Troy

Zeus sighed heavily. 'I wish, all those years ago, Prometheus hadn't persuaded me to make mankind,' he said. 'I knew it was a mistake.

We achieve immortality not through ambrosia and ichor but through history and reputation. Through statues and epic song.

The moment when flowers and fruits are at their fullest and ripest is the moment that precedes their fall, their decay, their rot, their death.

His reward is the eternal fame that is both priceless and worthless

The action is played out on the golden horizon between reality and legend, the beguiling penumbra where fable and fact coexist.

How strange is our mortal zest for fame. Perhaps it is the only way humans can be gods. We achieve immortality not through ambrosia and ichor but through history and reputation. Through statues and epic song

Forget him. What is treasure? Or Briseis, or honor, or anything? Next to the life of the one I loved best and dearest? My beloved, my only Patroclus.

I know,” said Helen. “Like all sacred and truly precious objects it is very plain. Only profane things are beautiful.

You may be gold, and we poor ordinary men may be of bronze, but ask any solier out there which metal they'd rather have for a sword blae or a spearpoint

The rescue of Aethra and the sparing of Antenor - can be registered as the only lights of clemency an honour that shone during that night of unnameable atrocities

We recognize that if we had ever encountered the real demon demigod Achilles, we woul have feared and dreaded him, hated his temper, despised his pride and been repelled by his savagery. But we know too that we could not have helped loving him.

Some are born with a beauty that seems to turn people mad. Fortunately there are very few of us like that, but our power can be unsettling and even eruptive.

They say a fool and his gold are soon parted, but they ought to say too that those who refuse ever to be parted from gold are the greatest fools of all.

You think you killed me, Hector,’ Patroclus gasped. ‘But it took the god Apollo to do that. Euphorbus was next. You, famous Hector, noble Hector, were just the third. All you did is finish me off. I die knowing that your fate will be settled by one greater than any … by my Achilles.

Although Achilles wore no armour, the mere sight of him, standing high on the embankment, bathed in an unearthly light and uttering the most piercing and monumental battle-cry was enough to scatter the Trojans. Three times Achilles yelled his terrible war cry. The Trojans and even their horses were filled with fear. In triumph the Achaeans bore the body of Patroclus back to their camp.

Hear me proclaim this, you loathsome turd from the ass of Typhon.

Given the intervention of the gods and other magical and supernatural happenings, I have—as mentioned in the Introduction that you so wisely skipped—thought it best to tell the story of the war and its aftermath without attempting to dot every sequential iota or cross every chronological tau.

Even as he breathed his last breath he killed more Trojans. Terrified by the sight of a mortally wounded man with such implacable strength and will, most held back, unsure that such a man could really die.

For nine years the Trojan War was more plunder than thunder

The Olympians enjoy the mauling and brawling of their playthings, their little human pets

Agamemnon heaved the gusty sigh of one much put upon by the weight of office, the malice of chance, and the endless incompetence of underlings.

We know how wars that each side believed would soon be decided can stretch out over months and years. The Greeks and Trojans were perhaps the first to discover this unhappy truth.

He can hardly dare to suggest anything if you thunder at him like that,” said Odysseus. “Either you want him to speak or you want to terrify him into silence. You can’t have both.

If this story, the story of Troy, has a meaning or a moral, it is the old, simple lesson that actions have consequences. What Tantalus did, exacerbated by what Pelops did . . . the actions of these two caused a doom to be laid on what was to be the most important royal house of Greece.

If that she-bear had eaten the baby it found o n the mountaintop instead of nursing it, how different the world would now have been

What did we see last night?” he asked. “It wasn’t warfare. It was madness. Deception, savagery, dishonor, and disgrace. What have the mortals become?” “Terrible, isn’t it? Who do they think they are—gods?” “There’s a time for humor, Hermes, and this isn’t it,” said Apollo.

We’ll spare your life, I promise,” hissed Odysseus. “Only speak quickly. And quietly. I have shaky hands and this blade against your throat might just slip and find its way into your windpipe if you aren’t quick, clear, and concise.

Heracles listened to Laomedon’s self-pitying and largely fabricated version of the events leading up to Hesione’s sacrifice.