We can see from a passage like this that there is vast corpus of narratives about the fall of Troy that is now lost to us, but that must have informed the experience of any spectator of ancient Greek art or tragedy.
Chapter 3. What associations does the Trojan War as a theme carry with it? How are Trojans and the fall of Troy represented in Athenian literature and art? As we will see, the Athenians are not categorically a part of the Achaean collective tradition and cannot necessarily be assimilated with the Greeks of the Iliad.
In the Iliad that has come down to us, the Athenians are barely mentioned. The Catalogue has been shown to reflect, for the most part, the political geography of Bronze Age Greece.
Iliad 2. And they that held the well-built citadel of Athens— the people of great Erechtheus, whom once Athena the daughter of Zeus raised, and who was born of the life-giving soil itself, and Athena established him at Athens in her own rich sanctuary; there, with bulls and rams the Athenian youths worship him as the years circle around— of these men Menestheus, the son of Peteos, was commander.
There was no man on earth like him for marshalling chariots and shield-bearing men. Nestor alone rivaled him, for he was older. With this man there came fifty black ships. Here I call attention to Menestheus, who at first glance seems like a strange choice.
Theseus seems to have had no connection whatsoever to the Trojan cycle of myth, and thus his absence might confirm a prevailing view of antiquity that the Athenians are a late addition to the Catalogue. It seems that the Athenians, small as their role was in the tradition as a whole, were nevertheless a venerable component of the Achaean forces, and that their hero Menestheus was as integrated into the oral tradition as any of the other minor figures that have been woven into the fabric of the narrative.
But despite these claims to participation in the Trojan War, the Athenians were accused in antiquity of forging their place in the Iliad. Plutarch records two instances where verses that mention Theseus or the Athenians were said to be inserted by the Athenians themselves or by others. Plutarch Solon Ajax brought twelve ships from Salamis, and stationed them where the Athenians placed their phalanxes.
This same story is related by Strabo with additional details, including the verses that the Megarians claimed Solon had replaced. The belief that an Athenian inserted a verse that he composed himself into the Iliad must have had some currency in antiquity. Verse is omitted in several of the ancient papyri and medieval manuscripts, including such important editions as the Hawara papyrus and the tenth-century Venetus A Marcianus Graecus But other verses that mention the Athenians in the Iliad , such as Iliad 1.
The Athenians themselves, however, do not seem to have doubted their place in the epic tradition. As several scholars have pointed out, these figures are not the warriors named, for example, in the Odyssean description of the Trojan horse 4.
Recent scholars, however, have shown that the representation of the sack of Troy in Athenian art is usually anything but celebratory. The representation of the sack of Troy on the Parthenon as an hubristic and unjustified act in fact resonates with Athenian literature and art in which the fall of Troy is depicted as a great sacrilege on the part of the Achaeans, in the context of which many atrocities were committed. The Athenian heroes Menestheus, Akamas, and Demophon are celebrated as the Athenian link to the collective kleos of Homeric song.
But as Ferrari points out, the point of representing the sack of Troy in fifth-century BC Athens was not to praise the Athenians, but to blame the Achaeans. Also most likely included were the deaths of Priam and Astyanax and the rape of Cassandra. In interpreting the significance of the sack of Troy on the Parthenon metopes it is important to keep in mind the historical circumstances of the building of this temple. When the Athenians retreated to Salamis in , the Persians swept through Attica, took over the Acropolis of Athens, and burned it, destroying its sanctuaries and temples.
As a memorial of the sacrilege committed by the Persians, the ruins of the burned temples were incorporated into the new building program. The ruins of the old temple of Athena were left in full view and never rebuilt. Ferrari asks: Would a subject that came trailing so heavy a baggage of pejorative connotations be chosen, unless that baggage was crucial to its charge?
The thesis of this paper is that the Ilioupersis was deployed on the Parthenon precisely because it was the paradigm of wrongful conquest. The images invited comparison with the Persian invasion of Greece, not, however, in the sense that the Trojans prefigure the Persians.
Rather, the recent sack of Athens is seen through the image of the epic sack of Troy. As I noted above, the Athenians believed that they had been a part of the collective Greek expedition. At times this was a source of pride for Athens, as the monumental bronze horse dedication on the Acropolis indicates. The following is one of the three inscriptions, as reported by Aeschines 3. In the previous chapter I argued that very soon after the Persian invasion the Athenians were able to sympathize in a remarkable way with the sufferings of their defeated enemy through the medium of tragedy.
