By Anna Von Reitz
We were standing on the stark and barren ruins of Troy, and it was sunset. Even as night fell and a cold seaward wind flowed over us, we couldn’t bear to leave. And nobody in our small party said anything. Not a word. We stared upward at the infinite pure majesty of the night sky, breathless and not even knowing why, but as Anna Akhmatova said, it was "something wild in our hearts for centuries."
My Father had had the good sense to buy and bring along a canteen of water and a soft thick wool blanket which he wrapped around my eleven year-old shoulders.
Was I disappointed, he asked? That this pile of rocks was all that was left of Troy?
Never.
The best of times for me were always being with my Father on some adventure. Our tour of the world’s great battlefields was his idea of teaching me World History.
I guess my Father saw the answer to his question written on my face, because after a moment, he sat down beside me and the enraptured silence was allowed to remain between us.
Even if nothing but sand remained, Troy would still be Troy.
Homer’s Epic Poem focuses our attention so powerfully on the drama of the Trojan War that we forget that it wasn’t just the city-state of Troy involved. The Trojan Empire that remained after Priam stretched from Babylon to Cornwall.
The Trojan War we think about occurred during the Greek Mycenaean Age circa 1400 BC. It took a thousand years for the actual war between the Trojans (and their Persian relatives) and the Greeks to end, with the Treaty of the Persians and Medes (Greeks) of 458 BC.
Though Troy itself was doomed by the guile of Odysseus, the Trojan Empire was huge and successful. It sprawled across three continents, spoke a hundred languages and dialects, and it did not die when Troy was reduced to. ruins. The Empire lived on and fought, together with its Persian allies, for a thousand years after King Priam and his sons were turned to dust.
You would think that a war that lasted a thousand years and which pitted the reigning Superpowers of the Middle East and Europe against each other for that length of time would merit some mention in our history books beyond a study of Homer's poems, and a brief mention of King Leonidas and the Spartan defense of the Greek homeland at Thermopylae against the Persians and maybe a line or two about Persian naval powers and battles at sea.
This was the most significant struggle of mankind in the Western Hemisphere in the entire history of the Ancient World. It set the stage for Greek and later British dominance of the sea. It foretold -- and dictated -- the rise of Islam. And the ending of the actual war between the Trojans and Greeks --the peace treaty between the Persians and Medes-- made the conquests of Alexander the Great possible, together with all the wealth that Alexander's success made possible for the Macedonians, and ultimately, for Rome.
People stare at the success of Alexander with the idea that a handful of Macedonians went on a rampage and single-handedly conquered the known world, including Egypt. That's not exactly true. What happened is that the Persians and Greeks settled their differences and then, less than a hundred years later, worked together under Alexander's leadership to conquer the known world.
Once they combined forces, there was nothing to stop them.
Alexander's position as hereditary King of Macedonia was not an accident. Alexander was a Trojan in Greek clothing, and Macedonia was a Trojan kingdom allied with Greece. After the peace treaty, it became the logical focus of Greek and Persian collaboration.
So why aren’t we taught anything about Troy beyond the romance of the war captured in a single Epic Poem written by a man so mysterious that scholars can’t even determine his birthdate except to mumble that “Homer may have been born between 1200 BC to 700 BC”— somewhere round about those 500 years, give or take…. Homer, our nearly unique voice about all things Trojan, was most likely another Trojan in Greek clothing, just like Alexander.
Because Homer wrote in the ubiquitous Greek language, his poetry survived,
but like Shakespeare, Homer has no solid human footprint, no credible personal history, because he wasn't Greek in the same way that Shakespeare wasn't British.
For many centuries people were told that Troy itself never existed. It was just a legend, and as luck would have it, a pile of rocks slowly weathering away.
Am I the only one who is alarmed? An Empire this large disappearing into the realm of legend? Really?
There are many reasons the Greeks and their Allies would wish and want the Trojan Empire forgotten. It was in Troy that the idea of basic human equality was first voiced as “All men are created equal." --- not Athens.
Latin was a native tongue of the Trojan Empire. That is how and why Latin became the language of commerce worldwide. When Latin-speaking Dacians and Romanians founded Rome in 753 BC, Troy itself had been weathering away for centuries, but its enduring legacy as an Empire remained, evolved, and became the Roman Empire.
Ironically, in the end, the Trojans won the war with Greece. Greece faded away while the once-tiny Trojan trading center at Rome grew into the dominant world power. It has held that role for another 2,000 years.
The Truth is that Rome didn't just "arrive" out of nowhere. Rome had a provenance, and Rome had all the accumulated wealth collected from throughout the Ancient World by Alexander the Great -- a horde so massive that it took thirty years-worth of mule trains to move it overland from Macedonia to its new home in Rome.
The story that Rome was founded by orphaned Trojans is not far from the mark; it was in fact founded by Latin-speaking Romanians and Dacians, both peoples descended from the Trojans and the Trojan Empire.
Disappearing Empires, gold hoards to rival Midas, Greek deceit at the root of the fall of Troy, deceit used by the Roman heirs of Troy to rule the world, the two greatest poets in history writing in the language of their enemies....it's a stunning panoply. No wonder my Father and I leaned our shoulders together as we sat on that stony rampart and watched the stars whirling in the night sky, dark as a velvet robe studded with diamonds.
In the morning, I awakened to see my Father tending a small campfire. He squatted silently, his face turned to the rising sun.
"It's a lot," he said, when he saw that I was awake, and he left my mind to fill in the blanks. He was always such a quiet, competent man. He always had the right gadget in his pocket. He always knew how I felt and how to comfort me.
That morning I felt almost unbearable excitement, though I couldn't say why. My heart had somehow expanded to accept the entire world, the Earth, and everything in it. Life and death, the forward toil of mankind, the fate of kings, the rise of Empires, my own small spark drifting on this great tide of history, all seemed to come together for a moment. Like never before, I felt truly alive --- and hungry.
My Father grinned and handed me a piece of pita bread and a chunk of hard salami to chew on. Bless him forever, Dad never missed a beat. He never forgot the toilet paper. He never let his little girl go hungry, either. I suppose it was somewhat of a mysterious disappointment to him, that he never had a son, and that he was saddled instead with the awesome responsibility of a daughter, but if so, he never let on to me.
We picked our way down the narrow stony pathway, perhaps one of those that Hector followed down to the sea.
When we look at the broad sweep of history, we must correctly remember and identify things, no matter what the politics of bygone ages were. When we look at Rome we have to see far deeper into history to see the connection between the Persians and the Trojans and the Romans, the Code of Hammurabi and the Roman Civil Law and the Federal Code in America today-- because it is all connected, as one part of a tapestry is connected to another.
In the days to come, vast amounts of precious metals will be deployed to make a new world. We will, together, do away with blood money based on enslavement and peonage, and open up the storehouses of the Lord to provide for everyone. This heritage and this wealth stems in an unbroken line from Troy to Macedonia to Romania to Rome to Spain to France to America, and it encircles the globe.
What began with the peace between the Persians and the Medes in 458 BC has also born fruit in an unbroken line of Treaties and Agreements that we inherit today as Americans and which we return to all the world as a blessing. It is written that the wealth of the Evil Ones is stored up for the Righteous, and so it is, and so it ever will be.
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