Hello and welcome back to the history of ancient Greece.

Episode 7, Late Bronze Age Collapse.

At the very height of Mycenaean power and prestige in the Mediterranean Sea, the Greeks came to blows with the Trojans in an epic 10-year war.

However, there is no single authoritative text

that tells the entire events of the Trojan War.

Instead, the story is assembled from a variety of sources.

Those would be the Iliad of Homer, various tragedy. of and a first century BC Roman named Virgil who's in need picks up where Homer left off and was relying upon sources that we don't have any longer.

The war gave them a golden apple, known as the apple of discord, marked for the fairest.

Zeus sent the goddesses to a Trojan prince named Paris, who judged that Aphrodite was the fairest and should receive the apple.

In exchange, Aphrodite promised him the love of any woman in the world.

Well, when a diplomatic mission brought Paris to Sparta, he was smitten by the beauty of their Queen Helen.

So he invoked Aphrodite to cash in on her promised debt.

So she made Helen, the most beautiful of all women and wife of Menelaus, fall in love with Paris.

And the two escaped Detroit in the middle of the night, and enraged Menelaus thus appealed to his brother Agamemnon, the king of Mycini, to attack Troy and bring back his wife.

Due to his power and prestige, Agamemnon was able to summon most of the Greek cities to join his cause.

The myth that supports this is the oath of Tindaris, who was Helen's father,

in which all of the Greek leaders that had wooed Helen

swore an oath that they would protect her marriage

with whomever she chose, which turned out to be Menelaeus.

So when Helen was abducted by Paris, the oath kicked in, but the Wiley Odysseus didn't want to go and resist it.

Since Achilles was too young to swear the oath, his mother Thetis dressed him like a girl and tried to

hide him. Obviously in the end both heroes joined the expedition.

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