She was considered the most beautiful woman in the world

 

     

                  ...but for her they never shot an arrow

As a seafarer who has navigated
                                      [all the seas and oceans,
I lived strange experiences and strong emotions.

Those thirty years I saw and heard
                                                  [incredible things,
but a story of them,
           semicolons, questions and doubts brings...


Once while I was sailing
                             [along the coast of ancient Troy,
inevitably I was thinking
          [of the Homeric Trojan campaign to destroy
the one who had control of narrow*.                                   

My poor Helen,
  [for you they never shot an arrow...

The Trojans were holding the keys to the Black Sea
and the Greeks were tired of paying the fee....

The old stoker,
         [suddenly interrupted my thoughts,

and together we broke
                   [into history's unknown slots.




He told me...I'm a Trojan, and my ancestors 
                                                 [came back to the region,

along with Constantine the Great and the 

                                                             [first Roman legion.                   

Aeneas fleeing Troy.......   to Latium

Eight miles away from Troy
                        [is Dardanos, my hometown. 
After the fall of Troy,
                      [Aeneas would not bow down     and he sailed from my city along with                                             [other Trojan fighters.... 


They went to Italy as mentioned
           [by Virgil and many other writers.


There, they defeated the Latins and 
                                        [created an empire,
so large that without refueling today 
              [you could not cross in an airliner.

These descendants of Aeneas
                                    [and the Trojans
became masters of the world,
                             [and called Romans..

They never forgot Troy,
   [though thousands of years passed,

with plans to return home

                     with armies they massed....

The return trip was made in 330 AD..

In order not to be forced,

               [as in the Trojan war, to flee,
they founded the capital of their empire

                         [in Byzantium, a fortified position,

several miles farther from Troy,

                                [as the base of each expedition....

But in Byzantium the people were speaking Greek
and over the years... each Roman Greek will speak.

Finishing the old man,

                               [the stoker, said:

When I was born.....
Greek was the language of my bred..

Am I...    A Trojan?  A Roman? 
                                 [A Greek?  A Hellen?
Two mysteries of history,
        [I and the queen of Sparta, Helen ...

___________* *___________

*Hellen, in Greek mythology, king of Phthia was the eponymous ancestor of all true Greeks, called Hellenes in his honour.

The Hellenes consisted of the Aeolians, Dorians, Ionians, and Achaeans, traditionally descended from and named for Hellen’s sons, Aeolus and Dorus, and his grandsons (by his third son, Xuthus), Ion and Achaeus.
______________________________________________________


Texts and Narration: Odysseus Heavilayias - ROTTERDAM //
Language adjustments and text adaptation: Kellene G Safis - CHICAGO//
Digital adaptation and text editing: Cathy Rapakoulia Mataraga - PIRAEUS//
Νο: 18
                                              _________________


*Helen of Troy, In Greek mythology, Helen of Troy (Greek Ἑλένη Helénē, pronounced [helénɛː]), also known as Helen of Sparta, was the daughter of Zeus and Leda, and was a sister of Castor, Pollux, and Clytemnestra. In Greek myths, she was considered the most beautiful woman in the world. By marriage she was Queen of Laconia, a province within Homeric Greece, the wife of King Menelaus. Her abduction by Paris, Prince of Troy, brought about the Trojan War. Elements of her putative biography come from classical authors such as Aristophanes, Cicero, Euripides and Homer (both The Iliad and The Odyssey).

*Dardanos : Eight miles to the ancient city of Troy.

*Constantine the Great,   57th Emperor of the Roman Empire

Colossal marble head of Emperor
Constantine the Great, Roman, 4th century

Constantine the Great (Latin: Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus; Greek: Κωνσταντίνος ὁ Μέγας; 27 February c. 272 AD – 22 May 337 AD), also known as Constantine I or Saint Constantine (in the Orthodox Church as Saint Constantine the Great, Equal-to-the-Apostles), was a Roman Emperor from 306 to 337 AD of Thracian-Illyrian ancestry. Constantine was the son of Flavius Valerius Constantius, a Roman army officer, and his consort Helena. His father became Caesar, the deputy emperor in the west in 293 AD. Constantine was sent east, where he rose through the ranks to become a military tribune under the emperors Diocletian and Galerius. In 305, Constantius was raised to the rank of Augustus, senior western emperor, and Constantine was recalled west to campaign under his father in Britannia. Acclaimed as emperor by the army at Eboracum (Modern-day York) after his father's death in 306 AD, Constantine emerged victorious in a series of civil wars against the emperors Maxentius and Licinius to become sole ruler of both west and east by 324 AD.

As emperor, Constantine enacted many administrative, financial, social, and military reforms to strengthen the empire. The government was restructured and civil and military authority separated. A new gold coin, the solidus, was introduced to combat inflation. It would become the standard for Byzantine and European currencies for more than a thousand years. The first Roman emperor to claim conversion to Christianity,[notes 4] Constantine played an influential role in the proclamation of the Edict of Milan, which decreed tolerance for Christianity in the empire. He called the First Council of Nicaea in 325, at which the Nicene Creed was professed by Christians. In military matters, the Roman army was reorganised to consist of mobile field units and garrison soldiers capable of countering internal threats and barbarian invasions. Constantine pursued successful campaigns against the tribes on the Roman frontiers—the Franks, the Alamanni, the Goths, and the Sarmatians—even resettling territories abandoned by his predecessors during the turmoil of the previous century.

The age of Constantine marked a distinct epoch in the history of the Roman Empire. He built a new imperial residence at Byzantium and renamed the city Constantinople after himself (the laudatory epithet of "New Rome" came later, and was never an official title). It would later become the capital of the Empire for over one thousand years; for which reason the later Eastern Empire would come to be known as the Byzantine Empire. His more immediate political legacy was that, in leaving the empire to his sons, he replaced Diocletian's tetrarchy with the principle of dynastic succession. His reputation flourished during the lifetime of his children and centuries after his reign. The medieval church upheld him as a paragon of virtue while secular rulers invoked him as a prototype, a point of reference, and the symbol of imperial legitimacy and identity. Beginning with the Renaissance, there were more critical appraisals of his reign due to the rediscovery of anti-Constantinian sources. Critics portrayed him as a despotic tyrant. Trends in modern and recent scholarship attempted to balance the extremes of previous scholarship.

Constantine—as the first Christian emperor—is a significant figure in the history of Christianity. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on his orders at the purported site of Jesus' tomb in Jerusalem, became the holiest place in Christendom. The Papal claim to temporal power was based on the supposed Donation of Constantine. He is venerated as a saint by Eastern Orthodox Christians, Byzantine Catholics, and Anglicans.




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