Book 2 is the part of the epic in which the Fall of Troy is recounted in harrowing detail: the awful climax to which the Iliad and Odyssey allude but never fully describe, the one peering into the future toward the devastating event, the other gazing backward at it. It is Virgil, the Roman, who gives us the whole story at last: the Greeks hidden within the gigantic Trojan Horse, which the Trojans have taken inside their city’s walls; then the ambush in the dark, the smoke from the burning city, the panic and the flames; the image of the headless trunk of the murdered Trojan king, Priam, a
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