by Ianto Watt
It was also the end of party time in the Pantheon of the gods, although they don’t seem to know it. The gods would bedevil the ‘victorious’ western Greeks during their entire voyage home (The Odyssey), especially Odysseus. And truth be told, Odysseus never again got to tell a lie so great as his masterpiece, the Trojan Horse. Why is everyone so enthralled by The Odyssey, the tale of the return of Odysseus to his kingdom in Ithaca? Was it because he seemed to be victorious, as evidenced by the sack of Troy? Or was it by his continual lies that always seem to work? But nobody ever seems to realize that he was fated, not to return to Ithaca and resume his rule as King of Ithaca. No, instead he was fated, once he had returned (and vanquished his foes who sought his wife and his kingdom), to leave once again to become an evangelist for ‘the gods’ who brought him home safely! In other words, to go and tell some more lies, in service to ‘the gods’. Let’s see, I won, as evidenced by the fact that I got to come home and vanquish my foes and regain my kingdom, but now I have to leave it again forever and sing the praises of the those same damned gods who have harassed me for 20 years. Wow, some victory, Odysseus. Idiot!
And by the way, where did he have to go? To the ends of the Earth, actually. The western end of Europe. And that would be Portugal. Lisbon, specifically, which he founded. Remember that, OK grandson? Especially when we see what happens later in Lisbon, of all places!
But forget that, for now, let’s get back to the real story. The story of Aeneas, cousin of Paris the Idiot. Aeneas, the Dardanian Prince who escapes the burning city of Troy, who repudiates the Old and the New Testaments of the pagan belief systems. Aeneas, who repudiates Wrath and Deceit, by embracing the new virtues of Honor and Duty.
Who was Aeneas? He was Paris’ cousin, a prince of the neighboring Dardanians. (Think of the Dardanelles, the passageway from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea.) Aeneas, like so many others at Troy, came to Troy to fight because his relatives were under attack. And next to Hector, the valiant brother of Paris the Weasel, Aeneas was the most valiant of all the Trojan warriors. Why do I call Paris a weasel? Because even in battle, he was a wimp. He fought from a distance with a bow and arrow, instead of close quarters, with a sword or lance. According to the story, he was only able to kill Achilles with the help of the god Apollo who guided the arrow to Achilles’ leg. No close-order battles for Paris, he was a chicken. No hand-to-hand combat for him. The only flesh he wanted to press was feminine. He left all the heavy lifting for Hector and Aeneas.
And to be fair, Aeneas wasn’t some saint, but compared to most of the other Greeks, western or eastern, he did have some scruples, some natural virtue, some rectitude. He was a man of his word. But more than that, he was a man who had a value system directly the opposite of most men of his day. Why do I say that? Because when the time came to flee the hellish scene of Troy being consumed in flames, Aeneas left with his dignity intact. How so? Because when he left, he took the last thing most men in those circumstances think of. He took his family. His father and his son (his ditzy wife wandered off, probably to a fire sale or something). All the other Trojans still left alive were looking for some gold to flee with (or some gold to loot, in the case of the western Greeks).
Gold was everything to these guys. But, oddly enough, this civilization had never figured out how to make coins out of their gold. They were always dragging around big slabs of the stuff, or objects made of it. Things like large bowls to hold their wine-offerings to the gods. And their other favorite thing (just to show you how idiotic they were) was an iron tripod that would hold an iron or copper cauldron! Cauldrons were a fetish with these guys, because you could brew up some truly exotic stuff in them. Now of course, if you try to flee from somewhere under duress, and being pursued, you start dragging any of this kind of hardware with you, it will naturally result in your being caught, because this stuff is heavy! But they always tried it, so go figure. And invariably, they were always caught by their pursuers (or they would drown trying to swim some river with it). Smart guys.
But there was one other thing that would certainly slow you down even more, and that would be dragging the young and the old with you, which is what Aeneas did. The other difference, of course, is that if he actually did escape, his burdens wouldn’t benefit him at all. In fact, his burden would increase, because then he would have three mouths to feed instead of one, and he’d have no gold with which to buy food. So why did he do it? Because he felt it was his duty to his father and because he loved his son. And these two emotions are what set Aeneas a part from all the other Greeks, both western and eastern. Aeneas was a man of Duty and Honor. The others were men of Glory and Fame. These two value systems are diametrically opposed, and it would become clear over the next millennium how much Rome differed from Greece (in any direction).
