Ancient Greek Warriors in Modern Reception
Module 2 focuses on modern receptions of Ancient Greek warriors and wars, especially the Trojan War (end of the Greek Bronze Age; this war may or may not actually have taken place) and Persian Wars (early 5th Century BCE). Because ancient warfare was carried out, for the most part, by men only and in grinding hand-to-hand battle, modern popular pre-digital and digital receptions have tended to pick up on and glorify the (hyper-)masculinity involved in ancient battle. Some ancient versions of the Trojan War, however, feature the famous Amazons, the female warriors (most likely historically from ancient Scythia) whose leader, Penthesilea, was slain (in Greek literary and material culture accounts) by Achilles not long before the war ended. The Amazons and their modern equivalent, Wonder Woman, therefore feature towards the end of this Module, even though they are not strictly “Greek.”
Module 2, then, focuses primarily on (hyper-)masculinity, and features some of the ideological baggage that tends to accompany that phenomenon, especially in regard to gender expectations. But since warfare tends to characterize the enemy as “other” and barbarous, alongside masculinity runs a focus on what Edward Said has called Orientalism.
Our primary source for the Trojan War, apart from archaeology, is Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and other epic works – such as the extant fragments of the Epic Cycle, Virgil’s Aeneid, and so on – that feed off those two central works. It is essential, therefore, to understand the nature of the medium in which Homer composed those works, that is, Spoken Word, which is explored in 2.1. Then in 2.2 other evidence for the Trojan War is examined in order to offer a reasonably “accurate” picture of the state of our knowledge about the historicity and/or mythical status of the war. Notable also is what many have referred to as Homer’s “cinematic” use of language, a vividness of expression that has facilitated the large number of receptions of the Trojan War in visual media, especially film and TV.
Module 2.2
Module 2.3 then examines two recent receptions of the Trojan War: the 2004 movie, Troy, by David Benioff (writer) and Wolfgang Petersen (director), and the British-American TV miniseries, Troy: Fall of a City, the brainchild of Executive Producer Derek Wax. Analyses of the two receptions raise a number of significant themes with wider significance for modern and digital receptions of the Classical World. Both receptions were significantly enhanced by digital (CGI) technology while retaining a strong basis in physically enacted scenes in front of the camera. Moreover, both receptions feature hypermasculinity although in differently nuanced ways.
The 2004 movie was hugely popular but also strongly criticized, while the TV series was praised by critics but fared less well in terms of audience ratings. The 2004 movie has been critiqued as a typical product of commercial cinema with Brad Pitt (as Ac