Quotes by Caroline Alexander

The greatest war story ever told commemorates a war that established no boundaries, won no territory, and furthered no cause.

This, the only occasion in the Iliad when furious Achilles smiles serves as a bittersweet reminder of the difference real leadership could have made to the events of the Iliad. Agamemnons panicked prize-grabbing in Book One and even Nestors rambling authority pale beside Achilles instinctive and absolute command of himself and the dangers of this occasion.

Surely, by all convention, the Iliad will end here, with the triumphant return of its vindicated hero. But the Iliad is not a conventional epic, and at the very moment of its heros greatest military triumph, Homer diverts his focus from Achilles to the epics two most important casualties, Patroklos and Hektor: it is to the consequences of their deaths, especially to the victor, that all action of the Iliad has been inexorably leading.

Homers epic does not tell of such seemingly essential events as the abduction of Helen, for example, nor of the mustering and sailing of the Greek fleet, the first hostilities of the war, the Trojan Horse, and the sacking and burning of Troy. Instead, the 15,693 lines of Homers Iliad describe the occurrences of a roughly two-week period in the tenth and final year of what had become a stalemated siege of Troy.