OK, I admit I’m far behind most of the country in my movie consumption (and TV and video games, too). So this will be old news to some, but I finally watched the movie Troy a couple of nights ago, with Brad Pitt et al.

The reason I promoted this to the head of my Netflix list was because our Greece trips this year include a visit to Mycenae, the powerful city that was home of King Agamemnon, who was leader of the Greek armies in the Trojan War.

The movie took a number of artistic liberties in rearranging the story, but then nobody knows how accurate the version in Homer’s The Iliad was, either. There have been many centuries for people to take artistic liberties between the original events and now!

Most experts today believe the story of the Trojan War is based at least generally on fact, but perhaps it’s a condensation of multiple campaigns that occurred over many decades, all rolled into one neat story line.

We may never know if the Trojan horse ruse ever really took place. But we do know that the city of Mycenae was center of a powerful kingdom over 3000 years ago. The stones are standing to prove it. The same amateur archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, discovered both Mycenae and Troy, back in the 1800’s when most people had written them off as myth. Now that’s the stuff that archaeologists’ dreams are made of!

One quote from the movie that caught my attention…

War is young men dying and old men talking.”
~ Odysseus (played by Sean Bean in the movie)

Some things never change!

We visit Mycenae on our women’s trip to Greece. There’s something magical about standing in the ruins of a city over 3000 years old. Though quiet today, you can imagine kings and great warriors coming and going, and the bustling sense of importance.