Troy, Pitt, and What I Mean By "Understand"
This essay will most likely be the first in a series about the Iliad and Odyssey that I hope to turn into a separate curriculum, one that covers the poems, ancient historians and the way they looked at history, and Nietsche.
I really didn't like the movie Troy.
As an ancient history major, that was to be expected - it's rare that a popular version of an old story is liked by those that know the story well. But I didn't dislike it because I'd studied ancient history. As a matter of fact, I thought it was a good movie, given its limitations. But what the filmmakers set out to do was impossible - you can't make such a well-known story plausible to a modern audience in the short space of two hours unless you change key elements of the story (the key elements being, unfortunately, the elements that most resist changing). And the reasons why this is impossible go a long way towards explaining the mindset of a good historian.
Read on, and you'll see why. So let's start at the beginning.
If you haven't seen the movie, the plot is simple - Paris, Younger Prince of Troy, sweeps Helen, wife of Menelaus, mighty king across the sea, off her beautiful feet. This angers Menelaus, who runs to his bigger and more powerful brother Agamemnon, who has always wanted to raid Troy and have it for his own. Using the infidelity as an excuse, he launches a mighty army against Troy, one that includes Achilles, the strongest and best warrior around. Agamemnon insults Achilles by taking away Briseus, a captured Trojan woman who decides that Achilles isn't all that bad after kissing him. Achilles refuses to fight until his cousin Patroclus is killed, at which point Achilles thinks it best to fight again. He kills Hector, Older Prince of Troy, and refuses to give the body back to Priam, King of Troy, until the king sneaks into the enemy camp and demands the body back himself. A mere two weeks later the Greeks (the invaders, not the Trojans), in a stroke of genius, place their best warriors in a giant wooden horse. The Trojans, in a stroke of pure blind idiocy, take the horse inside the city without a second thought. That night, the warriors emerge, open the gates to the city, and everyone is slaughtered. In the process, Achilles gets hit in the ankle with an arrow shot by none other than Paris, Younger Prince of Troy. Paris keeps Helen. Agamemnon is killed.
The story flows very well until the end. Everything up to the Trojan Horse is plausible enough, but once the horse arrives on the scene, the movie begins to fall apart. It takes all of forty seconds for the Trojan King and his advisors to declare that bringing a giant wooden horse into the city is a good idea. Other ideas, like "give the horse a good inspection," "are you sure this isn't some kind of trap?" or "why in the world are we out here on the battlefield without any soldiers to guard us?" don't seem to surface in anyone's mind but Paris'.
"Well," Priam might later say, "that horse was bad news. But bringing it into the city...well, it seemed like a good idea at the time."
The movie has hit a wall. It is impossible to make the Trojan Horse even remotely plausible unless other elements of the story of the Trojan War are told. These elements, however, didn't make it into the film, either because they weren't well-known or because they were nearly impossible to tell in the space of just two hours. In short, the movie Troy was trying to do two things at once - it was trying to make the story plausible to a modern audience, and it was trying to include all the events of the Trojan War that most people were familiar with. And when the movie arrives at the Trojan Horse, it cannot possibly do both, and which point it resolves the paradox by rushing through the rest of the movie as fast as possible.
The movie tries to accomplish something that most historians have to do at some point - make a period of history plausible and/or interesting by turning it into a story. Troy, of course, isn't history, but the problem is the same. The only way to make the taking of a giant wooden horse inside a city seem like "a good idea at the time" is to tell more of the story - the role of the gods, why Achilles was really angry, the way men thought and acted, and a host of other things that can't be told in a two-hour time frame. Quite frankly, it'd probably take days to fully explain - motivations were so different in the ancient world that the easiest way to tell a good story based in history is to make the characters act as if they were pulled from the 21st century. Then the story can seem plausible, because at least we understand the characters. But the story quickly fails when 21st century characters have to do things that only ancient characters would even think of doing.
("Ma! Come quick! The guvermint done sent us a big ticking box! They wants to make peace! Let's bring it inside!")
Proper understanding of periods of history is one of the most difficult problems that historians face (the Trojan War isn't history, of course, but the problem is the same). It's more than understanding people's actions from a 21st century standpoint - a good historian has to understand his subjects from the period of time in which they live. And sometimes the explanations for people's actions way, way back when are so strange to us that we can do no more than just accept the fact that people long dead thought a certain way. It doesn't make sense to us; maybe it never will. But it did to them, and understanding that, and a willingness to work within that constraint, is necessary for doing good history.