Rome, for a long while, would become a nation of Laws. These laws would apply to all men under its rule. Greece on the other hand, had only its self-centered values of Fame and Glory, which kept each city-state vying for superiority over its neighboring city-state. This is why city-states of Greece could never become an empire. Why? Because they had no unifying values that would override their petty desire for individual Fame and Glory. They had common values, sure, but no unifying ones, because there is no honor among thieves.
Well, what about Alexander the Great, you say? Didn’t he unify Greece? Well, Alexander wasn’t a Greek. But Al was a great guy. Later, this became shortened to Al the Great. And Al was a Macedonian who stepped in and stomped the crap out of all these divided and divisive city-states and then he declared himself King of Greece. Then he forced all of the defeated Greeks to send their defeated troops with him as he went on to stomp the crap out of everyone else outside of Greece (except the Jews, who had a friend upstairs, as I related earlier). Al was a focused guy. He knew what he wanted, and how to get it, the Barbarian way. I like him.
But when Al the Great died, the whole thing fell apar. Why? Because his generals divided the empire and proceeded to fight amongst themselves, just like the Greek city states had always done. Remember what I said earlier about divided leadership? Anyway, when the Romans arrived on the scene years later, the Greek remnants were easy pickings. Wait, why am I telling you all this, it all comes much later, after Aeneas founds the city that would become Rome. So let’s get back to our story of how Aeneas escapes from the burning city of Troy. Or better yet, why Aeneas escapes. Let’s get to the heart of the story; the prophecy of Calchas, the Seer of the ‘victorious’ western Greeks.
Now before we get into this prophecy, let’s remember one thing; Calchas was part of the western Greek army that sought to destroy the eastern Greeks in Troy. Keep this in mind. Calchas had no reason whatsoever to prophecy anything good about Troy or anyone in it. He had spent 10 long years trying to discern ways to destroy Troy. And remember too, Homer, the epic poet who memorialized the whole story of the war (except the actual Fall of Troy), was a western Greek. Maybe this was why he never covered the actual story of the fall of Troy, because he would have had to include Calchas’ prophecy that would ultimately contain the truth of the real story of the eventual fall of the Greek civilization at the hands of the Romans. No, Homer wasn’t about to compose anything that didn’t portray the western Greeks as being anything but glorious victorious warriors who ‘restored the family name’ by getting Helen The Slut back from those stupid Trojan bastards. But Quintus of Smyrna did write it down (before Homer did, I contend). And where is Smyrna? In Turkey, as we know it today. Which is where Troy was. Back then, it would have been part of the Trojan kingdom.
Well, wouldn’t that explain a lot, especially the omission of the actual Fall, as related by Homer in his western Greek point of view? Quintus told the story of the vanquished (the Trojans) and told the story of the deceit that was needed to achieve the western Greek victory. But the western Greeks (aka Homer) never mention the real action, the story of the Odysseus and the Horse, because it shows them in a bad light. So they had to compose their version of
‘Glory and Fame’ to take everyone’s attention away from the fact that the western Greeks had to lie to win because they couldn’t do it by force of arms. Wrath was insufficient for the task, so Deceit became the new Operating System. But they weren’t proud of it. The best they could do was to glamorize Odysseus and his journey home (accomplished by his continual lying), all the while ignoring what they had to do to sack Troy.
And more importantly, these western Greeks had to ignore the prophecy of Calchas, their own guy, and what he said about Aeneas. But what you’ll notice, if you read all the different accounts, is that the western Greeks never deny that Calchas said what Quintus relates. They simply ignore it. The Dog That Didn’t Bark, as Sherlock Holmes would say. Kind of like the ‘dynamic silence’ practiced by another people today when certain subjects are raised (look that one up yourself, grandson, I’m not going to tell you everything).
