Mark Gagnon

Whoever won Helen's hand, the rest would defend that marriage.

Think about that.

It was a mutual defense pact, and now Menelaus was calling it in.

So the man who organized the Greek response was Menelaus' brother, this guy Agamemnon.

This is the king of Mycenae and was the most powerful ruler in all of Greece at the time.

And Agamemnon didn't just want Helen back.

He wanted all of Troy.

Yeah, according to later Greek tradition, he assembled the largest fleet of the ancient world, the largest fleet ever assembled, over a thousand ships, according to Homer, carrying the greatest warriors of the Greek world.

Now, let's just pause the story here, all right?

We're gonna do like a little Lion King one and a half thing.

We're gonna talk about what and who is talking about this and how that changes what the story actually is.

So you might've heard of Homer, right?

He's the Greek poet that writes the Iliad.

And the Iliad is an epic poem about the Trojan War.

It was likely the product of, you know, centuries of oral song and storytelling.

Some of it is fact, some of it is kind of embellished, some of it's just purely fictional.

And it was crystallized sometime around like the 8th,

or early 7th century BC.

Now, by Homer's time, the world that the poet was describing was already gone.

And the Iliad doesn't actually cover the entire Trojan War.