The ability to transcend hostilities and reexperience Salamis from the other side, however, does not mean that the Athenians did not condemn the Persian attack and in particular the destruction of the Acropolis, or that they did not take pride in their victory. The Athenians seem to have been all too aware that in the act of sacking a city one is particularly susceptible to committing hubristic outrage.
In , after besieging and capturing the city of Eion, they sold the entire population into slavery and established a colony there. On the one hand it prefigures the sack of their own city and the desecration of their temples at the hands of a foreign aggressor.
On another level, the myth is a warning against the excesses of brutality that often come with victory. This portico contains, first, the Athenians arrayed against the Lacedaemonians at Oenoe in the Argive territory.
What is depicted is not the crisis of the battle nor when the action had advanced as far as the display of deeds of valor, but the beginning of the fight when the combatants were about to close.
On the middle wall are the Athenians and Theseus fighting with the Amazons. So, it seems, only the women did not lose through their defeats their reckless courage in the face of danger, if after Themiscyra was taken by Herakles, and afterwards the army which they dispatched to Athens was destroyed, they nevertheless came to Troy to fight all the Greeks as well as the Athenians themselves. After the Amazons come the Greeks when they have taken Troy, and the kings assembled on account of the outrage committed by Ajax against Cassandra.
The painting includes Ajax himself, other captive women, and Cassandra. At the end of the painting are those who fought at Marathon; the Boeotians of Plataea and the Attic contingent are coming to blows with the barbarians.
Here is also a portrait of the hero Marathon, after whom the plain is named, of Theseus represented as coming up from the under-world, of Athena and of Herakles. The Marathonians, according to their own account, were the first to regard Herakles as a god. Of the fighters the most conspicuous figures in the painting are Callimachus, who had been elected commander-in-chief by the Athenians, Miltiades, one of the generals, and a hero called Echetlus, of whom I shall make mention later.
What I find striking about this painting is its concern for the defeated Trojans, and in particular the captive Trojan women. If it were not for this important detail, it would be natural to interpret the defeat of the Trojans as a victory for the Greeks on par with the victory at Marathon, which was the subject of the adjacent painting.
Polygnotus chose to depict not only the plight of the captive women, but the after effects of one of the most notorious outrages of the Greeks, the forced removal of Cassandra by Ajax from the sanctuary of Athena. The outrage of the assault, moreover, is exacerbated by the Greeks as a collective when they fail, after deliberating about the matter, to properly punish Ajax. It is important therefore to take this particular version into account when considering the thematic importance of the sack of Troy in Greek poetry and art.
Although its intended audience was not Athenian, this larger painting by Polygnotus, described in great detail by Pausanias, can shed even further light on the aims and composition of the somewhat more truncated version in the Painted Stoa in Athens. Helen herself is sitting, and so is Eurybates near her. We inferred that he was the herald of Odysseus, although he had yet no beard. These names too are different from those given by Homer in the Iliad , where he tells of Helen going to the wall with her slave women.
Their sheer number and their position in the description suggest that they were a prominent component of the painting. The Trojan women are represented as already captives and lamenting. Andromache is in the painting, and nearby stands her boy grasping her breast; this child Lesches says was put to death by being flung from the tower, not that the Greeks had so decreed, but Neoptolemus, of his own accord, wanted to be his killer.
Poets sing of her death at the tomb of Achilles, and I have seen with my own eyes paintings both at Athens and at Pergamon on the Caicus depicting the suffering of Polyxena. Already at this point in the description we can see that Polygnotus has drawn on a storehouse of traditions about the fate of the captive women of Troy for the composition of this painting.
Throughout his description of the painting Pausanias uses his knowledge of epic traditions—most often the Sack of Troy attributed to Lesches—to interpret what he sees. Pausanias says that he himself had seen a number of paintings that depicted the sacrifice of Polyxena.
As we will see in the following chapters, captive women formed the protagonists and choruses of many tragedies. Pausanias is aware of the more canonical epic traditions about Troy, but he does not seem to have access to other media that may have influenced Polygnotus and other artists of the fifth century BC. About Creusa the story is told that the mother of the gods and Aphrodite rescued her from slavery among the Greeks, as she was, of course, the wife of Aeneas.
