Hi folks. My name is Jeff Wright. I'm the researcher, the writer, and the storyteller behind

Trojan War, the podcast. Ryan has kindly invited me to come on to his particular podcast and offer up a short

plug of my own show. So here goes. First of all, I'm really, really honored to be here. I use

Ryan's history of ancient Greece all the time. Whenever I require a quick and incisive and

entertaining overview of a particular period of ancient Greek history that I'm researching.

It's Ryan's podcast that I turn to. It's good, it's reliable, and it's entertaining. And you

already know that or you wouldn't be listening to this now. So thanks, Ryan. So a quick overview of

what I'm doing with Trojan War the podcast. Well, I am really telling in 20 serialized episodes

the Trojan War epic cycle. Now, just a quick

primer, if you're unfamiliar with that particular technical term, back in the Bronze Age of Greece,

sometime around 1,250 BC or so, there was a war. Well, there might have been a war. We don't really

know the historical record is really, really fuzzy, and archaeologists, historians,

and academics continue to debate it.

But there might have been a war, and if there was a war, it was between the ancient Greek

world and the city called Troy.

Now that war, which may or may not have happened, was talked about after it may or may not

have happened for about 500 years inside of what we

academics now refer to as the oral storytelling tradition. Basically guys like me walking into an

auditorium, a great hall, a taverna, or something like that, and telling the stories. So the

story consisted and hung around in the ancient Bronze Age world for about 500 years. Then sometime around 700 BC or so,

the Greeks developed a written language, and a lot of the stories got written down in a wonderfully epic

poem titled The Iliad by an author that we traditionally refer to as Homer. And after that, well,

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