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Posts by Debra Trusty

Header: Achilles cedes Briseis to Agamemnon, from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii, fresco, 1st century CE (Naples National Archaeological Museum. Image via Wikimedia and is in the Public Domain)

Blog: A Classicist Reviews Troy: Fall of a City

April 15, 2018

Troy: Fall of a City is a joint effort by Netflix and the BBC to repackage the Trojan War story as the next season of Game of Thrones. Producers David Farr, Derek Wax, and Christopher Aird didn’t have dig too deep to find the material they needed within the ancient myth: blood-thirsty kings, violent battle scenes, forbidden love, and powerful beings flying down from the sky. The Epic Cycle has it all and, since Troy (2004, starring Brad Pitt) hit the theaters nearly 15 years ago, perhaps we were due for another rendering.

Released in the U.S. on April 6th, the 8-episode series is ambitious, to say the least. Its writers wanted to tell the story of the fall of the mythological city of Troy and this, perhaps, is a bit hubristic. After all, Homer’s Iliad (which consists of over 15,000 lines of poetry and would have taken over 15 hours to Read more …