My name is Mykalus Kane. The Troad is the peninsula by the Hellespont, where ancient Troy was bloody located. King Xerxes made a pontoon bridge from boats, spanning the narrowest part of the Hellespont, during the Persian Wars. The bridge went from Abydos across to Sestos - 'the mistress of the passage', as Theopompus called it. If you want to sail across the narrows it can be bloody tricky, there's a fierce current, so you have to sail at an angle against the current for a few miles upstream to get you into the bloody harbour. If you don't do it right you'll end up in fucking Lemnos! Returning from Sestos to Abydos all you do is drift with the current and it's a fucking doddle. He must have been a clever cunt that Xerxes to keep his pontoon bridge (called the Heptastadion) steady with those rapids knocking it about. Must have had some heavy anchorage going on. Hats off to the bloke!
Ilion or Troy no longer exists. Not a trace of it! There's a burger van there now and Achilles would be proud of that. Ilion was named after Ilos, son of Dardanos, who was buried nearby, next to the famous wild fig tree.
The city of Priapos was named after Priapos the son of Dionysius and a tart. The whole area is a haven for grapes. Long ago King Xerxes gave the city of Lampsakos to his mate Themistocles, because he loved a bit of vino. Generous chap!
There's a big mountain called Mt Ida that overlooks the Troad and it's in the shape of a scolopendra, which is greek for bloody centipede. It has many rocky spurs like the legs of a centipede. Loads of rivers flow down from Ida and they used to keep Troy well watered.
Adrastia and Zeleia both had oracles that have long since been abandoned. At Zeleia there was the sanctuary of Nemesis but they decided to move it to Parion. Zeleia is surrounded by beautiful cultivated hills. Nice place for a bloody picnic.
I had a pig's ear in Parion where the Ophiogenians lived, who were serpent healers, and if you was bitten by a snake then a serpent healer would rub you all over and you'd be cured. One of the Libyan healers supposedly said "I used to be a snake once, but one day I transformed myself into a human" - if you believe that you'll believe the moon is made of cheese!
I trotted on to Pitya of the Pines, so named because there's fucking pine trees everywhere. There's a seafood hut and this bloke Mysian Les gets hold of some nice Linousian snails soaked in wine.
After a bite, I went to Prokonnesos on an island, only a short sail, where that poet Aristeas is from and he's not to be trusted. He told the cozzers I was dealing in hooky boxwood. Anyway, I was supplying the old bill with cheap truncheons so they didn't bother me.
King Darius burnt a load of cities down, including Abydos, to stop nomads crossing over the Hellespont, bent on vengeance, and he was afraid the cities would ferry supplies across to their armies on the Chersonesos. The Hellespont is a narrow strait that separates Europe from Asia. Not a lot of people know that!
I met Xanthus in the pub and he started going on about Plato, the old philosopher and lawyer. After the big flood, he reckons Plato nailed it. He said that there were three stages of culture. 1) Mountain tops - simple and wild people who were scared of water. 2) Foothills - people who were courageous once the plains were dry 3) The Plains - the most civilized people. Xanthus said he personally thought there were more stages of culture than what Plato suggested, as in people who live near beaches or on islands. I said "well you might be right Xanth, that makes five stages of culture." Then I said "what about people who live up lamp-posts?" and he said "that makes six!" Anyway we eventually settled on 72 stages, going way beyond what Plato had originally said.
"I left the old battlecruiser and galloped back to where Troy once was, over the wide Skamandrian Plain, named after Skamandros, Hector's lad. Once it was called the Trojan Plain, the location of many a nasty old swashbuckle. Many skulls were cracked in half by Achilles and Hector's bronze swords and eyeballs speared out of their sockets. The walls of Troy came down during that war. After the war, Lysimachus rebuilt some temples and the city walls as he was fond of Troy. Then a gang nicked the walls and all the roof tiles! The Galatians wanted protection in Troy but they immediately fucked off because it was a city without any buildings. Walls were built, but a Roman called Fimbria knocked them down again in the Mithridatic War. Cornelius Sulla removed Fimbria and rebuilt the walls. They reckon Sulla and King Mithridates had a chat at Dardanos and King Mith agreed to call it a day and that was that. Some bloke called Archeanax of Sigion nicked the remains of the wall and used the stones to build a wall round his garden!
Caesar liked Homer and he heard Alexander the Great had read Homer so Caesar became a fan of Alexander. The Romans believed that after the fall of Troy, a bloke called Aeneios escaped to Sicily with his mate Elmo and eventually settled in Latina. They reckon Romulus and Remus founded Rome and they were descendants of Aeneios. Homer didn't believe this, but many historians did. Caesar believed it and encouraged it.
During the Trojan war a bloke called Polites was keeping doggy up on the old mound of Aiyetes which was five miles from Troy and he kept having to abandon his post and scarper back to Troy to safety. He was Mr Fast but he was also Mr Daft. He should've kept watch up on the fucking acropolis! It was in the middle of Troy and was much higher than that mound. He should've stayed up the acropolis, the bloody idiot. Oh well it's 1000 years ago now so fuck it. Let's go have a butchers at the Beautiful Pine.
