EPISODE 3 “THE BIRTH OF ACHILLES”

TROJAN WAR: THE PODCAST

Jeff Wright

History

4.8 • 650 Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2016

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

THE STORY: (38 minutes) A miraculous child survives not only the homicidal raging of an angry demi-god, but also an icy immersion in a magic river and the venomous bite of a deadly snake. Then the child turns two, and his real adventures begin. THE COMMENTARY: THE ACHILLES STORIES THAT I DID NOT TELL YOU (16 minutes; begins at 38:00) I begin this episode of post-story commentary by discussing the reasons for the popularity of “Achilles stories” in the Bronze Age and Classical Greek world. I then briefly review some of the "birth of Achilles" stories that I chose to leave out of my account of Achilles’ early life. Following that, I review one particular major point of difference between Achilles as I present him in my story, versus Achilles as Homer chooses to portray him in The Iliad. This leads to a discussion of what “Achilles stories” were actually available and known to Homer when he wrote his epic, circa 700 BCE.. Have fun! Jeff RELATED IMAGES

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to Trojan War, the podcast, history's most awesome epic.
0:20.1	Yeah. history's most awesome epic this is episode number three in the series today's episode is titled
0:37.1	the birth of Achilles. So welcome to episode number three of Trojan War, the podcast.
1:06.3	This episode is titled The Birth of Achilles.
1:15.1	Now, a lot of you, you've been into the podcast for two episodes already and so you know how this process operates and you know that I'm telling an
1:20.1	ongoing epic story in serialized form and we're on to episode number three. But there's a possibility
1:26.0	that some of you listening right now have stumbled
1:28.2	across this podcast completely by accident, and this is your first exposure to Trojan War
1:33.8	the epic. And if that's the case, well, you're more than welcome to hang around. In this particular
1:38.5	episode, I'm going to be recounting a lot of the really incredibly interesting and fun stories
1:43.4	about the birth and the early
1:44.8	childhood years of the great hero Achilles. And these stories in this particular episode will serve
1:51.4	very nicely as a freestanding independent episode. You'll have an awful lot of fun. On the other hand,
1:57.4	I'd venture that you'll have even more awful lot of fun if you, instead of
2:02.5	listening to this episode right away, make a quick trip over to my website and tune into
2:08.6	podcast episodes number one, followed by podcast episode number two before you get on to this one.
2:15.3	Either choice is yours, and I'll let you make that right now.
2:19.8	So, if you recall back to the end of episode number one, the episode titled The Apple of Discord,
2:26.3	the wedding of Palaeus and Thetus had been horribly disrupted by the goddess of discord.
2:33.3	Now, Palaeus, you'll recall, was a Bronze Age Greek
2:35.8	warlord, sort of a medieval kind of king in the Bronze Age, and Thadus, his bride, his very
2:43.1	reluctant bride, who had been forced to marry him against her wishes, well, Thetus was an immortal
	...

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