‹ Shelves ■ Troy, Achilles and the Odyssey — Greek historyFrom the Cyclades and Mycenae to the fall of Troy, Odysseus's return, Delos and the Athenians, and the Greeks' road from the gods to Christianity. The causes of war, its techniques, and the parallels with today's conflicts. Every lesson has a quiz.
23 lessons · 38 min
The reading track 23 lessons All With quiz · 23 All authors Homer · 11 Tucidide · 4 Vergiliu · 2
01 Before Troy, the Aegean already had two thousand years of civilisation: the sculptors of the Cyclades, the palaces of Minoan Crete, and the town buried by the Thera eruption. Timaios · Platon · -360 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 02 Mycenae was a world of fortress-palaces, scribes and chariots, and the coalition that sailed for Troy held together, says Thucydides, through fear and a fleet, not oaths. Războiul peloponesiac · Tucidide · -411 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 03 The Iliad and the Odyssey were sung for centuries before they were written; the repeated formulas are not a flaw but the memory technology of a culture without books. Odiseea · Homer · -700 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 04 In myth the war begins with a beauty contest, an abduction and an oath; all three say the same thing — a king's wounded honour binds a whole alliance. Iliada · Homer · -750 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 05 Beyond Helen, Troy sat at the mouth of the Hellespont, between the Mycenaean world and the Hittite empire; control of the strait and its trade explains a ten-year war better than an abduction. Istorii · Herodot · -430 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 06 At Aulis the fleet cannot sail until Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter; the myth says that mobilising a coalition demands from the leader a price no one else pays. Despre natura lucrurilor · Lucretius · -55 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 07 Homeric warfare is a war of bronze, of chariots used as taxis, and of duels between champions; the mass of fighters matters less than the prestige of a few. Iliada · Homer · -750 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 08 Troy's ten years are not a continuous siege but a war of attrition: raids for food and plunder, a permanent camp, rotting ships and an army that wants to go home. Iliada · Homer · -750 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 09 The Iliad does not begin with Troy but with a quarrel inside the coalition: the commander takes the best fighter's prize, and the fighter withdraws from the war. Iliada · Homer · -750 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 10 Book IX is a treatise on negotiation: three envoys, three styles, a huge offer — and a refusal, because the offer repairs the prize, not the insult. Iliada · Homer · -750 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 11 Patroclus puts on Achilles's armour so the Trojans will believe Achilles is back: the first deception operation in European literature works for a day and costs him his life. Arta războiului · Sun Tzu · -500 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 12 Hector proposes rules — the victor shall return the other's body — and Achilles refuses them; the duel of Book XXII is the moment the war loses its last law. Iliada · Homer · -750 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 13 The Iliad does not end with the fall of Troy but with an old man kissing the hand of his son's killer and two enemies weeping together: the law is restored by humanity, not by victory. Iliada · Homer · -750 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 14 Achilles had chosen short glory over long life; in the underworld his shade says he was wrong — literature's most famous veteran revokes his own bargain. Odiseea · Homer · -700 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 15 What ten years of force could not do, one night of deception does: the Horse works because it targets what the Trojans want to believe — that the war is over. Eneida · Vergiliu · -19 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 16 The fall of Troy is told by the defeated: the men killed, Priam butchered at the altar, the women divided as booty, a child thrown from the wall — and one survivor who leaves to found something else. Eneida · Vergiliu · -19 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 17 Achilles is force, Odysseus is metis — practical intelligence: the false name told to the Cyclops, the sheep under which he leaves the cave, the beggar who wins back his house. Odiseea · Homer · -700 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 18 Odysseus knows he will not resist the song, so he has himself bound to the mast before hearing it: the oldest technique of decision under constraint — taking away your own power to give in. Odiseea · Homer · -700 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 19 Within fifty years of Troy's traditional date the Mycenaean palaces burn, writing disappears, and Greece enters four centuries without cities or kings: the victors did not survive their victory. Războiul peloponesiac · Tucidide · -411 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 20 Troy was found by a man who believed Homer too much and half destroyed by his haste; what we know for certain today is less than the legend and more than nothing. Războiul peloponesiac · Tucidide · -411 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 21 Delos, Apollo's sacred island, was the seat of a defensive league against Persia; within twenty-five years Athens moved the treasury home and the league became an empire — the road from alliance to domination has an island's name. Războiul peloponesiac · Tucidide · -411 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 22 The Greeks did not give up their gods in a day: the philosophers emptied them of content, oriental cults competed with them, the Roman empire replaced them with law, and a single century of decrees closed the temples. Faptele Apostolilor · Noul Testament · 90 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions › 23 Odysseus gets home and, in Tennyson's version, wants to leave again; Troy and the Odyssey remain the maps on which every century draws its own wars, homecomings and doubts. Ulysses · Alfred Tennyson · 1842 ✓ Quiz · 3 questions ›