a nice way of saying “enslaved trojan women
for them to bone.”
Achilles’s bride-prize is Briseis, a character with
basically no character who, surprisingly,
does seem to get along okay with Achilles and Patroclus - she’s very upset when Patroclus
dies, spoiler alert, and mentions that he promised to make Achilles marry her when they
returned from Troy - while Agamemnon’s bride-prize is
Chryseis, the daughter of Chryses, a Trojan
priest of Apollo.
Chryses tries to buy his daughter’s freedom with a kingly ransom, but Agamemnon tells
Chryses he’s gonna enjoy making sure Chryseis is too busy boning him and making him sandwiches
to ever see her homeland again.
Chryses prays to Apollo for help and Apollo deems Agamemnon a Huge Dickweasel and rains
divine arrows down on the Achaeans, killing a whole bunch of ‘em.
The Achaeans figure out Agamemnon pissed off Apollo by dishonoring his priest and the only
way to make him stop killing everyone is to give back Chryseis, which Agamemnon refuses
to do unless he’s given a replacement slave woman right now, because obviously that's SO much
more important than winning the actual war he's there to win. So he takes Briseis from Achilles.
This royally antagonizes Achilles, so he bundles up into his sulky blanket burrito and hides
in his tent while the Achaeans get absolutely slaughtered without him.
With Achilles off the field, the Trojan hero Hector has nobody to counterbalance him, so
the Trojans actually start winning for a change.
Long story short, that’s basically how things continue
until Patroclus is killed by Hector and Achilles’s
grief and rage finally motivate him to rejoin the battle - at which point he pretty much
immediately kills Hector and completely turns the tide of the war.
And that’s basically the Iliad, minus a couple metal gear jokes.
The events after the Iliad are recounted in
a few places - one of them being Quintus Smyrnaeus’s
Posthomerica, which covers the death of Achilles and the final days of the Trojan War.
It also features an ass-kicking Amazon princess, Penthesilia, daughter of Ares, who rolls up
to Troy pursued by the furies for accidentally killing her sister and decides to sublimate
her many, many issues by slaughtering as many Achaeans as she can get her hands on, which
she does so effectively it briefly sparks an honest-to-god feminist revolution in the
trojan women.
Achilles isn’t there to stop her because he’s too busy crying on top of Patroclus’s
grave, but when he catches wind of the slaughter he gears up, heads to the battlefield - and
kills her in one hit.
But this doesn’t improve his mood, as when he removes her helmet he finds Penthesilia
stunningly beautiful and immediately regrets killing her, instead imagining the life they
could’ve shared if they’d met under literally any other circumstances.
The Achaean warrior Thersites pops up to make
fun of him for being a lame girl-liking weenie-pants
and Achilles smacks him so hard he dies.
Weird chapter.
Anyway, later on we get the death of Achilles - which is unfortunately very inconsistent
across its many sources.
The post-homerica, for instance, credits his death to Apollo himself, who violates Zeus’s
dubiously-enforced no-interference policy and shoots Achilles in the heel with a poisoned
arrow.
In Pseudo-Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca, meanwhile, Achilles is shot in the heel by Paris being
guided by Apollo, and in Ovid’s metamorphoses Paris shoots Achilles with Apollo’s help,
but they’re being motivated by Poseidon, who’s pissed as hell that Achilles killed
one of his sons earlier in the war.
In the Iliad, Hector prophesies that Achilles will be killed by Paris with Apollo’s help,
so that’s probably the most generally consistent version - but ultimately the how doesn’t
matter so much, all that matters is Achilles dies in Troy, just like his mother prophesied.
It's also interesting to note that none of these versions specify that
Achilles's heel is his only weakness or that he's indestructible everywhere
else. And while that's a fun bit of folklore, it seems to have popped up after Homer and
isn't really part of the original Trojan cycle. But it's still cool, so. Y'know.
Fun fact, according to Sophocles’s play Ajax this is also where Ajax dies after he
loses to Odysseus at the funeral games for Achilles’s armor and kills himself from
shame.
Fun!
The posthomerica also explains how Paris dies - embarrassingly.
He’s shot by Philoctetes with two poisoned arrows, one of which hits him in the dick,
which I think we can all agree is the true villain of this story.
Paris tries to get his wife Oenone, a nymph, to heal him, but she’s pretty livid he abandoned
her for Helen and refuses, so he dies, and Priam is too busy mourning Hector to notice.
I’d feel bad for the guy, but……
I don't.
Anyway, with almost all of the major players dead, the war winds down, culminating in the
final domino - the Trojan Horse.
This part of the story is recounted in detail in both the Odyssey and the Aeneid, though
the Aeneid goes into a little more detail - with Athena’s help, the Greeks build a
massive wooden horse and several of them hide inside while the rest burn their camp and
sail away to make the trojans think they’re retreating.
The trojans are overjoyed that the siege is apparently over and swarm out of the city
and into the abandoned camp, finding it empty except for this giant wooden horse.
There’s a lot of debate over what to do with it, and one dude, Laocoon, a seer and
priest of Apollo, is actually appropriately worried about this seemingly spontaneous retreat,
yelling that they should REALLY know Odysseus’s tricks by now.
He even hucks a spear into the side of the horse to make his point.
The trojans also find and capture one remaining Achaean - a dude named Sinon, who spins a
very compelling sob story about being left behind as a sacrifice parallelling Iphigenia
to allow the rest of the Achaeans to sail home.
The horse, he explains, was built to win back favor from Athena, who was furious at Odysseus
and Diomedes for stealing her sacred statue, the Palladium, from Troy.
Sinon warns the trojans that because the horse
is very definitely sacred to Athena they absolutely
cannot destroy it or damage it in any way, but if they take it into the city it might
bring them the same good fortune that the Palladium used to.
And to really sell the bit, the gods send a bunch of snakes to kill Laocoon and his
sons.
Thoroughly convinced that damaging the horse is a very bad idea, the trojans lug it into
the city - over Cassandra’s protests, naturally - and that night Sinon unlocks the horse and
releases the warriors within, who swarm out and sack troy, burning it to the ground.
The version in the Odyssey is very similar, but it’s recounted from Menelaus’s perspective
inside the horse and he adds that Helen was suspicious of the horse and went around the
outside knocking on it, addressing the achaeans by name while impersonating the voices of
their wives, which is pretty devious - Odysseus just barely managed to keep the others from
blowing their cover through basic logic and the occasional application of CQC.
The horse plan works, the Achaeans successfully sack troy, and it’s a happy ending for everyone!
Kind of.
Really it’s a happy ending for almost no-one.
Between the Iliad and the Odyssey there’s one more lost epic called the Nostoi, a text
so fragmentary we only have five and a half lines from it.
Oh, it hurts.
Anyway the Nostoi seems to have told the story of the various surviving Greek heroes returning
home from Troy, minus our boys Odysseus and Aeneas, of course, who get their own elaborate
epilogues later on.
This is an important intermediate bit most of the later stories technically serve as
sequels to - for instance, Aeschylus’s Oresteia follows after Agamemnon returning home, and
in the Odyssey Telemachus visits Menelaus after he made it home with Helen, a story
that’s partially recounted in Euripides’s play Helen.
But at this point the Trojan War is basically fully wrapped up - 99% of everyone is dead,
Troy’s been burned to the ground, Agamemnon’s about to get murdered and all is finally right
with the world.
You know, I bet when Odyseuss was stuck out in Troy fighting for ten long years, and then
when he was lost at sea for another ten years - he probably really appreciated the irony
that the whole thing was technically his fault.
[Lorde - Team]