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

by Stephen Fry

The smoke rose in the air and the cries of every soldier, servant, and slave mingled to make a noise louder than the greatest clamor of the war. The smoke and the sound reached Olympus where the gods wept too. Golden Achilles, the son of Peleus and Thetis, was gone from the world. His death meant more than the loss to the Achaeans of their foremost warrior and champion. Humanity had lost a mortal of greater glory than had ever been known. Wild, petulant, headstrong, stubborn, sentimental, and cruel as he could be, 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. Every great champion ever since, in war and in sport, has been a miniature of Achilles, a simulacrum, a tiny speck of a reminder of what real glory can be. 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. In our world all athletes know that their years are short; they understand too that they have to be mean, passionate, merciless, and unrelenting if they wish to rise to their own kind of lasting fame. Achilles will always be their patron and their guardian divinity. We each of us know, or have known, someone with a glimmer of Achilles’s flame in them. We have loved and loathed them. We have admired the...