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Sometimes people think being an historian is all about names and dates and politics, but it’s so much more. My favorite thing about studying ancient Greece is getting to a museum and looking at all the pottery. You get to see these beautiful works of art close up. Pictures just don't do justice to the sheer size of some of the pottery. My favorite place on the west coast to gaze at antiquities is the Getty Museum in Malibu, California. If you get a chance to go, you should. It's amazing not only for its art work, but because it's an actual replica of wealthy Roman villa complete with gardens and a giant pool. While writing the Homeric Chronicles, I reference amphorae quite a bit because these vessels were commonly used to store wine, oil, and water much the way we use Tupperware. So, one vessel that intrigues me is the two handled amphora depicting Achilles and Ajax playing dice while trying to relax during the Trojan War. The vessel is from the Archaic Period (525-520 BCE). I love this scene and decided to reference it in Rise of Princes, book two of the Homeric Chronicles. Playing dice humanizes the Greek heroes, making them reachable characters because they too needed reprieve from stress and bad days, as well as the grinding hardships of war. Enjoy the video :)  Start your journey with the Homeric Chronicles grab Song of Sacrifice today!
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When I first began toying with the idea...what if you could see the mythological stories surrounding the major figures of the Homeric tales (the Iliad and the Odyssey) in a seamless telling? The cast of characters is a celebrity Who’s Who in the world of ancient Greece: Achilles, Paris, Hektor, and Odysseus. But, you can’t begin to tell their stories without reaching beyond what Homer provides and dig into other mythological cannon to discover more about Helen, Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, Leda, Deidamia, Priam, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Tyndareus, Peleus, Thetis, and Chiron. Then, there’s the pantheon of gods and goddesses to contend with. The major heroes of Homer’s tales are entwined with other characters and to get a sense of how that’s even possible, I had to dig deep and make some choices. I used the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey as the backbone of the chronological story. But after days of compiling data, I realized the task was much more difficult than it seemed. The original storytellers weren’t trying to make chronological sense of the various stories. The first glitch was the Paris and Helen myth. Everyone who’s familiar with the story assumes that Paris gives the judgment of the fairest to Aphrodite, who has promised him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta. Soon after, Paris goes to Sparta and absconds with Helen and sails back to Troy. This widely held assumption is, well, wrong. Let’s examine why. The golden apple event that occurred was at the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis. These are Achilles parents. So, Achilles, the greatest fighter of all the Greeks has NOT been born yet. He’s the star of the Iliad. The Muse sings about his wrath, his undoing of character after Agamemnon humiliates him and his cousin and comrade, Patrokles, was killed. So, the judgment Paris gives about who the “fairest” goddess is takes place soon after the wedding feast, before Achilles is conceived or born. Bottom line, we have to wait at least 15 years for Achilles to grow up, get trained, and father a son BEFORE Odysseus can discover him on Skyros, dressed like a girl and call our hero into action. This means two things: Paris has to be at least 15-18 years old to be considered MAN enough to judge the female flesh; therefore, he’s 15-18 years older than Achilles. Most movies and books depict Paris and Achilles about the same age. But they can’t be. Paris is definitely his elder. The other question in this story is: When does Paris meet and woo Helen? And how old is Helen? Paris couldn’t have taken off with her any time soon following the judgment because that would mean they’d be in Troy for years before Menelaus even tried to get her back. Even if you take the whole jaunt to Egypt bit seriously, that still leaves too many years in between the kidnapping and the attempted rescue. Remember, no matter what, Achilles has to be old enough to lead the Myrmidons (some sources say Achilles was 15 when he went to Troy. (I gave him a few more years to make it more plausible, using Alexander the Great as a close model. Alexander led his first troops into major battle, under his father’s command, at Chaeronea at age 18). So, if Helen were already born and left with Paris shortly after the judgment, she’d be away in Troy for 15-18 years before Menelaus went for her because he’d have to wait for Achilles to be born and grow up. That makes no sense. Also, there is the first kidnapping Helen endures by Theseus when she was just a young girl, probably pre-teen around 12 or 13. She’s the hostage of the king of Athens, or rather his mother’s hostage, until she’s eventually rescued by her brothers, Pollux and Caster, and taken safely back to Troy. She is married to Menelaus shortly after this event to secure her safety and the safety of Sparta. Menelaus did not marry an old maid. Helen would have been about 15-18 years old. This is the young queen of Sparta who was seduced by a