Mark Gagnon

frenemies bromance thing heated rivalry 1.0 and uh even like the 2018 bbc series troy fall of the city and a madeline miller novel the song of achilles and circe brought the story of the trojan war to everyone in the modern age

And perhaps most importantly, the Iliad gives us something that no other ancient text really does.

It shows us the humanity on both sides of war, which is very unique for the time and really kind of unique now.

Homer doesn't make the Greeks purely heroic or the Trojans purely villainous.

Hector's arguably like the best character in the poem, right?

Like he's like a good dude fighting for his family against impossible odds.

Achilles is like the hero, but he's also like cruel and he's kind of like mopey and petty.

The Iliad insists that war is both glorious and amazing, but also like horrifying and it brings out like the best in people, but the worst in people.

And really that your enemy is a human being and that this feeling of pain and loss and grief is a universal feeling.

That scene where Priam kneels before Achilles and they just hold each other and cry, sort of sharing this mutual loss, right?

It may be one of the most important moments in all of Western literature.

So just to wrap up, the Trojan War sits at this crazy intersection, the place where like you have myth and history kind of like blurring into this sort of amorphous thing that no one can really fully explain.

There was a real city that was really destroyed and there was a real Bronze Age collapse of Greeks and fighting between Bronze Age Greeks and Anatolian peoples and

You know, all this stuff did happen in theory, right?

But the story that we tell about it, the golden apple, you know, this beauty competition that turns into this big war with Helen, the most beautiful woman ever, all that kind of stuff, that obviously belongs to Homer and to the centuries of oral poets that kind of shaped the story before him.

But I think...

Homer knew something in writing this that we're still learning today and that our politicians and leaders from around the world are still discovering every new generation is that the real tragedy of war isn't about who won or who lost.

It's that it costs everyone.

It's about enemies, a prideful hero, this pitiful king, both kneeling in the dirt, weeping for the loss of their loved ones.

And the fact that 3,000 years later, we're still telling the story