The Trojan War, with Mary Beard

0:07Hello everyone, it's Tom Holland here and I have teamed up with the great Mary Beard to bring you four episodes on what we together have decided are the four most iconic themes in ancient history. And today we are looking at the Trojan War. Here's a short extract of that episode. Hello everybody and welcome to Leighton House in Kensington in London. It's a gorgeous, This beautiful, very grand house full of Arabic touches and classical touches. Gorgeous garden where we had an Athelstan party. And we've come here because we need a sumptuous location for an imperious guest. And that guest is the most famous classicist in the world.

1:00and a woman to whom I owe personally an enormous amount because she was the person who first read Rubicon, my first book on classical history in manuscript. So ever since, I've been incredibly grateful to her as well as being her biggest fan. And it is, of course, the great, the one and only Mary Beard. Tom, thank you very much. I mean, Leighton House is my favourite place in London and it's great to talk to you. And you've just done what you always do. You always say when you introduce me, she was really kind to me back in the day before I'd written Rubicon. You were a professor of classics at Cambridge.

1:40You've written a lot of wonderful books aimed at more popular market as well as all your academic studies. So you've written books on the Parthenon, the general reader, Pompeii, the Caesars. and we're meeting here because we thought it would be fun, the two of us, to discuss the four most iconic subjects in ancient history, classical history, let's say the history of Greece and Rome specifically. And we've kind of had to and fro and we've come up with four subjects, haven't we? And what did you decide we should do? Well, we thought we had to do sort of two Greek, two Roman. Yeah. And how could you not do the Trojan War?

2:22you know, where it all begins. And so that's what we're doing today. We then thought, how could you not do Alexander the Great? A certain reservation on my part, it has to be said, but you persuaded me that we should do that. And then, and these do link in a way, as I hope people listening will discover. Then we go from Alexander to Julius Caesar. Yeah. And then gladiators and with a special lookout but Spartacus, a movie. All four of those, they're very masculine, aren't they? And they're very much focused on people killing each other. They are. And I think we thought that it would bring out some of our differences of opinion as well as things we hold in common.

3:09And I think also they're not just loads of men killing each other. They are that. most of them, all of them I think, they kind of occupy that funny, fuzzy boundary between what's myth and what's history. And that is one of the things I think is most interesting to explore in ancient history. How do we know what's true or not? And does it matter if it's true? And some of the most important aspects of all these, some of the most important aspects, are the mythical ones, whether or not they're there. Strictly true. So we're kind of, it's going to be a great tightrope actually. Well, it always is when you're trying to kind of tell stories that people want to know what actually happened.

3:58But often it's the fact we don't know entirely what happened that is the real fascination. And I know that you think I'm going to be a downer. You think I'm going to be a downer because you think Mary Beard, what's her trademark? Her trademark is scepticism. So we could have some great story and then I'm going to come in and say, none of it's true, you know. So I'm going to try and hold myself in a bit. You will make it much more interesting than just saying it's all rubbish. I know, I have absolute confidence in that. But some of the best history is not true. I think that's... Well, so on that topic, would it be fair to say that really Greek and Roman civilisation in a sense begins with this?

4:36Yeah. The way the Greeks and Romans think about themselves goes back to what they think about the Trojan War. I mean, it's both a kind of almost cosmic clash, which ends up slightly indirectly with the foundation of Rome, because Aeneas, one of the Trojan warriors, flees and founds the Roman race in Italy. The Trojan War is the place where Greeks and Romans start to debate about the morality of war, what the cost of war is, whether we think heroism is being a warrior or not. And for me, that's why the stories of the Trojan War are so interesting. Yeah, brilliant. Well, before we come on to the broader cultural context and what it meant for the Greeks and the Romans, and of course, in due course, the question that I'm sure lots of people will want to know your opinion on, did it actually happen?

5:40can you tell us the story of the the the Trojan War itself and I'm aware that there are multiple versions of it so feel free to kind of complicate it but a general sense of you know what's going on why did the Greeks and the Trojans come to fight what's the the the sweep of the narrative where did it start that's the question here we've got this you know semi-cosmic conflict How did it begin? Well, it began with a wedding party from hell, really. But the goddess Thetis is getting married to a mortal man called Peleus. Now, these in the end are going to be the parents of Achilles, but Achilles hasn't been born yet, great hero of the Greek side.

6:26Now, they made a terrible error. We all know about this. They didn't. There was somebody they should have invited, but they didn't. And they should have invited the goddess discord, conflict, Eris in Greek. So like a sort of mad grey aunt, Eris turns up anyway, determined to have her say. And she throws into this divine wedding party, really, a golden apple which says on it, to the most fair, it's written on this apple, it could be to the best, to the finest. Caliste is the word in Greek, which can mean beautiful but can mean morally good too. And three goddesses start to squabble about who owns the apple.

7:19And there's Hera, the queen of the gods. There's Athena, the oversimplifying goddess of wisdom, and there's Aphrodite. Who is the goddess of beauty. And they can't work out who owns the apple, therefore. And in order to adjudicate, and I think it's quite hard to see the details of how this adjudication came into being, it was decided that Paris, who was the, at that point, estranged son of King Priam of Troy and his wife, Queen Hecuba, should decide which goddess had the apple. So he meets them and they all kind of, each one tries to bribe him saying, if you choose me, I'll give you something you really need.

8:11Right. Hera's going to give him power. Athena's going to give him wisdom. Paris chooses Aphrodite as the fairest because her bribe is the best. She is offering him the most beautiful, desirable woman in the world for himself. And that woman is Helen. what is going to happen is that Paris is going to go and get Helen. That's what he does. Now, Helen was so beautiful and had been so lovely and had been such a prize for Menelaus when he won her as his wife that in order to kind of stop future trouble and civil war amongst the Greeks, They had agreed that if anybody came and pinched Helen, all the Greek kings and leaders would gang up and support Menelaus and go and get her back.

9:10And in a nutshell. That is what happens. That's what the Trojan War is all about. Paris takes Helen back to his city of Troy and he arrives back in Troy with Helen, his new trophy bride. And all the Trojans think, wow, she's great. We're never giving her back. And so that then sets up the war. Thanks for listening. You can subscribe to The Rest is History Club at therestishistory.com to hear the whole episode, to hear the whole series in due course and to get a massive, insanely brilliant range of other benefits. Mary and I will be back next week with Alexander the Great.