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Tag Archives: Aphrodite

The City of Aeneas 1000 B. C. – 500 B. C.

Aeneas

The minstrels who wandered from country to country in the ancient world told a legend of Aeneas, a Trojan prince. According to the story, Aeneas escaped the Greeks who broke through the walls of Troy and fled to his ships with a little band of warriors. Rowing out onto the Hellespont, they watched while a great fire destroyed their city and they knew that they could never return to Troy. Then, the storytellers said, the gods spoke to Aeneas, telling him to turn his ships west. They commanded him to sail away from the Hellespont and the Aegean Sea, past Crete and the country of the Greeks, into the unknown western ocean. There he would find a new land and build a new Troy, a mighty city that would conquer the Greeks and all the world. Aeneas obeyed the gods and sailed west; but before he came to the place where his new city would be built, he knew many years of adventure and hardship. A storm wrecked his ships on the coast of Africa, where he was found by Dido, the queen of a great city called Carthage. Dido took Aeneas to her palace and told her people to greet him like a prince. While he lived in the palace, waiting for new ships to be built, the queen fell in love with him. She begged him to give up his wandering and his dreams of a new Troy. She would make him king of Carthage, if only he would stay with her. When he refused, she killed herself, calling on the gods to grant her curse: “May Carthage and the city of Aeneas be enemies, make war on one another and live in hatred forever.” Aeneas sailed on, until he came to Italy and the ancient Greek city …

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The Golden Age of Athens 480 B. C. to 430 B. C.

Pericles

When Themistocles and the people of Athens came home from Salamis, they found only the ashes of a city. Their houses and shops were gone. The Acropolis was littered with chunks of broken limestone and smoke-blackened statues, the ruins of their sacred temples. The years of war had taught the Athenians courage and victory gave them pride and hope. They began to build again. While the citizens planned new houses, Themistocles planned new walls – walls around the city, walls to protect the harbour at Piraeus and walls along the four miles of road that connected the two. When they were finished, Athens would be an island, surrounded by ramparts of stone instead of the sea and as safe as Salamis. The Spartans already jealous of the Athenian navy, wanted badly to stop the work on the walls. They wrote to Themistocles and asked him to join them in a pact to outlaw all city walls in Greece. Themistocles knew well enough what they were after, but he agreed to go to Sparta to talk. Once he was there, he kept the talk going for weeks. When the Spartans heard that the walls were still going up, they complained. Themistocles suggested that they send ambassadors to Athens to look for themselves. When the ambassadors returned, they said that the walls were indeed being worked on. “No” Themistocles said, “by now they are finished” and he left the conference. It was a Spartan sort of trick and no one blamed Themistocles for it. In fact, many of the Greeks were pleased, not only because Sparta had been fooled, but Athens was the city they looked to as their defender against the Persians. The Spartans had lost interest in fighting Persians, once their own land was safe. Athens, however, had carried the …

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Gods and Heroes 800 B.C. – 550 B.C.

Homer

From island to island and town to town, across the wide new world of the Greeks, the minstrel wandered, with a harp slung across his back and a batch of stories in his hand. When he knocked at the gate of a palace or great house and offered to sing for his supper, he was never refused. There were no shows to see and no books to read. The people relied on the minstrels to entertain them and to tell their stories of the past, which otherwise might be forgotten. The minstrel’s stock of stories was a mixture of tall tales, half-remembered history and myths, the stories of the gods. He collected them wherever he travelled, usually from other minstrels. As the stories were passed along from singer to singer, the history grew a little fuzzier and the tales grew a great deal taller. In the great hall of a palace, where the lord and his guests gathered in the evening, the minstrel was given a place of honour. After dinner, he was invited to sing. Most of his songs began with the Achaean attack on Troy. First, he reminded his listeners of the reason for the war: Paris, a prince Troy, stole Helen, the wife of the king of Sparta, Menelaus and the most beautiful woman in the world. The minstrel told about Agamemnon’s call to arms and the fleet that was made ready to sail. Then he listed the famous heroes who boarded the ships. Each had his own adventures and the minstrel chose different ones to tell about every evening. He might sing about Agamemnon, who came home from Troy victorious, only to be killed by his wife; or Achilles, the greatest of Greek warriors, who slew the Trojan champion Hector; or Odysseus, the craftiest of the …

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