Pausanias does not mention this episode in his description of the smaller painting in the Painted Stoa in Athens, but it is almost certain to have been painted there too.
For example, Pausanias mentions the deliberation about the rape of Cassandra in his description of the Stoa. Dead Trojans litter the painting. Priam is among the dead. It is not clear whether Priam is depicted at the altar of Zeus, but it is likely to have been the case, since Pausanias does mention the alternative version in which Neoptolemus drags Priam from the altar and kills him in the doorway.
Here again the sheer number of the corpses suggests that the central theme of this painting is the suffering of the Trojans and the utter brutality of the Greeks.
The painting is not about the experience of the victors, but that of the losers, whose men are killed and women taken as captives. As we turn back to Greek tragedy in the ensuing chapters, we will see that the concern for the defeated that is evident in Greek monumental art of the fifth century BC is likewise an important theme of the tragedies that deal with the Trojan War.
But as the fifth century progressed, the Athenians became increasingly the aggressors in the on-going hostilities between cities that pervaded the century, with the result that the relationship between history and tragedy is now quite different as we approach the Trojan War tragedies. The Parthenon was completed in , just before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. Conceived of as a dedication to Athena and a monument to victory over the Persians, it took on further significance as Athens became an empire over the course of the fifth-century BC.
That act is symbolic of the transformation of the Delian League into the Athenian Empire. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The two most powerful city-states in ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta, went to war with each other from to B.
The Peloponnesian War marked a significant power shift in ancient Greece, favoring Sparta, and also ushered in a period of regional decline that signaled the By the time the First Punic War broke out, Rome had become the dominant power throughout the Italian The term Ancient, or Archaic, Greece refers to the years B.
Archaic Greece saw advances in art, poetry and technology, but is known as the age in which the polis, or city-state, was The warrior Achilles is one of the great heroes of Greek mythology. The Battle of Marathon in B. The battle was fought on the Marathon plain of northeastern Attica and marked the first blows of the Greco-Persian War. With the Persians closing in on the Greek capitol, Athenian general Leonidas c. Although Leonidas lost the battle, his death at Thermopylae was seen as a heroic sacrifice because he sent most How will it end?
Who was the first man? Where do souls go after death? One of the greatest ancient historians, Thucydides c. The Trojan Horse is one. The main difference between the Spartan and Athenian is that Athenians wore a breastplate and did not have the Red cape that Spartans wore. Spartans did not wear the breastplate but instead fought only armed with Shield and Weapon. Spartans are extreamly better trained. Hector was a Spartan, Achilles fought for the Trojans Hector was a Trojan. The best Trojan in fact.
No; Helen was the wife of the Spartan king, Menelaus. Helen of Troy was a Spartan who fell in love with Paris who was a Trojan. Troy is about a forbidden between Paris Trojan prince and Helen Spartan queen.
An epic war ensues due to this forbidden love. The term Trojan horse is used while talking about computer infections. Trojan house is probably a name used to lure PC users in downloading malicious software. RS -VS. Athen woman went to war while Spartan woman stayed home to pick fruits and they lived a gentle life. The Spartan king who took part in the Trojan war was Menelaos, the husband of Helen. The Trojan war was a war between the ancient Greek city-state Troy and the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta and their allies.
Menelaus wanted to have his wife back so he invaded Troy with his army. The war was really long but the Spartans it is said in Greeks myths finally managed to get past the Trojan walls by giving them a huge horse made of wood where the Spartan warriors hide.
The Trojans didn't know that so they received the gift and thought that the war was over, but at night the Spartan warriors went out the horse, opened the doors and the Spartan armies with their allies fall over Troy. A spartan. Athenian people were more civilised and enjoyed entertainment such as theatre. Spartan people were warriors and were what you may call 'Barbaric' they enjoyed entertainment such as hunting and public fights.
A Trojan Horse virus comes into you computer, and your computer usually won't expect it. It then send many other different and horrible viruses into your comp. Look up the story of the Trojan Horse if you still don't understand. Log in. The Difference Between. Study now. See Answer. Best Answer. Study guides.
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