The fighting around Troy's walls lasted for 10 grinding years. The Iliad's time span is scarcely six weeks of the last year of that war. But this poem is an exciting story, ringing with the clash of armored and embattled men. For the Greeks who first heard it, it expressed the heroic ideals of their own aristocratic era, freshly emerged from the Dark Age, and served as a religious document that set the characters of the Olympian family. For all time it is high tragedy—the story of a great man brought low by his pride and anger. Achilles, the Greek warrior who was incomparable in battle, is the central figure of this poem. After a heated quarrel with Agamemnon, Achilles, furiously angry, sulks in his tent while the Trojans under Hector, son of Troy's King Priam, drive the Greeks away from Troy's walls. But when his dearest friend, Patroclus, is killed, Achilles comes forth to lead the invaders back to Troy. There he slays Hector. A funeral is held for Patroclus. Then the sorrowing Achilles, moved to compassion by the mediation of the gods, gives Hector's body to Priam, to be buried as befits a fallen hero.
IN SINGLEHANDED BATTLE, two warriors clash. While it is not possible to identify these two figures, Homer told of the Trojan Hector using a sword, the Greek Achilles a spear, here eroded.
World History
