As evidence for this much darker account of the Trojan War, Herodotus cites some other stories and a few Egyptian authorities, backing it up with a fine analysis of human nature: investigative journalism c. After foolishly razing Troy-and fighting for a decade in the wrong place while suffering heavy losses-the Greeks finally realized the truth and Menelaus recovered Helen from Egypt. There was no Helen in Troy during the ten-year siege, but the Greeks refused to believe the Trojans who kept saying so. Paris went home empty-handed, wrote Herodotus. Before sending Paris off, the king fumed at him, calling him the ‘basest of men’ for having ‘seduced the wife’ of his own host, exciting her mind, and stealing her away from her husband. The king spared Paris’s life but detained Helen and the treasures that acompanied them until Menelaus ‘comes in person and takes them back with him’. The matter reached the local king who promptly had Paris arrested. There, the slaves on Paris’s ship, seizing a chance to escape their lot, revolted and informed the ‘warden of that mouth of the river’ about Paris’s deed. After Paris took Helen from Sparta, a gale swept them to the Egyptian coast where the Nile meets the sea. What really happened, suggests Herodotus, was even worse than the story the Iliad recounts. For the rest he offered the ‘true’ story based on his own research, adding, ‘It seems to me that Homer was acquainted with story, and discarded it, because he thought it less adapted for epic poetry’. Herodotus did ultimately accept some parts of Homer’s account, including the Greek motivation for the invasion, absurd as it seemed to him. He doubted that Helen could have been taken from Sparta against her wishes, and even if she was, wasn’t that deed the work of a rogue, unworthy of such a large mobilization by the Greeks? What also didn’t sit well with his sense of human nature was the response of the otherwise reasonable Trojans to the Greek invasion, for ‘surely neither Priam nor his family could have been so infatuated as to endanger their own persons, their children and their city, merely that Paris might possess Helen.’ He found it odd that the Trojans, ‘when the Greeks ran off with their women, never troubled themselves about the matter but the Greeks, for the sake of a single girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam’. Cultivated Greek gents were expected to recite colorful stretches from it.įrom the start, Herodotus had trouble with the Iliad. In his day and age, the Iliad was considered a true account of Greek ancestry and it was obligatory for every Greek schoolboy to read it. Among the more charming passages of Histories is his take on the Trojan War. He is justly famous for preferring rational-rather than mythical and supernatural-explanations for human events to understand his past he looked to the actions, character, and motivations of men. Herodotus, the 5th century BCE historian regarded as the father of history, lived more than three hundred years after the Iliad was written. Mostly an account of the last days of the war, the Iliad teems with intrigue, character, and incident. Joining forces, they set sail and laid siege to the coastal city of Troy in Asia Minor. Menelaus, his pride wounded, called on other Greek kings bound to him by an oath. The apparent cause of the war was the ‘abduction’ of Helen by Paris-Helen was the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta Paris was the son of Priam, king of Troy. Homer’s Iliad is the story of an epic war between the Greeks and the Trojans.
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