With that in mind, read on to see what Troy would have looked like had the director instructed the actors to behave as if they lived according to standards of ancient morality and ancient values.
I really didn't like the movie Troy.
As an ancient history major, that was to be expected - it's rare that a popular version of an old story is liked by those that know the story well. But I didn't dislike it because I'd studied ancient history. As a matter of fact, I thought it was a good movie, given its limitations. But what the filmmakers set out to do was impossible - you can't make such a well-known story plausible to a modern audience in the short space of two hours unless you change key elements of the story (the key elements being, unfortunately, the elements that most resist changing). And the reasons why this is impossible go a long way towards explaining the mindset of a good historian.
Read on, and you'll see why. So let's start at the beginning.
If you haven't seen the movie, the plot is simple - Paris, Younger Prince of Troy, sweeps Helen, wife of Menelaus, mighty king across the sea, off her beautiful feet. This angers Menelaus, who runs to his bigger and more powerful brother Agamemnon, who has always wanted to raid Troy and have it for his own. Using the infidelity as an excuse, he launches a mighty army against Troy, one that includes Achilles, the strongest and best warrior around. Agamemnon insults Achilles by taking away Briseus, a captured Trojan woman who decides that Achilles isn't all that bad after kissing him. Achilles refuses to fight until his cousin Patroclus is killed, at which point Achilles thinks it best to fight again. He kills Hector, Older Prince of Troy, and refuses to give the body back to Priam, King of Troy, until the king sneaks into the enemy camp and demands the body back himself. A mere two weeks later the Greeks (the invaders, not the Trojans), in a stroke of genius, place their best warriors in a giant wooden horse. The Trojans, in a stroke of pure blind idiocy, take the horse inside the city without a second thought. That night, the warriors emerge, open the gates to the city, and everyone is slaughtered. In the process, Achilles gets hit in the ankle with an arrow shot by none other than Paris, Younger Prince of Troy. Paris keeps Helen. Agamemnon is killed.
The story flows very well until the end. Everything up to the Trojan Horse is plausible enough, but once the horse arrives on the scene, the movie begins to fall apart. It takes all of forty seconds for the Trojan King and his advisors to declare that bringing a giant wooden horse into the city is a good idea. Other ideas, like "give the horse a good inspection," "are you sure this isn't some kind of trap?" or "why in the world are we out here on the battlefield without any soldiers to guard us?" don't seem to surface in anyone's mind but Paris'.
"Well," Priam might later say, "that horse was bad news. But bringing it into the city...well, it seemed like a good idea at the time."
The movie has hit a wall. It is impossible to make the Trojan Horse even remotely plausible unless other elements of the story of the Trojan War are told. These elements, however, didn't make it into the film, either because they weren't well-known or because they were nearly impossible to tell in the space of just two hours. In short, the movie Troy was trying to do two things at once - it was trying to make the story plausible to a modern audience, and it was trying to include all the events of the Trojan War that most people were familiar with. And when the movie arrives at the Trojan Horse, it cannot possibly do both, and which point it resolves the paradox by rushing through the rest of the movie as fast as possible.
The movie tries to accomplish something that most historians have to do at some point - make a period of history plausible and/or interesting by turning it into a story. Troy, of course, isn't history, but the problem is the same. The only way to make the taking of a giant wooden horse inside a city seem like "a good idea at the time" is to tell more of the story - the role of the gods, why Achilles was really angry, the way men thought and acted, and a host of other things that can't be told in a two-hour time frame. Quite frankly, it'd probably take days to fully explain - motivations were so different in the ancient world that the easiest way to tell a good story based in history is to make the characters act as if they were pulled from the 21st century. Then the story can seem plausible, because at least we understand the characters. But the story quickly fails when 21st century characters have to do things that only ancient characters would even think of doing.
("Ma! Come quick! The guvermint done sent us a big ticking box! They wants to make peace! Let's bring it inside!")
Proper understanding of periods of history is one of the most difficult problems that historians face (the Trojan War isn't history, of course, but the problem is the same). It's more than understanding people's actions from a 21st century standpoint - a good historian has to understand his subjects from the period of time in which they live. And sometimes the explanations for people's actions way, way back when are so strange to us that we can do no more than just accept the fact that people long dead thought a certain way. It doesn't make sense to us; maybe it never will. But it did to them, and understanding that, and a willingness to work within that constraint, is necessary for doing good history.
With that in mind, read on to see what Troy would have looked like had the director instructed the actors to behave as if they lived according to standards of ancient morality and ancient values.
posted by NateWazoo at 4:30 PM
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