So, what did Calchas say, and how has it panned out? OK, OK, we’re finally at that point, grandson! Here’s the context; Troy is burning, western Greeks are killing, pillaging and raping (their usual behavior, so nothing special here). The few Trojan survivors are trying to escape against bad odds, because most of them are dead-drunk or simply dead. They got so drunk, literally, after their apparent ‘victory’ (when they saw the empty beaches and that crazy Horse) that they couldn’t fight when the rest of the western Greeks came back before dawn and the horse-borne contingent opened the gates of Troy. It was a pretty easy ‘victory’ for the western Greeks, all things considered.
Anyway, Aeneas is one of the few sober men left, and he is battling his way out of the burning city when he is trapped and surrounded. The western Greeks were closing in for the kill, when Calchas the Seer of the Greeks jumps out of nowhere and says to his fellow western Greeks;
“Stop hurling your cruel arrows and destructive spears at mighty Aeneas. It is decreed for him by the splendid plan of the gods to go from (the river) Xanthus to the broad stream of Tiber. There he shall fashion a sacred city, an object of wonder for future generations, and he shall himself be lord of a widespread people. The stock born from him shall thereafter rule all the way from the rising to the setting sun. Moreover, it is decreed for him to take a place among the immortals, because he is the son of fair-haired Aphrodite. And let us, in any case, keep our hands away from this man, because in preference to gold and all his other possessions, things that preserve a man when he goes as an exile to a foreign land, in preference to all this, he has chosen his father and his son. A single night has revealed to us a son marvelously kind to his old father, a noble father marvelously kind to his son.”25 (from Combellack’s translation, p.243, parentheticals and emphasis mine).
Painting of ‘Aeneas Flees Burning Troy’ by Federico Barocci, 1598,26 Another example of Renaissance men spending their considerable talents and time memorializing something that never happened, right? Hahahah! Idiots.
Let’s read this again a few times, and start parsing the different elements and their plain meanings. And let’s remember that the Weiner Dogs of this world absolutely don’t want anything to do with my reading of this prophecy. Why? Because it would undermine their entire careers of obfuscating everything from the past, which has produced today’s society of men who are totally ignorant of anything from the past. Their methods of teaching actually teaches nothing, because everything they say is ‘tentative’ and ‘needs further exploration’. All of which leads to tenure, their real goal. Bark bark.
So where do we begin? Let’s look at the context again. First of all, let’s deal with the issue of the timeframe. We’ve already shown that nobody really knows when Homer or Quintus lived, nor which preceded the other. We know the Weiner Dogs are hysterically adamant in saying that Quintus came after Homer (even though they have no proof, as Combellack freely admits). Why are they so insistent on this one thing, when they are so wishy-washy on every other point of chronological or analytical history? Well, because they know where I’m going with this, and they are pretty damned determined that this explanation must never be explored (let alone accepted). Why? Because it would blow their entire careers out of the intellectual backwaters they inhabit. Why? Because their masters have told them what to teach (relativity) and how to teach it (in disconnected chunks). Why? Because this method ends up making their students think “hell, this stuff doesn’t matter, even the professor isn’t sure what happened”. Exactly.
All right you say, so what if Quintus was born after Homer, does it make a difference to my story? Nope. Why? Because the elements of the prophecy have come true, way beyond the life span of either Homer or Quintus, or anybody else for that matter! But from a story-line perspective, my explanation is the simple one, the straight forward one, the one that fits with human nature. I’ll ask the question again; why would an ancient people be so enthralled with a prequel (The Iliad) and a sequel (The Odyssey) of a story that they all knew, and yet no one had ever bothered to memorialize the main course of the meal (The War at Troy, by Quintus)? Why? Why would George Lucas bother to make the prequels and sequels of Star Wars if he hadn’t told the main story first?
What about the Weiner Dog objection that Quintus had a Latin name, and the Romans came after the Greeks? Simple- the Latins were colonial Greeks, and the Greeks colonized the entire Mediterranean basin from Italy to Colchis, on the eastern shores of the Black Sea. Quintus had a Latin name but lived near Troy. So what?
