How the Trojan War led to Seldon Crisis

The podcasts, anyway.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Wright, professional storyteller, scholar of ancient history and Greek myths, and podcast host, for the Seldon Crisis podcast.

It was a wonderful conversation and I learned a lot about how he became fascinated by the topic and eventually built a professional career out of his passion for storytelling and how it eventually led to two wonderful podcasts, one on the events surrounding the Trojan War and Homer’s Iliad and another on the Odyssey.

The first episode of the Trojan War podcast is about the event that precipitated the conflict; not the abduction of Helen from Greece by the Trojan prince Paris, the event that “launched a thousand ships,” but a wedding on Olympus between a god and a mortal. A certain notorious goddess named Eris was not invited and wasn’t happy about being excluded. She wreaked her revenge through an act of epic trolling — by tossing a golden apple into the proceedings with an inscription, “For the fairest.”

Eris knew this would cause a ruckus, and it surely did, leading to the famous “judgment of Paris” in which he declined to accept absolute power or wisdom in favor of just getting his rocks off with the most beautiful woman in the world. Such mistakes tend to lead to serious consequences, like a ten year long conflict on distant shores with countless agonizing deaths and a destroyed civilization or two.

Jeff Wright told this story in his first episode, with one of the funniest and most engaging treatments imaginable including some brilliantly insightful commentary and analysis, and I was hooked.

I followed it through the remaining eleven episodes, then devoured his subsequent podcast on the Odyssey as well, again finding every episode absolutely delightful, engaging, and brilliantly delivered.

Jeff's since put the whole saga to page, too — his book, The Full Disclosure Iliad: From Mythic Origins to Trojan Horse, tells the complete Trojan War story in one continuous narrative, filling in everything Homer's version leaves hanging (which, if you've read the Iliad, you know is a lot). If the podcast hooked you the way it hooked me, it's well worth picking up.

During the Covid pandemic in 2020, I decided to go back to the future so to speak, and picked up a similarly powerful epic placed 20,000 years or so in humanity’s future and re-read it for the first time since high school. The story was, of course, Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. Since I’d first read the story, Asimov had written two sequels and two prequels, so I devoured all seven books, then convinced my son to read them as well.

I still felt an urge to share the wonder of the stories, and my mind returned to Jeff and his storytelling magic. He introduced his Trojan War series by calling it “history’s most awesome epic.” It occurred to me that Foundation could be a candidate for future history’s most awesome epic and someone should retell it the way Jeff had done with the works of Homer.

I believe I encountered the Trojan War podcast through another wonderful podcast entitled Literature and History, hosted by the amazing literary scholar and musician Doug Metzger. If you haven’t encountered Literature and History before, please do so. It’s one of the most thoroughly educating and at the same time humorous and insightful podcasts on the planet, and it has some amazing background music performed by the host himself.

That, my friends, is how Seldon Crisis was born. I didn’t directly copy Jeff’s style. His episodes are clearly separated into the first half in which he tells the story, and a second, optional, half when he gets deep into the analysis. I tend to weave the analysis into the story a bit more, but the influence is clear. I also feel deeply indebted to Doug’s Literature and History approach, which is also heavily weighted towards expert analysis. I don’t have the academic cred to work on the same high level as these two giants, but I want people to know how much they inspired me and to link to their first episodes here so you can see for yourself.

If you haven’t journeyed through the core trilogy of Foundation with me yet, here’s the link to episode 1 of Seldon Crisis.