Girls wearing jeans? Men cooking and cleaning? What has the world come too!?

The final major point I want to address in my analysis is one of cultural expectations and codes of behaviour. As I mentioned in my introduction, both Homer’s Iliad and Petersen’s Troy were created to serve a purpose – entertainment, and to best do that they must pander to their very different audiences.

 As we’ve already established, violence, even in excessive doses is not something unfamiliar to the Greeks or modern day people – but perhaps only because we’ve become desensitized to it from watching numerous others, as violent, films. The real divisions between populations pop out of the woodwork when things like Pederasty come up – something widely accepted in Greek culture but what looks to us contemporary viewers as a form of paedophilia. It’s curious that our society can be ok with grievous bodily harm if it’s a decapitation or a well armed spear through the head courtesy of Achilles – but not rape, which is surely no better or worse than a painful death?

Petersen’s adaptation in Troy reflects this, especially in the later scenes of the sacking of Troy itself. Petersen preserves as much gruesome violence as he can involving Greek soldier and Trojan citizen extras – but no rape, although it is implied when a soldier ties up a woman but does not kill her, no killing of young children, except in one instance when a baby is thrown offscreen, only those of the figurative ‘age of majority.’ Curiously, or not so curiously, Petersen also adapts the Iliad to save many of his more important characters from their deaths or indignities to preserve his blockbuster conforming Hollywood film.

Examples of this begin with the fact that Achilles dies long before the Trojan horse enters Troy, the fact that Hektor loses his nerve in his fight with Achilles and runs from him in terror until Achilles catches him, and ends with the sacking of Troy – not only is Paris killed – Hektor’s wife is captured and enslaved, and his child has his brains bashed out by Odysseus before the newborn is thrown from the balcony. If that wasn’t enough, Helen actually shacks up with some random Trojan after Paris dies as well – so much for true love. This isn’t exactly relevant to codes of behaviour, but in a sense it is – the fact that the good guys have to win, at least in part, is just plain expected in all of our forms of storytelling. The ‘true’ ending of the Iliad just straight up isn’t suitable for a modern audience – it would leave a bitter taste in most people’s mouths, and if Petersen instead tried to be realistic, the idea that a war was fought over desirable land and military positioning is a bit more boring than a war forged from true love and drama.

In contrast, the notion of the ‘good guy winning’ wasn’t really present in Greek society, in fact, the idea that the good guy always loses was much more common – just look at Sophocles’ tragedies. However, this doesn’t really apply specifically to the Iliad – unlike Petersen’s Troy, the Trojans really aren’t the ‘good guys’, there really isn’t much of a concept of moral right and wrong in the Iliad at all.