With many apologies to pastifi for the delay in posting these pictures, here are some photos of his latest custom, some Trojan guards.
There are differing views as to whether the Trojan War/Siege of Troy was an actual incident in history or simply one of the mythological stories of the ancient Greeks. If you look at the British Museum website, for example, all references are to the myth of the Trojan War, but other authorities are less certain. Certainly, until the late 19th century, it was the accepted view that the story was a myth. This was partly because of the quite major role of the Greek gods in the story, always interfering and siding with one army or character or another, but most importantly because of the lack of any written evidence for the existence of Troy and the war between it and the Greeks because there was no really developed written language at the time. For example, The Illiad, Homer's epic 15,000 line poem about just 40 days of the siege of Troy in the ninth year of the war, was put into written form long after Homer died. Homer had composed it and then told it over and over again orally, committing it to memory, as did others during and after his lifetime, with nothing written down. (As Homer was blind, writing or having the poem written down for him wouldn't have helped anyway.) In these times, knowledge was passed on to later generations through an oral tradition.
It wasn't until the 1870s and the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann in Asia Minor that people began to think that maybe there was something in the Greek story of the siege of Troy, and later archaeological discoveries have reinforced the likelihood of there being some real events behind the Greek "myth" which were passed down orally and then embroidered on to form the story as we know it now.
But enough of this and on to the pictures.
First, a group of Trojan guards, with shields bearing a horse, the emblem of Troy.
Then, two guards at the doors of the main temple in Troy. In his poem, Homer has the Trojans speaking Greek and worshipping the same gods as the Greeks. Whether or not this was so, we don't know. It seems likely, however, that the Trojans and Greeks had at least some of the same gods (after all, the Romans adopted the Greek gods and then added more to them.
