Then started the tenth year,
which decided everything. Agamemnon kidnapped Chryseiis, the daughter of
a Trojan priest of Apollo. The priest begged then to the God, who sent a
plague to the Greek camp. When the Greeks asked to their seer Kalchas,
he advised them to bring back the girl. Agamemnon did not really agree
with this and went on a fight with Achilles. To prove him who was more
powerful, he liberated Chryseiis and took Achilles lover instead.
Achilles reaction was to go on
a fight and killing strike, supported by his best friend
Patroklos, who
also stopped fighting. With the time, things started to get worse for
the Greeks and many heroes were loosing their lives, so Patroklos
decided to take up back the weapons but ended up being killed by
Hector. This was a terrible blow for Achilles, who regret it very much
for many years and interrupted the fights for some days. After this,
Achilles decided to go return to the fight himself and not to stop until
Hector was dead and the city of Troy in flames.
The Trojan war was also a Gods
battle, since the Gods stood by both sides helping each army. During the
duel of Achilles and Hector, for instance, Athena blinded the Trojan
hero so that Achilles could kill him. To humiliate him even after his
dead, Achilles took his body and dragged it to the the pile were his
friend Patrokolos was buried. Then happened something really strange and
maybe the most famous scene of the Iliad. Priamos, the king of Sparta
and father of Hector, went to see Achilles in his tent at the Greek camp
and pleaded him to release his son to bury him in a decent way. Achilles
did it.
But
the battles continued and Achilles got hit by an arrow from
Paris that
had been guided by Apollo. Unfortunately, the arrow had hit his ankle
and he died instantaneously. Even the great hero Aias went crazy with
this and killed himself with his own hands. Paris, the responsible of
all the war, got killed by an arrow from Philoktetes. This was a Greek
soldier wounded during the war who, after living many years in pain, was
called back by his army and returned having Heracles' magic arrows with
him. But Paris did not die immediately and searched for help in the
mountain where he ended up dying. In summary, many dead but no step
forward.
Suddenly Odysseus had an idea. He had heard the
Trojan seer Helenos saying that Troy would see its end in a horse that
would carry the destruction inside his stomach. And Odysseus made his
own interpretation of the prophecy. He organized the army to build a
huge wooden horse that they would offer to Troy as a present and sign of
respect. The Trojans, too careless because of the excitement of the
apparent victory, took the present without a doubt and ignoring the
warnings of the seer Cassandra.
At night, when they were all sleeping, the stomach
of the horse got open and some Greek soldiers came out and opened the
doors of the city to let all the army inside. They butchered absolutely
everybody. Nobody was left alive: not women, not children, not old
people nor dogs, cats and cattle. At most, they took some beautiful
women as slaves. They pillaged the town and burnt everything which was
inside the walls. It was the end of the glorious Troy and its long
defense against the Greek army.
Troy would be rebuilt later on. It needed time, of
course, and it was never again the famous and glorious city it had been.
Gods / Heroes / The Danaids / Europa / The Atriden / Trojan War / The Oracle