Well, what about the possibility that Quintus was simply glorifying the Roman culture (by piggybacking on Homer’s epics)? And that he did it to give a noble lineage (mythical in nature, they say) to the line of Caesars, who the Weiner Dogs insist he was employed by (thus putting him about 1,000 years after Homer in chronological order)? Again, even if this were true (and my explanation of the ‘prequel-sequel’ situation militates against this), it still doesn’t matter, because this Pagan prophecy came true and is still true today!!!! That’s my whole point- this prophecy wasn’t just relevant then (whenever ‘then’ was), it’s still relevant today! It has withstood the test of time, by at least 2,000 years (if the Weiner Dog chronology is correct), or closer to 3,000 if my time-line is right.
OK, the context part is done. I say Quintus composed his work earlier, the Weiner Dogs say it was later, but so what, the prophecy was and still is true. But their objections about the timing are simply meant to distract you from this very point, that the prophecy is true. And they will go to any extreme to discredit (by means of chronological arguments) anyone who says otherwise. So this is where my work will be attacked, at least initially. Remember that prophecy, OK? Bark bark bark! Idiots.
Alright, now let’s look at the contents of the prophecy, regardless of its date, because all of us, Wiener Dogs and Mad Dogs alike, must agree that this prophecy is at least 2,000 years old. And that’s a huge point. Show me another prophecy (by a Pagan Seer, no less) that was this prescient, this precise, and that has stayed true for so long!
Now Calchas was the priest of the western Greeks, as I have already observed, and I know of no objections to this fact from the western Greek side. And Calchas was the man who blessed Odysseus’ plot of using the Horse to fool the Trojans. So he is unimpeachable as a spokesman for the western Greeks. Yet he spoke approvingly of Aeneas. And no one, east or west, denies that Calchas said it. And no one denies the actual existence of a man named Aeneas, although Weiner Dogs will say that we can’t be sure, because we don’t have his photo ID and birth certificate on file. They are the original members of the ‘birther movement’. Hahahahah!
Yes, the Weiner Dogs will insist Aeneas is mythical. But again, why would an entire ancient civilization (Imperial Rome) be in thrall to a story that was entirely mythical? Was there an Achilles? An Odysseus? A Paris? Why did the French name their capital after Paris if he didn’t exist? Why did the Greeks (everywhere) carve all those fabulous statues of these men if they never existed? Remember, we’re not talking about mythical invisible gods here, we’re talking about flesh-and-blood men
. Men who came from verifiable cities (not some lofty Olympus), men with historical achievements (like founding a city). Again I ask, why would the majority of the known civilized world even care about these stories unless there was some element of truth to them?
Well, you can ask me that about Luke Skywalker too, I suppose, but then you’re talking about Wookies too, right? We all knew that was a fairy tale, because it was about non-existent species and deep space travel too, neither of which existed, then or today. But maybe in 3,000 years someone will say (when Luke’s tomb is found in a galaxy far, far away) that I was an idiot for not believing in Yoda. Go ahead, Weiner Dogs, and tell me then that you believed the story of Darth Vader but you simply can’t believe there was ever a War at Troy, with real people like Achilles, Odysseus, Hector, Paris and Aeneas. Go ahead. Here, have another shot of whatever it is you’re drinking.
Anyway, back to the story. Let’s look at the actual prophecy itself and see if it really contains verifiable elements of something that is actually profound. Something which actually came true, and is still true and applicable today. Let’s start with the second sentence; ‘It is decreed for him by the splendid plan of the gods to go from (the river) Xanthus (near Troy) to the broad stream of Tiber’. (parentheticals mine)
Well, we all know that the river Tiber is the location of Rome today. And Aeneas had to literally cross the entire breadth of the Greek world-civilization, from east to west, to reach his new home. The real question, of course, is ‘was this decree really from the gods’, right? Well, I’ve already told you what I think of the concept of ‘the gods’. But I’ve also already told you that I do believe these ‘gods’ exist. They just don’t happen to be the almighty and omnipotent kinds, in my opinion. But obviously, they would have to have some kind of knowledge to make such a prophetic utterance, right? Well, maybe. Or maybe they are simply doing the bidding (knowingly or not, willingly or not) of the real God, the God of the Jews (and later, the Christians). Although at this point in history, there were no Christians yet, because the War at Troy ended in 1093 BC, by my count. I’ll explain that count later.