Happy 3,208th Birthday to a Very Large Horse!

3,208 years ago today, on June 11 of 1184 BCE, as reckoned by the ancient Greek historian Eratosthenes, the Western Anatolian city of Walusa fell to Hellenic forces after a prolonged siege. Walusa had been a wealthy and influential center of trade and culture, located at the entrance to the Black Sea, and its destruction marked a shift in the Late Bronze Age balance of powers; the decline of the Hittite Empire, with which Walusa had been aligned, and the rise of the Greek city-states.

Over the next four centuries, an oral storytelling tradition incorporated the conquest of Walusa into an epic cycle of poetry about the Trojan War, its causes, and its aftermath. With the Greek adoption of the Phoenician alphabet, it became possible in the 8th Century BCE to preserve these stories in written form as the Epic Cycle, the two surviving segments of which are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

One of the poems written down alongside the works of Homer was the Aethiopis. In its first rhapsody, a band of female Scythian warriors, the Amazons, joins the Trojan side of the war and their leader, Queen Penthesileia, takes on Achilles in single combat as a respected equal. In written form, this story likely endured for a thousand years until the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria in 272 CE.

Shortly after the destruction of the great library, possibly intending to preserve the epic tradition, Quintus of Smyrna, living and writing in Roman-occupied Anatolia, cobbled together a 3rd Century Homeric-styled epic from remaining sources, traditions, and memories. His version of the story, preserved by Byzantine monks, was unearthed into the modern world shortly after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

This is the story I’m currently retelling in the web edition of Some Amazons. You can think of it as the long lost 25th chapter of the Iliad. The episode releasing today, on this 3,208th anniversary of the war’s conclusion, centers crude Thersites, kin to Diomedes.

Thersites is the kind of character who was born to chew the scenery. In the Iliad, he speaks truth to power, not fearing to speak his mind even to Agamemnon, the head honcho of all the Greek forces. In a council of kings and princes, Thersites represents the thoughts and interests of the common man. Unfortunately for Thersites, he delivers his truths in a crude and offensive way that enrages even his closest allies. Nobody likes him, nobody respects him, and nobody listens to him—but that doesn’t make him wrong. Like Cassandra on the Trojan side, Thersites is tragic figure whose advice is tragically disregarded.

Thersites doesn’t get nearly enough screen-time in Quintus’s version. He is not only treated as a joke, but one for which only the punchline is preserved. In attempting to restore what I imagine to be the lost setup from the original version, I’ve found Thersites to be the perfect counterpoint to that smooth-talking manipulator, Odysseus.

I’m not going to claim that Thersites deserved better than what he got, or that he was a flattering representation of the lower class of his society, but I will say that he deserved to be more visible. Enjoy him while you can.