THE ILIAD An extract

After his leader, Agamemnon, dishonours him, the Greek warrior Achilles prays to his sea-goddess mother to restore his lost honour. She achieves this by ensuring that the Greeks suffer terrible losses while he sits out of battle – thus demonstrating that they cannot succeed without him. But the losses include the death of Achilles’s own dearest comrade, Patroclus – after which swiftfooted Achilles, now dressed in divinely forged armour, joins battle for the first time in the Iliad, ready to avenge his dead friend by slaughtering the Trojans.

Then Tros, Alastor’s son, approached and clasped Achilles by the knees because he hoped that he might spare his life and take him captive, not kill him, once he saw their ages matched.

The poor fool did not know he would not listen. Achilles had no sweetness in his heart, no softness in his mind. He was riled up with frenzied eagerness to fight and kill.

The Trojan clasped his knees and tried to pray. Achilles plunged his sword into his liver, which slipped out and the black blood drenched his

belly.

The darkness veiled his eyes as he was losing his life. And then Achilles stood beside

Mulius, stabbed him through his ear, and drove the bronze right out the other ear. He used his hilted sword to strike Antenor’s son,

Echeclus, through the middle of his skull.

Submerged in blood, the blade grew warm. Red death and strong fate seized the man and veiled his sight. Achilles killed Deucalion. He struck his elbow, where the tendons meet, and sliced right through the arm with his bronze spear. The

victim, impeded by his injury, could not move out of his killer’s way, but looked directly towards impending death. Then with his sword Achilles struck his neck and chopped his head off and threw it far away, helmet and all.

The marrow burst out from the vertebrae.

The torso lay stretched out upon the ground.

Then he pursued the son of Piros, Rigmus, who came from fertile Thrace. Achilles threw his bronze spear at his middle, and it pierced his belly. From the chariot he fell.

The charioteer, Arethous, was turning the horses round, but with his sharp bronze spear Achilles struck his back and made him fall out of the chariot. The horses panicked.

As fire from heaven rages through deep glens and wind whirls everywhere and whips the flames, Achilles with his spear swept everywhere, pursuing those he killed. The ground flowed black with blood. As when a farmer yokes two oxen with flat, broad faces, so that he can garner white barley in a well-built threshing floor— they bellow as they work, and soon the grain is turned to husks beneath their hooves—just so the strong-hoofed horses driven by Achilles trampled the shields and corpses, and the axle beneath the chariot was doused in blood, as were the rails around it. They were spattered by droplets from the wheels and horses’ hooves. Achilles, son of Peleus, still yearned to win himself more glory and success.

His lethal hands were always drenched in gore.

Hero or heel?: Brad Pitt as Achilles in the 2004 film Troy