Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad

Summary

Black Ships Before Troy is Rosemary Sutcliff's prose retelling of the Trojan War for young readers, in nineteen short chapters. Although subtitled The Story of the Iliad, it begins long before Homer's poem and ends after it. In The Golden Apple, Eris, the uninvited goddess of discord, throws an apple marked for the fairest among the guests at the wedding of King Peleus and the sea-nymph Thetis; Hera, Athene and Aphrodite quarrel over it, and Paris, a prince of Troy raised as a herdsman on Mount Ida, awards it to Aphrodite for the promise of the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris later carries off Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, and Agamemnon, Menelaus's brother and High King of Mycenae, gathers the Greek kings and their black ships against Troy. After nine years of siege the Iliad's own story begins. Apollo sends plague on the camp because Agamemnon holds Chryseis, his priest's daughter; forced to return her, Agamemnon takes Briseis from Achilles, and Achilles withdraws from the fighting. The following chapters retell the duel of Paris and Menelaus, Hector's farewell to Andromache and their baby son, the failed embassy to Achilles, the night raid of Odysseus and Diomedes on the horses of King Rhesus, the Trojan assault on the ships, and the death of Patroclus, who fights in Achilles's armour and is killed by Hector. Thetis brings Achilles new armour forged by Hephaestus; Achilles kills Hector and drags his body behind his chariot, holds funeral games for Patroclus, and at last gives up the body when old King Priam comes by night to his hut to beg for it. Sutcliff then continues past the Iliad with material from later Greek and Roman sources: the coming of the Amazon queen Penthesilea, the theft of the Palladium, the image on which Troy's luck depended, the death of Achilles by an arrow from Paris, the fetching of Philoctetes and the bow of Heracles, the poisoned arrow that kills Paris, and finally Odysseus's stratagem of the wooden horse, the night sack of the city and Menelaus taking Helen home. Sutcliff died in July 1992, and the book was published posthumously in 1993 by Frances Lincoln in London, with paintings and drawings by Alan Lee, which won the Kate Greenaway Medal. A companion volume, The Wanderings of Odysseus, followed in 1995.

Top Lessons

• Wrath and what it costs

  Achilles's anger at Agamemnon is just at first, but by holding on to it he lets his own friends die and loses Patroclus. Sutcliff, like Homer, shows anger turning on the one who keeps it.

• Courage at home and on the field

  Hector knows Troy may fall and still goes out to fight, after holding his frightened son on the wall. The book honours courage that sees the danger plainly and accepts duty anyway.

• Mercy between enemies

  Priam kisses the hands that killed his son, and Achilles, remembering his own father, weeps with him and gives back Hector's body. The fiercest warrior in the story shows his greatest strength in pity.

• Cleverness and its limits

  Odysseus wins the war with a trick, the wooden horse, after ten years of open battle fail. The ending invites readers to weigh the cunning that takes Troy against the burning and killing that follow.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The war story opens with an epidemic understood as divine punishment: Apollo's arrows of plague fall on the Greek camp, killing first the mules and dogs and then the men, until Chryseis is returned to her father. The later chapters include battlefield wounds told in Homeric directness, and the poisoned arrow of Paris's death. Philoctetes, abandoned on Lemnos with a festering snake-bite wound, is brought back because the bow of Heracles is needed to take Troy, an old story of a wounded man shunned and then recalled. Grief is the book's deepest strain, in Achilles's mourning for Patroclus and Priam's for Hector. For a medical reader the interest is chiefly in the ancient model of epidemic disease as a god's anger and the treatment of the wounded in the camp; Sutcliff's retelling is for children and keeps such matters brief.

• Chapter 3, Quarrel with the High King

  Apollo sends plague on the Greek camp until Agamemnon returns Chryseis to her father, the priest Chryses.

• Chapters 11-12

  Achilles's grief for Patroclus, the mourning in the camp and the funeral pyre.

• Chapter 17, Poisoned Arrow

  Philoctetes, left on Lemnos with a wound that would not heal, is brought to Troy with the bow of Heracles; Paris dies of a poisoned arrow.