I went to watch the movie "Troy" tonight. I quite enjoyed it, even though there were definite parts that made me cringe. Petricles gasping for breath with a very large gap in his throat - I hiccupped, probably my body's way of preventing me from throwing up everything I had for dinner. I shall never be a surgeon or a warrior of any sort, nope - the battefield is not the place for my poor tummy.
On a nicer note, while I watched the movie I felt a longing. Not really a romance lovey-dovey longing, though I was most intrigued with the Achilles/Rosalia romance (which, of course, did not exist in the Iliad). It was a longing to see the past. I want to go to Europe. I want to walk the streets of Pompei and Herculaneum, watch the sun burn the skies while standing in one of the arches of the mosque at Cordoba. I want to see cities dead and gone, like Troy, or Ur and find the stories that were lost. I want to see how the people lived, what they felt and thought. I want to find the places of myth - Atlantis, El Dorado - just to marvel at the tales of the places.
My mother gave me a book when I was small. It was called "Vesuvius" and it detailed a fictional life of a slave girl who lived in Herculaneum during it's last days. There were a lot of pictures and diagrams of the city, and photos of the excavations. I think that it was that book that really made me love ancient history. My sister got a book about the Trojan War in one of those silly school book sales and I remember reading that and "I, Columbus" over and over. And when I was middle school, the game I liked the most was "Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time" where the character explores Atlantis, El Dorado and Shangri-La. Sometimes I think I should have been an archaeologist.