Plenty of bloody pines on the Troad but none as spectacular as this fucker. Look at that! 240 ft in circumference and 670 ft high. It actually splits into three trunks and rejoins near the crown. King Attalos measured it as he had fuck all else to do. Well one day Demetrios the Skepsian came to look at it and he said "that's a big bastard ain't it!?" The tree isn't far from Old Skepsis which is a bit like Old Harlow. Demetrios wrote about 30 volumes called 'The Catalogue of the Trojans'. Maybe it was like Kays catalogue! Maybe the Trojans got their armour and weapons by mail order and paid by fucking HP!
Skepsis was also where they hid some books by Aristotle and Theophrastus, in a trench and they went mouldy and moth-eaten so a pelican rewrote the missing parts but made a shit load of errors. The later scholars had a tough time figuring them out and making practical philosophies. After a while they pieced them back together and all was hunky dory again. Sorry I meant a bloke called Apellikon, not a bloody pelican. Can't imagine a pelican writing Socratic philosophy with a pen in its beak!
Rode to Chrysa to see the sanctuary of Apollo Smintheus the Mouse Killer. According to myth, one day a load of mice came out the fields and ate all the leather on the weapons and equipment belonging to the Teukrians of Crete. A xoanan was carved by Skopas showing Apollo stepping on a mouse. Mice love this sanctuary and aren't phased by the statue. I had a few pig's ears at The Nibbling Mouse, a nice old pub, and moved on, I ain't keen on rodents!
Up on Mount Alexandria they say that Paris rode over from Troy and judged the goddesses. Sounds like it could've been like a beauty contest. I bet Miss Troy bloody won that! Down there in the valley there's Aspaneus and there's a timber market where they get some bloody good sticks from Mt Ida. Then I had a butchers at Assos. Stratonikos said 'don't go to Assos or you'll quickly come to destruction'. That's going a bit far but it's a long steep climb from the harbour up to the town and we was a bit cream-crackered! Anyone for Hovis?
Rode down to Achilleion for a butchers at the statue of Achilles and on to Adramyttion. Not an easy one to say after a few Vera Lynns but a bloody nice little manor. The city suffered during the Mithridatic War, as Commander Diodoros cut the throats of the citizen council. He pretended to be a philosopher of the Academy, teacher of rhetoric and dispenser of Justice, a bit like Judge Dredd. This pleased his boss King Mithridates, but he paid for his foul deeds when the king was overthrown by the Romans. He was charged for his actions and he starved himself to death during his incarceration in Amasia as he couldn't handle the bloody shame. Some say he was offered a nice bit of kidney with plum pudding for afters and a drop of Lampsakian red, but he stuck to his guns and met his maker.
Xenokles is from Adramyttion but I don't know the geezer from Adam. The Adramyttians built an aqueduct to bring water from the fresher parts of the Euenos river. I bet they got plenty of help from the Romans. Oh, there goes old Xenokles, what's he's up to? He's gone in the knocking shop haha.
Had a quick nose at Pitane where they say the geographer Poseidonius saw some bricks floating on water. Then he went on to say the bricks were made of fake silver and it all gets a bit far-fetched. If the bricks were made from a material that's lighter than water I don't think they'd be much cop. A good joke I suppose, if you wanted to chuck a load of bricks in a lake and see everyone's stunned faces when they all floated to the top.
Poseidonius said some geezer called Eudoxos found a Celtic shipwreck in the Red Sea and instantly realised you must be able to sail around Africa if you go south beyond the Pillars of Hercules. After several false starts he got within a few miles from circumnavigating Africa and suddenly decided he couldn't be arsed because he found better things to do on an island off Morocco. The Egyptian authorities were furious and tried to track him down as Cleopatra had loaned him a fucking fortune. People say that Poseidonius is a bit of a Jackanory and he fabricated the whole thing.
Galloped like Dick Turpin down to Halicarnassos in Pedasia. Nice manor. Old Herodotus once said 'when anything shifty happens to the Pedasians and their neighbours, the priestess of Athena grows a beard'. She's done it three times. Cor she must be hacked off. "Ere will you stop fighting your neighbours, I'm fed up with growing beards! It's putting my husband to shame!"
Onward to Teuthrania, via a city called Kane or Kanai, where my descendants are from, said to have been founded by people from Kynai in Greece. They reckon an Arcadian girl Auge and her son Telephos were locked in a chest which was thrown into the Aegeian Sea by her crazy dad Aleos because Hercules had given her the eye and she quite fancied a bit of his dick! The goddess Athene made sure they safely reached the mouth of the river Kaikos. King Teuthras rescued them, took a shine to Auge and married her on the spot. Telephos took over as ruler when the king popped his clogs. I dunno about some of these myths mate, anyway time to head back to Mazaka for tea, so you can all fuck off!
No comments:
Post a Comment