Word: troys
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...principal epics of the ancient world were put together and attributed to a poet called Homer. Both poems related adventures incidental to a ten years' war that had been fought by the chivalry from the Peloponnesus against the chivalry of Asia Minor at a walled town, Troy, near the entrance to the Dardanelles. The Odyssey told of the wanderings of the Greek soldier, Odysseus, on his way home to the island of Ithaca (now Corfu); the Iliad told of the wrath of Achilles and what came of it at the siege of Troy. The Iliad is the first great...
...ardor, humor and radiance of life, the bloody darkness of death in war are constantly and insistently mingled in the Iliad. It is more than a war story of the Greeks, fighting on their beaches before Troy. Artful in detail, it is also awesome in implication. As the French scholar Rachel Bespaloff recently observed, the Iliad presents a civilized soldier, Hector, who has everything precious to defend, in contrast and finally in combat with the childlike yet superhuman fury which was Achilles...
...answer to Cassandra was the same as it had always been: there was something in what she said about Troy's parlous position, but it was her kinsfolk who went on to found Rome...
Boulevards and Boudoirs. Helen Goes to Troy translates Homer into French bedroom farce. Its mythological Greeks and Trojans chase each other around marble bathtubs and across perfumed counterpanes. Its Hellas consists entirely of boulevards and boudoirs. Its Helen, beneath her classical robes, is a bored upper-class Parisienne whose bumbling bourgeois spouse Menelaus (well played by Ernest Truex) is sent on a trip to Naxos, returns unexpectedly to find his wife in bed with Paris, an unawakened but erotically gifted Trojan shepherd...
What makes Helen Goes to Troy as a show is the thing that has kept it alive for nearly a century: the inimitable lilt of Offenbach's music, a vulgar Parisian sheen that sparkles like the rhinestones in a cocotte's garter...