You are listening to Trojan War, the podcast, history's most awesome epic.

This is episode number one in the series. Today's episode is titled, The Apple of Discord. Hi, and welcome to Trojan War, the podcast. My name is Jeff Wright. I am the researcher,

the writer, the storyteller, and the producer of this series.

Now, what Trojan War the podcast is is a serialized telling in contemporary, 21st century

language of, well, the myriad of stories that, well, if you combine them all together,

comprise the epic story of the Trojan War. Now, each episode in the series that you'll listen to is

going to present a particular story. And if you choose to listen to all of the episodes in order,

well, you'll end up tuning into one big, epically big, I suppose, story arc. Now, there's a lot

of material to cover. There's Achilles, of course, and Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships, and there's going to be a beauty contest between goddesses. And, of course, at some stage in the proceedings, there will have to be a wooden horse. So, it's a lot of ground to cover. It's going to be an awful lot of fun. Let's get right into it, shall we, with today's inaugural episode, which I've decided to call

the Apple of Discord. So I need to take you to a mountain. The mountain is located in modern-day

Greece. It's in the north of Greece. You can actually go visit the mountain today. And the reason

I need you to take you to the mountain is because it's a particularly important mountain inside the history of this story and in fact inside of Greek mythology.

Because the mountain is called Mount Olympus and it's the home of the Olympian gods.

You know these gods. You are familiar with at least some of their names. Zeus, King of the Gods,

Master of the Thunderbolt,

his wife, Hera, and there's Athena, there's Aphrodite, there's Apollo, there's 12 of them in total.

And on the day when the epic story of the Trojan War really gets going, the story begins on Mount Olympus, and that is the one recorded day in history when Zeus, King of the Gods, chose to remove

the veil of mist that shrouded Mount Olympus from human sight. Now, the reason Zeus did this on

this day, which happened sometime about 4,000 years ago, is because Zeus had decided to host a wedding. And the

wedding that Zeus was hosting was going to be the largest, most spectacular wedding in the entire

history of myth or epic or humanity. The two people being married were unique. The bride to be was actually a deity herself. She was a minor goddess. She was what was called a sea nymph, not one of the big time powerful goddesses, but in a mortal goddess all the same. Her name was Thetis. And what she did as a sea nymph is basically hang around the Mediterranean sunbathing. And Thetus, the bride to be, was going to be

marrying a human being, a Greek Bronze Age warlord, a guy named Palius. Now, Zeus was hosting the

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