much older Paris. Their elopement/kidnapping is the precipitating event of the Trojan War. This is the dogma of the mythology surrounding Troy that we can’t alter. Therefore, Helen is most likely Achilles age. She would’ve had to been born about 15-18 years before the ships launch to rescue her. Achilles would’ve had to been born at least 15-18 years before he led the Myrmidons across the sea to Troy. Paris is in his 28-30 and Helen and Achilles are contemporaries at 15-18 years of age. This means Paris has an entire life he lived as a man, long enough to be abandoned by Priam, raised by Agelaus, married to his first wife, a nymph named Oenone and to have a son with her named Corythus. He also had to be discovered by Priam and re-embraced as family. Then sent by Priam to rescue Hesione, Priam’s sister, who was kidnapped by Herakles...you get the picture. One thread wraps around another thread and so on. And yes, some times the “trying to make sense of it” turns what we think we know on its head. I read a review of Song of Princes, by Nadine Paque-Wolkow, she said, in reference to the ages of Paris, Helen and Achilles, “...this may sound like a good idea so first, but I was nervous when Paris was still a child at 30% of the book. Then there was a small leap in time, Paris is now 18, but neither Achilles nor Helena are even born. I admit that I can not recite the dates of birth of all Trojan hero from the head, but in my head [it] is all messed up, just because I already (through books and films etc.) had a picture of all. Also, I glanced back to the percentage display...Half the book was almost already read! Helena was a baby and Achill[es] five at scarce 50%. Hector but already late twenties! And there are still decades until the big final battle of both the gates of Troy! For me, most people had therefore a completely wrong age and everything felt ... wrong and strange.” I think a lot of readers may also have this initial dissonance about the dates and timeline, because most films and books haven’t tried to put a logical chronology to the mythology. (I have a very detailed timeline in the front of the book.) I’ve tried to do just that. By leaving the seduction/kidnapping/eloping of Helen with Paris as the definitive catalyst of the war, it has made several other elements of the entire story sync together in a way most people haven’t thought of, or even entertained. That and there are the many fragments and other sources for these characters besides Homer that had to be integrated. And if that doesn’t get your stars in a twinkle, think about this. The Iliad begins almost a decade after the ships disembarked from Aulis for Troy, making every hero and heroine ten years older when we read about them, than when they set out on the adventure. They are all full grown men and women by the time we see them in action in Homer’s tales. I welcome comments and questions. And again, I thank Nadine for her thoughtful and detailed review of book one of the Homeric Chronicles. It certainly made me get this blog about the timeline question out in a timely fashion :) Here’s the link to Nadine’s original post. It’s in German, but you can easily translate it to English in Google Translate. Happy reading!! http://meineliteratour.blogspot.de/2016/07/rezension-song-of-princes.html If you enjoyed this post, give it a LIKE or a TWEET :) And by all means, SHARE :) If you'd like a heads up on future Big Ten Interviews or giveaways, join my email list. The only spam I like is with my eggs. © Janell Rhiannon 2016 Any information from this blog must be properly cited :) There was a time when I used to joke that I wished I could date Achilles. Strong. Golden. Fierce. Ruthless when it mattered. The kind of man myth remembers, and the kind history warns us about. Achilles is both the glory and the grief of the Iliad, the warrior whose brilliance burned as hot as the fires of Troy itself. As I began writing The Homeric Chronicles, I quickly realized the story I wanted to tell was far larger than enthusiasm alone could carry. I was not ready, not yet. I needed years of reading, years of writing, and the courage to confront the full scope of these stories: war and love, blood and longing, triumph and ruin. Greek myth does not flinch from the extremes of human experience, and neither could I. From the beginning, my vision was to create a sweeping narrative, one vast and interconnected epic in which the lives of heroes and heroines converge at Troy and ripple outward into the generations that follow. That vision demanded structure, and structure demanded chronology. I found myself pulling at strands of myth, tracing lineages, comparing fragments, and piecing together events that had never before been fully aligned into a continuous historical arc. The late George Shipway, author of Warrior in Bronze, once warned readers that “...it would be a rash scribbler who ventured on definite dates.” I became that rash scribbler, though not recklessly. With sources spread across my desk and timelines scratched into notebooks, I began the long labor of ordering myth into sequence. Shipway’s own timeline falls only about seventeen years from mine, a reminder that serious minds approaching the same material often arrive at strikingly similar conclusions. Writing realistic mythology is no simple task, especially Greek mythology, where the broad outlines of the stories are already familiar to so many readers. The challenge is not invention, but interpretation. Not