The story does a good job portraying just how bloodyand nasty that stuff was. It takes a certain certain mant go into a situation like that and to not run away. And perhaps that's part of why they told this story. It was perhaps to pire other other young men to be willing to fight, because it truly is a gruesome adventure.
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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.
