Troy: The Greek Myths Reimagined (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology #3)

by Stephen Fry

The brutal murder of Troilus was seen as crucial in hardening Apollo’s opposition to the Greek cause and to feeding his hatred of Achilles in particular.

I want the Achaean army pinned against their ships like herded cattle. And slaughtered like herded cattle. Let Agamemnon see what disaster falls when he insults Achilles. The Greeks must lose everything. I want them humbled. I want them broken. Brought down into the dust. How dare he take Briseis away from me?

The rank and file worshipped Hector, but had grown to dislike Paris, whom they thought haughty, vain, and arrogant. All show and no go. Too petty and too pretty to be trusted,

Whatever trance Aphrodite had put Helen in at the beginning had certainly cleared and she felt nothing for Paris now. Nothing but contempt.

Menelaus and Paris emerged from the ranks of the opposing armies. The thousands upon thousands of excited warriors roared their approval and beat their weapons against their shields. Helen had never heard a sound so loud. She felt the very walls of the city tremble.

No one had ever seen a warrior as entirely and terrifyingly energized as Diomedes was that day. He was enthused—a word whose literal meaning is “to be filled with the spirit of a god” (en-theos).

A shudder swept the ranks of both armies as a howl of pain like no other sound ever heard emerged from the wounded war god. Only Diomedes had been given the power to see the immortals, of course. To the warriors on both sides the sound was as mysterious as it was appalling. For a brief moment the fighting stopped as everyone looked around them in horrified wonder.

All for my sake, worthless as I am. And, of course, for the sake of your pitiful brother Paris and his vanity. I would rather never have been born than bring this all on you.” Hector looked into the loveliest human face there had ever been. “Please,” he said, “don’t upset yourself. I do what has to be done. No one in our family blames you, Helen.

The soldiers on each side were too absorbed to cheer. They shivered in the knowledge that they were watching history. History of such profound importance that it would become the stuff of legend. The grace and speed of Hector against the power and strength of Ajax.

But only in defense of the ships, mind. Don’t even think of trying to hack your way up to Troy. You wouldn’t be safe from Apollo. He’ll guide the arrows of the archers that patrol the city’s high ramparts. Just the beachhead. Promise me?” “I promise!” shouted Patroclus

Now there was nothing between Patroclus and Troy except . . . the god Apollo.

The Trojans came for him in three waves, and Patroclus killed nine in each wave. He seemed invincible—but it was now that Apollo lost patience and struck Patroclus, again and again. He knocked him off his feet, shattered his spear, stripped the shield from his arm, wrenched off his breastplate and struck the helmet off his head.

EUPHORBUS launched a spear at Patroclus. It found its mark. With the spear buried in his side, Patroclus stumbled and wove his way back toward the Greek lines. Hector finished him off with a spear thrust that pierced his bowels and came out of his back. “You think you killed me, Hector,” Patroclus gasped. “But it took the god Apollo to do that. Euphorbus was next. You, famous Hector, noble Hector, were just the third. All you did is finish me off. I die knowing that your fate will be settled by one greater than any . . . by my Achilles.”

It is worth stopping here to remind ourselves of just how important to each side it was that those who died on the field of battle be accorded proper funeral rites.

It was believed too that there was no possibility of a soul departing life in peace and entering the underworld unless the corpse was covered by earth. Those who died of illness, or any cause other than the wounds of war, could not expect the cleansing and ceremony, no matter how important they had been in life, but they might at least be given the dignity of a handful of dirt over their body.

he took off his own armor and put on that of Patroclus—that of Achilles. The helmet he gave to one of his men for safe keeping. He could not risk wearing it, for he might be mistaken for Achilles and face attack from his own side.

Achilles broke down completely. His despair overwhelmed him. He scrabbled at the ground for dirt and rubbed it all over his beautiful face. He tore his hair and howled with absolute and uncontrollable grief.

“it is foretold that if Hector dies your death will come straight after.” “Then let me die straight after!” “And Agamemnon?” “Forget him. What is treasure, or Briseis, or honor, or anything next to the life of the one I loved best and dearest, my beloved, my only Patroclus? Patroclus, oh Patroclus!” Achilles threw himself down and howled his despair into the dirt.

By dawn he had finished and was able to present Thetis with not just the shield but a four-plated helmet with a crest of gold, a bright breastplate and—to protect the legs from the knee down—shining greaves of light, flexible tin. Nothing more beautiful had ever been made for mortal man.

The marvelous shield glittered, the helmet flashed. This was the sight every Greek had longed to see. Achilles,

But he was too slow. Achilles speared him in the back. Hector heard his younger brother’s shrill screams and hurled his own spear at Achilles,

Homer is as merciless and implacable in his descriptions as Achilles was in his killing. Dryops: speared through the neck. Demuchus: knee smashed and cut into pieces. The brothers Laogonus and Dardanus: speared and chopped. Young Tros, son of Alastor: liver split open and butchered. Mulius: a spear through one ear and out the other. Echeclus, the son of Agenor: head split open, a curtain of blood running down his face. Deucalion: speared, spitted, and decapitated.