distortion, but illumination. From the outset, I made a deliberate choice. I would not twist the myths into alternate endings, nor shift the focus onto minor observers to retell familiar tales from the margins. I had no interest in merely repeating the Iliad and the Odyssey in prose. Those stories already exist in their immortal form. Instead, The Homeric Chronicles was conceived as something different: a chronological epic that follows the rise of kingdoms, the forging of alliances, the breaking of oaths, and the relentless pull of prophecy that draws heroes toward Troy and beyond. To build this world, I relied not only on myth, but on history. Archaeological data from Troy, Asia Minor, and mainland Greece shaped geography and culture. Scholarly literature informed political structure and material life. My own training as a historian became the foundation beneath the narrative itself. The result is a living synthesis of myth and history, an unfolding saga in which legend walks alongside evidence, and prophecy collides with human choice. If you are ready to step into that world, begin where destiny itself begins, with the births of Paris and Achilles in Song of Princes, Book One of The Homeric Chronicles. Available in Kindle and paperback on Amazon. Copyright © 2016, revised 2026 Janell Rhiannon. All rights reserved. Achilles stands at the center of the Trojan War tradition as the greatest warrior of the Bronze Age, a figure whose name endured long after the collapse of kingdoms and the fading of empires. Even Alexander the Great admired Achilles, keeping a copy of The Iliad close at hand as both inspiration and mirror. For centuries, readers and scholars alike have wrestled with a single question: were these heroes purely myth, or echoes of real men whose stories were shaped by memory and song? Historian Barry Strauss addresses this question in The Trojan War, noting that names are among the easiest elements of oral tradition to preserve across generations. Their survival suggests the possibility that figures like Achilles may have roots in historical memory, even if their stories were later transformed into epic poetry. That possibility alone is enough to keep scholars, writers, and readers returning to the tale again and again. What makes Achilles endure is not simply his strength, but his humanity. He was passionate, stubborn, brilliant, and reckless. He loved as fiercely as he fought. At the heart of his story lies one of the most universal struggles in human history: the search for purpose. Achilles knew from the beginning that his life would be short. He understood that his choice was not between life and death, but between obscurity and immortality through glory. That choice—between time and renown—defines the arc of his life. Achilles represents the passionate side of human nature ruled not by caution, but by conviction. His bond with Patroclus has been debated for centuries, yet Homer leaves their relationship deliberately undefined. What remains clear is their loyalty. They trained together, fought together, and relied on one another in the brutal uncertainty of Bronze Age warfare. Their connection reflects a warrior culture built on trust, honor, and shared survival rather than modern labels imposed centuries later. Achilles also formed powerful attachments to women whose lives became bound to his own fate. While hidden among the court of King Lycomedes on the island of Skyros, Achilles met Deidamia. Their relationship began in youth and produced a son, Neoptolemus, whose destiny would later intertwine with the fall of Troy. Years later, during the campaigns that preceded the siege, Achilles captured Briseis, princess of Lyrnessus. Over time, she became more than spoils of war. Within the traditions preserved in epic and later literature, their relationship developed into one marked by attachment, grief, and loss. Her removal by decree of Agamemnon sparked the crisis that set the tragedy of the Iliad into motion. The conflict forced Achilles into a devastating decision. When Briseis was taken from him, the insult struck at both his honor and his identity. His withdrawal from battle reshaped the course of the war, allowing Hector to drive Greek forces back toward the sea. The chain of events that followed remains one of the most tragic in epic tradition. Patroclus, seeing the Greeks falter, begged Achilles to lend him his armor so he could rally the troops. Achilles agreed, and that decision altered everything. Hector killed Patroclus, believing him to be Achilles himself. When Achilles learned the truth, grief ignited into rage, and rage returned him to the battlefield. The duel between Achilles and Hector became inevitable. In the end, Achilles fulfilled every prophecy tied to his fate. His return to battle restored Greek strength, but it also sealed his destiny. Though he achieved undying fame, the cost was irreversible. Those he loved were lost, and the glory he sought came only through sacrifice. Perhaps that is why Achilles continues to resonate across generations. His story is not simply about war, but about identity, purpose, love, and loss. He embodies the dangerous beauty of choosing greatness at the expense of time. And in the end, it was love—not weakness—that shaped his fate. Love for Patroclus. Love for Briseis. Love for honor. That, perhaps, was his true Achilles' heel. — Janell Rhiannon © 2015, revised 2026 |
Janell Rhiannon
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