Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Ancient Warfare Answers. I'm Murray Darm. I'm the assistant editor of Ancient Warfare magazine. I'm on my own again, but that's all good. And I'm going to answer a question from Alec Johnson, I believe his name is. Let's have a look. I'm pretty sure. No, Andrew Johnson. Sorry, Andrew. I'll call you Alec. That was last time. I'm going to answer his question in a minute, but you too could ask us a question, and you two could support the podcast.

If you go to Patreon forward slash ancient warfare podcast, you can choose one of three levels to support the podcast, and you can even get a copy of the magazine, either in PDF or print form. So do that,

and that helps us do what we do. Now, the question today is, I was wondering how the

intertwining of heroic figures into people's lineage, such as everyone having an ancestor from

the Trojan War, was viewed by the common people.

I wonder if it has something to do with a foundational priesthood type rule.

It seems to me that people nowadays would love it if we could do something similar.

So the interesting thing there is, A, we don't know,

which is one of the things we've tried to avoid saying when we've been doing

these ancient warfare answers, but it's unfortunately one of the things that we have to say

more often not, we don't know, we're not sure you could go anywhere with that. But certainly

in terms of the common person's perspective, we don't have many things in our source material that's written from that perspective.

So we don't tend to get that kind of attitude reflected.

You can read it into some of the responses and certainly in terms of the way that the common people, for lack of a better term, refer or react to an aristocrat or a royal figure claiming that they have a lineage from a god or later on from a heroic figure, that they support them and they buy into that propaganda

shows that it seems to be effective.

You know, and it's not just obviously in the Homeric poems you've got the heroes and Hercules

and all of these others that have direct lineage to the gods.

And then moving on through history history you've got people who claim

lineage from those Homeric heroes you've also got the idea of course later on whether it be

Alexander where his mother claims that um you know, it was Zeus that slept with her,

and then even Julius Caesar has the same story told about him by his mother.

It continues.

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