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

by Stephen Fry

It would be impossible to tell the story of the Trojan War without reference to Homer’s Iliad, long regarded as the first great literary work of the Western canon.186 The Iliad begins with rage and ends with sorrow: the rage of Achilles at Agamemnon’s appropriation of the slave girl Briseis and the sorrow of the Trojan people as they mourn the death of their champion Hector. This fractional part of the ten-year siege takes 15,693 lines of verse—each comprising between twelve and seventeen syllables—divided into twenty-four books. The concentrated unity of action, the complex and convincing characterizations, the depictions of such a multiplicity of human emotion and impulse, the cinematic shifts in perspective and point of view, the relentless energy and drive, the unflinching representation of violence, the flashbacks and foreshadowings, the depth, deftness, and daring of imagery—these qualities and more have caused poets, artists, scholars, and readers over the centuries to regard the Iliad, along with its companion piece the Odyssey, as the supreme works of narrative art to which all others aspire and by which all others are judged. And yet there remains a fundamental question which anyone encountering these works is bound to ask. Homer and the Trojan War—did they even exist?