Scamander called on Apollo to slay Achilles and grant the Trojans victory. Achilles heard the river god’s anguished plea; enraged, he dived in and attacked the water.

Apollo spirited the real Agenor away and took his form, taunting Achilles and leading him all over the plain of Ilium, giving the stampeding Trojans time to pour into the city. Apollo-Agenor then disappeared with a laugh, and a furious Achilles turned to vent his wrath on Troy.

Hector was standing outside the Scaean Gate, ready for the final encounter. Priam and Hecuba called down, begging him to take shelter inside. The old king tore at his hair as the vision arose in his mind’s eye of the fate of his city and the Trojan people if Hector were to be killed.

Hector had refused, and so many great Trojans, so many brothers and dear friends, had been cut down. The only way he could redeem himself for his recklessness was by killing the man responsible. Achilles.

you pledge to do the same if you prevail?” Achilles snarled with contempt. “I have no interest in deals. Hunters make no deals with lions. Wolves make no deals with lambs.”

Achilles aimed his spear at the spot where he knew the leather did not quite overlap the bronze, exposing bare skin and leaving the throat open, just where the collarbone met the neck. Achilles thrust and Hector, Prince of Troy, the hope and glory of his people, came crashing down,

This was a crime against the principles of proper martial conduct, the codes of honor, and the canons of religion which shocked even the gods.

Every day, standing in his chariot like an avenging demon, whip hand raised, he circled the walls of Troy, dragging the corpse behind. Such implacable fury, such insane cruelty, such open contempt, caused the gods to avert their eyes.

I’d say he looks finer than he did when you last looked down on him from your city’s walls.” “The gods be praised,” said Priam in wonder. “Apollo, specifically,” the young man said

Hector was everything that the vain and hollow Paris was not.

the Trojans bade their final farewell to Hector, their greatest of men.

Penthesilea brought with her to Troy twelve fierce Amazon warrior princesses,162 and she alone accounted for eight hapless Achaean men on her first foray into battle.

None of them had ever engaged with a mortal female in battle, let alone one shooting down arrows at them from horseback.

The women of Troy, watching from the high walls, were so inspired to see members of their own sex driving the hated Argives back that they determined on joining the fray themselves,

Achilles roughly stripped Penthesilea of her armor, but when he removed her helmet and saw her face he was struck dumb with wonder. This is how he imagined the goddess Artemis must look. He mourned the death of one so beautiful, brave, and honorable. He wept at her loss.

The dark Memnon and golden Achilles fought all day in what became the longest man-on-man duel of the war. In the end Achilles’s fitness and speed prevailed

“I see you at the Scaean Gates, brought down by Apollo and Paris . . .” The voice of Phoebus Apollo himself now called on Achilles to turn back, but the blood was singing in the hero’s ears.

Apollo could not overlook the contemptuously blasphemous manner in which Achilles had so brutally slaughtered young Troilus in Apollo’s own temple, on his own sacred altar.

The first requirement for a sniping bowman was patience. Achilles reared over a panicking young Trojan. The Trojan fell. Achilles stood exposed in Paris’s eyeline. He let the arrow fly.

Paris gave a cry of triumph, and now the page saw that the arrow had indeed struck Achilles, low down, on the back of the foot. It had pierced the flesh of his left heel. This was the heel that Thetis had held him by when dipping him as a baby in the River Styx. The one vulnerable place on all his body.

his leaving marked a change in the human world. Something great had gone that could never—and would never—be replaced. The vulnerability, the flaw that every human has recalls the first Achilles heel.

He could have chosen for himself a long life of tranquil ease in obscurity, but he knowingly threw himself into a brief, dazzling blaze of glory. His reward is the eternal fame that is both priceless and worthless.

When the Trojan prisoners of war declared that they regarded Odysseus as their most feared adversary, the Greeks let out a collective groan. They were afraid that Ajax would prove the sorer loser. They were right.

Distraught at the madness that had overcome him and terrified at how close he had come to murdering those he truly held most dear, Ajax stumbled to a lonely part of the shore, planted his sword—the silver sword of Hector—in the sand and threw himself upon it.

His body was found by Tecmessa,

All the Greeks were desolated when they learned that their beloved giant had died in so pitiable a fashion. Odysseus seemed shaken too and told anyone who would listen that he would happily have given the armor to Ajax had he known the poor fellow was going to take it all so badly.

Agamemnon and Menelaus ruled that, while the suicide was tragic, it could by no means be regarded as a warrior’s death. It warranted no cleansing, no great pyre, no ceremonial burning. The body must, according to the code by which they all lived and fought, be left on open ground.

So it was that Telamonian Ajax, Ajax the Great, was cremated with full honors. His charred bones were sealed in a gold coffin that the soldiers buried in a great mound by the banks of the River Simoeis