TROJAN WAR (Characters, must know facts) Achilles When Achilles was still a little baby, his mother

tried to protect him from harm by dipping him into a river that had special magic water. And it worked; he could not be harmed, except for one heel that his mother held him by as she dipped him in the water. Now when someone is very strong but has one weak spot, we call that their "Achilles' heel." When he grew up, Achilles heard a prophecy. It was this: he could make a choice to live quietly and without fame or honor, and live a long time and die in bed, or he could choose to be famous in his lifetime and remembered always, but to die young. What would you choose? Achilles chose to be famous and die young, and you can read about how that happened in Homer's Iliad. Helen Helen, the daughter of Zeus and the queen of Sparta, was the most beautiful young woman in the world. She lived in Sparta with her mother and her father, the king of Sparta, and her half-sister, Clytemnestra. All the young men wanted to marry her. Her stepfather (the king of Sparta) was afraid that if he said she could marry one of the suitors (the men who wanted to marry her), all the other suitors would fight him, and there would be a big war. (Yes, Helen was that beautiful. It's a story). So Helen's stepfather had an idea. He got all the suitors together in one place and made them all swear to protect Helen and her marriage, whichever one of them got to marry her. So they all swore. Then the king (Helen's stepfather) had the suitors all compete in athletic games. The one who won was Menelaus, and so he married Helen. Helen's sister Clytemnestra married Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, Menelaus' older brother. Cassandra Cassandra was a priestess of Apollo in Troy before the Trojan War. She was very beautiful, and Apollo saw her and fell in love with her. He offered her the gift of prophecy (being able to see what was going to happen in the future) if she would kiss him. She agreed, and he gave her the gift, but when he went to kiss her she spit in his mouth. Apollo was very angry. He could not take away her gift, but he changed it so that she would always know what was going to happen, but nobody would ever believe her when she told them. Sure enough, Cassandra told all the people in Troy to watch out for the Trojan, but nobody paid any attention. After the Trojans lost the war, the Greek warrior Ajax (not the same one as the other Ajax) took Cassandra prisoner and gave her to Agamemnon as a slave. He took her home to Mycenae, where she warned him that Clytemnestra was going to kill him, but again no one believed her. After killing Agamemnon, Clytemnestra killed Cassandra too.

1. The most famous Greek literary stories of the war are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, our first two epic poems, composed for oral recitation probably in the eighth century before Christ. The theme of the Iliad is the wrath of Achilles at the action of Agamemnon, and the epic follows the story of Achilles' withdrawal from the war and his subsequent return. The Odyssey tells the story of the return of Odysseus from the war. A major reason for the extraordinary popularity and fecundity of the story of the Trojan War is the unquestioned quality and authority of these two great poems, even though they tell only a small part of the total narrative and were for a long time unavailable in Western Europe (after they were lost to the West, they did not appear until the fifteenth century). The Iliad was the inspiration for the archaeological work of Schliemann in the nineteenth century, a search which resulted in the discovery of the site of Troy at Hissarlik, in modern Turkey. 2. The Greek tragedians, we know from the extant plays and many fragments, found in the story of the Trojan War their favorite material, focusing especially on the events after the fall of the city. 3. Greek philosophers and historians used the Trojan War as a common example to demonstrate their own understanding of human conduct. So Herodotus and Thucydides, in defining their approach to the historical past, both offer an analysis of the origins of the war. Plato's Republic uses many parts of Homer's epics to establish important points about political wisdom (often citing Homer as a negative example). Alexander the Great carried a copy of the Iliad around with him in a special royal casket which he had captured from Darius, King of the Persians.