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By
WADE GOSSETT
2004 has been a banner year
for documentaries on ancient Greece. It is
understandable since the 2004 Summer Olympics are
to be held in Athens, and it's just good marketing
to release DVDs about ancient Greece right now.
But, as I mentioned in my review of A&E's "The
First Olympics: Blood, Honor, and Glory,"
urgency can result in errors.
In this case, the exact same error that plagued
"The First Olympics" is evident in "Troy:
Unearthing the Legend": two versions of the same
documentary, one narrated by an unknown and
another by actor Leonard Nimoy, are included on
the same disc as two distinct offerings. "Ancient
Mysteries: The Odyssey of Troy" and "The Trojan
City" seem to be exactly the same program. Both
trace connections between Homer's "The Iliad" and
history, and they do a pretty good job, but what’s
the point of watching the same thing twice?
The other features on this two-disc collection are
"Trojan War: The Rise and Fall of the Spartans"
and "Treasure! The Ancient Gold of Troy." The
former is the principal feature, a three-hour
exploration of Sparta, the notorious ancient Greek
city-state that thrived on extreme militarism. It
is one of the oddest cultures in the history of
the world, but it actually had very little to do
with the Trojan War. Yes, Eleni (i.e. Helen) was
the queen of Sparta, and Menelaos, her cuckolded
husband, was the brother of Agamemnon, the king of
Mycenae and the general who led the Greeks against
the Ionian citadel of Troy. But that's about it,
really. What the Spartans are famous for is their
Nazi-like obsession for creating perfect physical
specimens, the sacrifice of the 300 at the Battle
of Thermopylae, and their participation in the
Peloponnesian War against Athens. Several
historians put things in perspective in this
documentary, and it's well-worth watching -- but,
again, very little here has much to do with the
Trojan War: Thermopylae was an event of the
Persian Wars and, like the Peloponnesian War, took
place hundreds of years after the Trojan War.
"Treasure! The Ancient Gold of Troy," narrowly
focuses on the controversial jewelry found by
Heinrich Schliemann at the Troy site. It documents
its history, from Schliemann taking it to Germany
to the Soviets taking to a Russian museum during
World War II. |
