Upon the opening of Homer’s epic, we find that the Achaians
(the Greeks, led by King Agamemnon) have been fighting
the Trojans for
nine
long years while trying to get back Helen, wife of Meneleus. She was
stolen by Paris, a prince of Troy,
who took her as his wife because of her great beauty. Troy
remains intact, on land and on the sea, but the Achaians are dying of a
mysterious sickness. Achilles finally
gathers the survivors together to find the cause of it, and a prophet
tells
them it’s Agamemnon’s arrogance in not returning a woman taken as a
spoil of
war. He reluctantly does so, but takes
Achilles’ female war-prize to compensate. Achilles says he won’t fight
for the Achaians any longer, retreats to
the beach, and makes a deal with the gods (one of whom is his mother)
to help
destroy the Achaians. Paris
and Meneleus meet in single combat on the
field, but before Meneleus
can kill
him, his mother Aphrodite takes him away from the field and places him
in his
bedroom. A truce that follows is broken
when Meneleus is wounded – and in the resulting
battle, the Achaian
warrior
Diomedes kills many Trojans and wounds the goddess Aphrodite. The great
Trojan warrior, Hektor, returns to
find Athena refuses his sacrifices. He goes to his family, to which
he’s devoted, but also shames Paris from his
bedroom with Helen as a coward, sending him back out to the field to
fight. Achilles doesn’t return to battle, but his wish to have the
Achaians destroyed seems almost done when he
sends a servant into the fracas in his armor. The Trojans are so scared
they all retreat to the city. When the man is killed by Hektor,
Achilles is
told he’ll die if he tries to avenge it; but avenge it he does, this
time in
god-fashioned armor. Not only does he
break the Trojan army, he kills Hektor and desecrates the body in front
of the
Trojan walls. He gives over the body
later on, moved by Hektor’s father’s pleas and the will of the gods.
The fall of Troy isn’t given in The Iliad, though, but happens
afterward.