Ayelet Haimson Lushkov - You Win or You Die: The Ancient World of Game of Thrones

GT : A Game of Thrones

CK : A Clash of Kings

SS : A Storm of Swords

FC : A Feast for Crows

DD : A Dance with Dragons

Ancient texts are divided into books rather than chapters, and then into sections (for prose works) or lines (for poetry). Some works have only one book, so their only subdivision is into sections or lines, but more usually theyll be made up of many books. The Iliad , for instance, has 24 books. Livys history of Rome came to 142. This means that, in order to understand the references in this book, youll have to understand the standard citation practices, which are fortunately very easy:

If a work has book divisions, the first number will invariably be the book number, and the second will be line numbers. So, Iliad 1922 means Iliad , Books 1922, while Iliad 1.110 means Iliad , Book 1, lines 110. The same holds for prose: Caesar, The Gallic War , 1.310 means Caesar, The Gallic War , Book 1, chapters 310. Some older editions have further subdivisions, marked in Roman numerals, but the newer editions invariably go for the more streamlined style.

For those works that do not have book divisions (here mostly Greek tragedies), the citation simply refers to line numbers; Helen 306, for example, does not mean Books 306 of Euripides Helen , but rather lines 306.

In this book, all line numbers, no matter what format of citation, refer to the text of the cited translations, as opposed to the original Latin or Greek.

The world of Game of Thrones is vast, but what makes it bigger still is the multiplicity of connections to our own world not just our present, but also our historical and literary past. This book presents one way of approaching Game of Thrones , which pays close attention to the points of contact with the ancient Greek and Roman world, of which there are many. Specifically, the book shows what happens in one readers mind as she reads and views the series through the lens of a professional classicist. What this book is not, however, is a definitive guide to the Greco-Roman classics in Westeros: I have no special knowledge, for instance, of what goes on in the head or the library of George R. R. Martin, nor behind the scenes at HBO, nor any other venue that produces official versions of the franchise, except in cases where they state so explicitly (like Martin on Hadrians Wall, for instance). And despite being the work of a professional classicist, this book isnt a compendium of every single similarity or reminiscence of the ancient world in Westeros. However large and complex Game of Thrones seems, the classical world is far larger, and classicists dont all focus on the same things when we study what the ancient Greeks or Romans thought, said, or did. What this book is, therefore, is one readers view of how the classical world resonates with the world of Westeros, what similarities are of particular interest, and how these connections deepen the experience of reading, watching, or thinking about Game of Thrones . At the heart of the book is the idea that the Game of Thrones saga can usefully be read as a prose epic that is, a combination of epic motifs, ideas, and storytelling techniques with material more commonly treated in prose histories: politics, domestic scheming, ethnographies, and so on.

Precise readers will already have noticed that I use Game of Thrones to mean more than the first book of the Song of Ice and Fire series. Indeed, throughout the book I use it both to refer to the whole series and to its first book. I have tried to make it very clear when I am referring to the single novel and when to the series (most instances refer to the latter). The rationale for risking potential confusion was to simplify what otherwise is a mouthful, and to use what has come to be the standard and popular name for the book and television series. To those readers who find their teeth set on edge by my usage, I offer apologies at the outset. In general, this work takes its cue from the books, with the HBO adaptation used to supplement rather than as the focus so when I say Game of Thrones unspecified, I mean the books or a narrative on the show that is modeled so closely on the books as to make no significant difference.

Like Game of Thrones , the word classics or classical world is a shorthand that covers a multitude of sins. The classical world proper is the entire inhabited globe, with chronologies for the classical changing for each specific culture: numerous civilizations Greco-Roman, Indic, Chinese, etc. retrospectively identify a classical moment in their history, or have one identified for them by successors or outsiders. Hence, the field of the classical, even the very word, is as vast as it is contested. What I mean by the classical, however, is much more confined and functions almost like a technical term in Western culture: it is the world of the ancient Mediterranean from about 800 BC to 400 AD (give or take a few centuries either way), and with a particular focus on the cultures of Greece and Rome and their empires. From this definition are excluded the Mediterranean cultures of the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, and the Northern European tribes, except where they come into contact with Greece and Rome. This scope isnt exactly commensurate with the academic discipline of classics, which can range much further in time and space, but it does represent the core of the material we study.

My particular emphasis is often on the literature rather than the history, not least because it is the writings of Greek and Roman authors that have exerted the strongest and clearest influence on the subsequent tradition of literature and art, down to Game of Thrones itself. For this reason I include indeed often focus on the famous Trojan War, an event which, whether or not it really happened, is traditionally dated to roughly 1200 BC. Stories about the Trojan War circulated in all sorts of ways, especially oral performance, long before the two main epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey , were set down in writing. The epics as we know them are a multilayered creation, and even after being written down evolved through the work of editors down to the Hellenistic period of the third century BC. Nor is this our only source of knowledge about the Trojan War: Ill also frequently turn to the representations in Athenian tragedy of the fifth century BC and Vergils famous Roman epic, the Aeneid , in the first century BC. But besides the Trojan War there will be many other myths, histories, and monuments that we encounter over the course of the book. One thing that will emerge very clearly from all these works is just how much our understanding of the ancient world is mediated through its representation in texts and by the motivations of their authors. That sense of personal, and inevitably partial, point-of-view is equally crucial to understanding Game of Thrones , especially a book series defined and structured by individual characters perspectives on events, and a fantasy world about which we can never hope to have complete information.