This episode of the Hard Men podcast is brought to you by backwards planning financial, keep wise partners, farmer bills provisions, be regener race for our swift ships, then our fastest man afoot, then our best and boldest can step up to

win the javelin hurl, or wing the wind-swift arrow, or dare to fight with bloody rawhide

gauntlets. Come all. See who takes the victory prize, the palm, a reverent silence all, and

crown your brows with wreaths. An excerpt from The Inneid Book 5, Juneral Games for Ankyces.

The shifts were moored as the Trojans gathered on the shores of Sicily. Great-hearted

Aeneas, captain of the fallen city of Troy, called his men forward to pay homage to a life of mythic

proportions. A year had passed since he had buried his father, Ancise, in the earth on which he now stood.

The time had come to honor the anniversary of his passing, and so honor him they would,

not with weeping, not with empty words, but with games, beats of strength, endurance, skill,

and grit.

To honor the life of the man, it would conduct an elaborate

imitation of it and celebrate his accomplishments with accomplishments of their own. Trojan warriors

with fire in their blood took the field. They raced, they sailed, they fought for the palm branch,

for the acknowledgement of their captain, for the glory that only competition

can bring. Not for themselves alone, but for their ancestors and their descendants, for a legacy

that stretches beyond any single life. The civilization of Rome itself was built on such

contests in ceremonies, not in sloth, nor in softness, but in striving, martial training, and generational

reverence of men who knew that a people must know itself and be grounded in its heritage

in order to survive.

The intricate war drill performed on horseback, and led by the young princes of Troy in book

five of the Aeneid, known as the Lucis Troia, would later become

a Roman tradition revived by Julius Caesar, who sought as a way to connect Rome to its Trojan

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