The Apple of Discord

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Which interestingly enough is making a myth of your own rather then getting outside the context of myth. You are in fact being no different then a shaman who tells me that wheat grows because Father Sky married Mother Earth rather then using boring words like precipitation and evaporation. Paris said to be picking Aphrodite because Aphrodite was imported from the east is a myth to explain a fact of myth not unlike other myths made to explain facts of nature.

Huh? You do know that the Greeks themselves claimed Aphrodite came from Cyprus, that most of her more impressive temples are in Turkey, and that the closest Indoeuropean deity (the goddess of dawn) shares almost no myths other than the being born from the sea foam one, right?

And of course I'm absolutely certain no goddesses actually appeared to offer bribes to any Trojan prince, so assuming the Illiad records any real preference the city had for Aphrodite, and admittedly it may not, it must have some other source.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Huh? You do know that the Greeks themselves claimed Aphrodite came from Cyprus, that most of her more impressive temples are in Turkey, and that the closest Indoeuropean deity (the goddess of dawn) shares almost no myths other than the being born from the sea foam one, right?

And of course I'm absolutely certain no goddesses actually appeared to offer bribes to any Trojan prince, so assuming the Illiad records any real preference the city had for Aphrodite, and admittedly it may not, it must have some other source.

But saying Paris' picking of Aphrodite is a representation of where he lived and Aphrodite's popularity in Ionia in real life is a mythical allegory. It is a story made to explain a fact about life. A myth about a myth. Just like saying magic fountains in King Arthur is an expression of pre-christian tales is also a myth about a myth. What you are presenting is an origin story for the Trojan Cycle.

The point is which fits Occam's Razor best, Aphrodite won because of some Jungian streak in Ionians or she won because some blind bard thousands of years ago decided it fit the story better? The two are not incompatible and the former is not uninteresting, but the fact that you should seize upon it is an example of mythical instinct.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by malloyd

And of course I'm absolutely certain no goddesses actually appeared to offer bribes to any Trojan prince, so assuming the Illiad records any real preference the city had for Aphrodite, and admittedly it may not, it must have some other source.

Well, Apollo is definitely a Trojan god in the Iliad, so the audience definitely understood that some of their gods were worshipped there.

On the other hand the war in the poem doesn't actually need to record anything historical at all. There probably wasn't a war anything like that one, even if you ignore the theological elements, just for purely logistical reasons.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

On the other hand the war in the poem doesn't actually need to record anything historical at all. There probably wasn't a war anything like that one, even if you ignore the theological elements, just for purely logistical reasons.

From what I have discovered, most of the ten years of the war was mostly a siege and blockade action with increased build-up as the Spartans and Trojans both sought allies with very few actual battles; think of it as ten years of Desert Shield and then The Iliad and the Trojan Horse essentially being Desert Storm.

Despite it being massively mythologically inaccurate (on top of various other factors that made me cringe at times), the movie Troy is an interesting depiction of how the war would probably have played out.

[whswhs]

In any case, I don't think we need to look to regional ethnic attachments to explain why Aphrodite won. Here we have Paris going on a mission to Greece and bringing home the most beautiful woman in the world, who happens to be another man's wife. Which of the goddesses would have giving him that as a bribe? Probably not Hera, who's the goddess of marriage, and probably not Athena, who's one of the three virgin goddesses and also is the goddess of prudence; it's not in their idiom. But Aphrodite is the goddess of love and beauty and has had more affairs than any other Olympian except Zeus. And she's also the goddess most likely to inspire Helen to forget her home, children, and husband, as Sappho says in one of her surviving poems. Purely in literary terms it's the obvious choice.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by whswhs

In any case, I don't think we need to look to regional ethnic attachments to explain why Aphrodite won. Here we have Paris going on a mission to Greece and bringing home the most beautiful woman in the world, who happens to be another man's wife. Which of the goddesses would have giving him that as a bribe? Probably not Hera, who's the goddess of marriage, and probably not Athena, who's one of the three virgin goddesses and also is the goddess of prudence; it's not in their idiom. But Aphrodite is the goddess of love and beauty and has had more affairs than any other Olympian except Zeus. And she's also the goddess most likely to inspire Helen to forget her home, children, and husband, as Sappho says in one of her surviving poems. Purely in literary terms it's the obvious choice.

