Helen of Troy Movie Streaming
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I found Bettany Hughes very shapely and couldn’t engage my eyes off her in this program as she explored sources of information about Helen of Troy, a reaction that seems very appropriate given Helen’s reputation. Hughes has done a previous program on Sparta which rehabilitates them somewhat and is rumored as making another one on Socrates.
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This 2005 PBS broadcast runs for two hours and covers a lot of ground. Hughes states she is keen in exploring how a Bronze Age Queen such as Helen might have lived. Her premise is that there was really a Helen and that the epic of the portion she played in the Trojan War is based on fact. This reach, which ignores Helen’s mythological roles, enables Hughes to restrict herself to the archaeological narrate, where the life of the Bronze Age elite of Greece has left some mark.
The written recount is not too wonderful. Homer contents himself with calling Helen the most heavenly woman without giving further details, shiny his audience will maintain in the blanks themselves. But, examining Homer closely, it is possible to peruse how many details he writes about were of an earlier time than his acquire and consider the passing down of an oral tradition from as early as the 12th century BC, the time of the War. Fair as Michael Wood did in In Search of the Trojan War, Hughes finds experts who can reconstruct Bronze Age weaponry from Homer’s descriptions. It seems there is a lot of recoverable detail about how people lived in those times. But all this is supporting detail and doesn’t serve great where Helen is concerned.
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Hughes drives from Mycenae to Sparta, crosses the Aegean to Troy, travels up the Hellespont to Istanbul for a taste of what Troy might have seemed like in its heyday, then travels east to peruse the Hittites, the dominant political power of the Bronze Age in western Asia. While filling in a lot of social and political detail, Hughes is not able to fully note one of her major points, the relative freedom and access to power accorded to women in many societies of that time. There’s really not enough evidence to obtain more than conjectures.
There is another aspect to Helen that Hughes does not really peer, as her search is for a historical figure. Helen is a daughter of Zeus, king of the Greek gods. She and her sister Clytemnestra were hatched from an egg, even though her mother, Leda, was of human gain (though divine) . Her brothers were the gods Castor and Pollux. Both Helen and Clytemnestra were to show fatal to the Greek forces through their involvement with the brothers Agamemnon, leader of the Greek army and married to Clytemnestra, and Menelaus, married to Helen.
The Greeks often gave divine honors to their ancestors. If the involvement of Zeus and Aphrodite in Helen’s sage are seen as piece of this process, then the bloody feud of the Atridae, detailed in Aeschylus’ Oresteia and which was an indirect cause of the Trojan War, as well as the fable of the Seven against Thebes and of Oedipus, of Perseus, of Jason and Medea and of the Trojan War itself can be read as history, with the very ample qualification that the stories, based on fact but created to glean tribal and clan renown, were passed on as allotment of songs in honor of the ancestors and in rituals enacted at family shrines. In this process the ancestors became heroes, the heroes became gods and children of gods. Five hundred years after these Bronze Age societies had passed away a gifted poet named Homer, who definitely did not ascribe to the religious beliefs of the age he depicted, recreated one such story: so fable became narrative, became ritual, became ceremonial song and then became one of the world’s greatest poems. Finding the historical elements in this is not an easy job.
Had Hughes wished to she could have looked at Bronze Age rituals that evidently did give position and authority to women and which can be seen on the surviving frescoes from Minoan Crete, opinion to be the parent civilisation to that of Mycenean Greece. Women were bare breasted, their femininity was honored, they predominated in ceremonies below ground to invoke the snake goddess who gave wisdom and the bull god who gave life (I can’t support thinking of the Canaanite Eve who might have been once such a priestess/goddess) . Medea could have been another such figure, as was the Pythoness who gave plot to Apollo at Delphi.
The distress with looking at the past is that other societies had vastly different ways of looking at things than we do. We survey skin color, many ragged societies didn’t (which Roman Emperors were dark? ) We like facts, dilapidated societies didn’t deem facts were nearly as indispensable as clan honour. We separate concepts such as patriotism and religion, the Greeks didn’t. Nobody’s going to net a biography of Helen or a history of the Trojan War surviving on clay tablets because nobody in the Bronze Age had view of such things.
From the remains we have: a few battered artifacts, an excavated city’s outline, deductions from a few lines of poetry, historians such as Hughes try to clarify a vanished procedure of life. The lack of evidence means there can be more than one such interpretation, and none conclusive. This is the fascination of the past.
One black fact Hughes is able to confirm is that the scale of things was distinguished smaller than we imagine. Smaller cities, smaller populations, fewer soldiers and ships, raids more accepted than battles, deaths (despite Homer’s repulsive descriptions) more often among the peasantry than the nobility. “The face that launched a thousand ships” was said of Helen almost 3000 years after her time, the memoir having grown with the telling.
I actually first watched this at a friends house. Its the first time that when I got home I went to Amazon and had to have my bear copy. Its really done well and Ms Hughes provides unprejudiced the fair mix of been a history teacher and also a lover of customary culture’s. It’s filmed quite well and if you like Michael Woods DVD and Books then this ones for you. The main incompatibility is Hughes has more energy than Wood although I am a Wood fan.Its about the just mix of been serious about your history and been lost in your appreciate for it, Bravo!!!
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