Nicholas: The villains are clearly the king and the prince on either side, who created this whole conflict by acting like women. Why do they infer all this sort of like homorotic subtext into a into the story? I think that when you opt for homoroticism as your hot for anything, you're probably really mists in the forest through the trees. And it's a way to shut down any interesting conversation," he says.
Transcript
chevron_right
Play full episode
chevron_right
Transcript
Episode notes
The history of the Trojan War, assiduously studied and thoroughly documented today, was passed down through the centuries not by academic text, but by oral tradition. The conduit for communication, rather than scholarly prose, was the campfire poetry best told in the Iliad by Homer, author of the other great Greek epic The Odyssey. How much of the details of the story were true, such as the role of the Gods, versus artistic embellishment are of less import, but rather how the stories and myths of such great events – incorporating the essentials of love, lust, power and corruption – proved equally a reflection as much as an influence on the foundations of culture in the ancient Greek world and by extension the greater West.