It might be more general too. We know enslaving girls from elsewhere was a relatively normal part of the economy of Mycenean palaces (from IIRC palace inventories that list them with the other textile production stuff), and Aphrodite is a war goddess too - this is more obvious in the Near Eastern goddesses, but isn't absent from the Greek side if you don't buy that link - both in her relationship to Ares and in some of her cults - Aphrodite Areia as Sparta for example. It's possible Aphrodite was just generally considered responsible for girl stealing raids, and her patronage of this particular one flowed from that.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

From what I have discovered, most of the ten years of the war was mostly a siege and blockade action with increased build-up as the Spartans and Trojans both sought allies with very few actual battles; think of it as ten years of Desert Shield and then The Iliad and the Trojan Horse essentially being Desert Storm.

It seems unlikely to me that a Mycenaean alliance c. 1500 BC could have sustained a ten year siege of a city on the far end of the Mediterranean, just based on how that kind of war wasn't very easy much later for much more unified states with much better logistics.

[Apollonian]

It's not the far end of the Med, it's on the other side of the Aegean - which is to say, well within usual raiding and trading range. That said, it seems a loose blockade and alliance-building phase is more likely than the classic siege, and would also make an excellent RP campaign. PCs could be envoys/heroes for either side, and alternate between blockade running/enforcing and trying to woo allies to their side, plus the usual business of propitiating gods, killing monsters, and continuing petty feuds with their nominal friends.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

It seems unlikely to me that a Mycenaean alliance c. 1500 BC could have sustained a ten year siege of a city on the far end of the Mediterranean, just based on how that kind of war wasn't very easy much later for much more unified states with much better logistics.

To be fair, much of the first five years of war was gathering the alliance, from what I discovered. (Various references from Plutarch, Solon, and other classical mythographers about the war that to them was already legendary history.) And technically it was on the other side of the Aegean, not the Med; much closer to home. :)

That said, I expect there was some exaggeration of timelines involved in order to fit the "ten years of war" established by Homer. Realistically, I can see maybe three years of declared war, with much of that time being ships blockading the Trojan port on the Aegean but unable to prevent overland travel from Anatolia or farther up the Dardenalles. I could expect there to be a constant shifting of forces in the region until the final push. Mythologically, the war was basically a stalemate until Odysseus came up with the Horse ploy anyway.

From a historical point of view, the war was probably over Trojan taxation of ships entering and leaving the Dardenalles/Hellespont in order to pass through to the Black Sea for the amber that was mined there. If we assume a grain of truth to the "Prince of Troy absconds with the Queen of Sparta" part of the story, we either have a woman running from an abusive husband into the arms of a charming visiting prince, or an arrogant prince thinking he can get away with it because he's the prince of Troy and he's claiming a "royal privilege" from a "subject" city-state - quite possibly both! - and the King of Sparta and his brother using that as an excuse to feed their own ambition. If there is a historical grain of truth to the myth that Helen's half-brother Heracles sacked Troy a generation and a half before, instilling Priam as king there, the Trojan War of The Iliad was not the first time the Mycenaeans and Ionians bashed heads over the route.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

From a historical point of view, the war was probably over Trojan taxation of ships entering and leaving the Dardenalles/Hellespont in order to pass through to the Black Sea for the amber that was mined there.

Sure, but "some period of unpleasantness between a constantly shifting network of Mycenaean and Ioian city-states" describes a war that is nothing like the Iliad, except metaphorically. It certainly isn't "the Iliad but atheist" the way Troy was supposed to be.