Black Ships Before Troy

Athene is Zeus’s daughter and the goddess of wisdom and battle strategy—a contrast to Ares, the god of bloodthirsty combat slaughter. She has “sword-gray eyes” and dresses in “gleaming armor” (4). After she claims Eris’s golden apple, her stake in the war becomes personal. Although the Trojans worship Athene, and have dedicated the Palladium, a sacred stone, to her honor, Athene favors the Greek king Odysseus, whose cunning mind she seeds with ideas. The most fruitful of these is the Trojan Horse, a device for sneaking a squad of Greek soldiers past the otherwise impenetrable walls of Troy.

Aphrodite is the goddess of beauty and love. To win Eris’s golden apple, Aphrodite offers the Trojan prince Paris the most beautiful mortal woman as a wife—even though that woman, Helen, is already married to the Greek king Menelaus. Aphrodite continues to favor Paris through the beginning of the war: she saves the cowardly Paris from a one-on-one duel with Menelaus, and threatens Helen to compel her to stay with Paris rather than returning to her husband. 

Priam is the king of Troy, a city surrounded by great walls on the coast of the Aegean Sea. He is married to Queen Hecuba. To circumvent a prophecy that his newborn son, Paris will one day be “a firebrand that should burn down Troy” (3), he abandons Paris in the woods. Many years later, through the workings of Aphrodite, Priam recognizes his son and accepts him back into the royal family without any consideration of the prophecy.

During the war, after Achilles kills Priam’s son Hector in battle, and then maniacally desecrates his corpse in retribution for the death of Patroclus, Priam enters the camp of the Greeks to beg Achilles to return Hector’s body. In one of the most famous and most moving scenes of the story, the elderly king purposefully degrades himself by kneeling to the blood-covered enraged warrior in order to engender empathy in Achilles. Together, they weep over their losses, and Achilles returns Hector’s body and thus reclaims some of his lost honor. After the Trojans fall for Odysseus’s Trojan Horse, the Greek soldiers murder Priam brutally, desecrating an altar. 

Paris is one of the primary characters in both the Iliad and Black Ships Before Troy. He is frequently described as a golden-haired and handsome young man; vain and selfish, Paris “always got the things he wanted” (10). He abandons his wife Oenone after Aphrodite promises to give him the world’s most beautiful woman, Helen.

During the war, Paris showboats in a spotted panther skin, boastfully challenging any Greek warrior to single combat. However, as soon as Menelaus takes him up on his offer, the cowardly Paris hides in the crowd, and then is whisked to safety through Aphrodite’s magic. From then on, Paris leaves the fighting to others, like his brother Hector.

Ultimately, with the help of Apollo, Paris kills Achilles by shooting a poison arrow into his ankle. In a display of dramatic irony, Paris is also shot by a poison arrow. He begs Oenone to heal him with her magic, blaming the gods and the Fates for leaving her for Helen, continuing the theme of free will and fate that flows through the story. 

Helen of the Fair Cheeks is the most beautiful of all mortal women. She has many suitors, but her father marries her to the much older King Menelaus of Sparta. She has only recently given birth to their child when Aphrodite arranges her to meet and fall in love with the young and handsome Paris. Helen willingly leaves Sparta to be with Paris.

During the war, after seeing Paris’s true cowardly nature, Helen is utterly ashamed. She wishes she had died before leaving Menelaus or that Paris had died in the duel “at the hand of [her] true marriage-lord, who is a better man than [Paris] will ever be” (30). When Helen decides to return to the Greeks, Aphrodite casts a spell on her and the mortal woman stays with Paris.

Later, Helen helps Odysseus steal the Trojan sacred Palladium stone when she recognizes him in disguise. In return, Odysseus reunites her with Menelaus and prevents him from killing her. 

Odysseus is a renowned hero known for his cunning. Married to Helen’s cousin Penelope, he rules over the island of Ithaca. Odysseus plays an important part in the war, and his cleverness endears him to Athene, who makes him her favorite.

Odysseus employs many tricks, stratagems, and other ploys to help the Greek side in the war. To begin with, he tricks Achilles into revealing himself and joining the Greek army. During the fighting, he demoralizes the Trojans by killing their ally King Rhesus and stealing his horses, disguising himself to steal the Palladium, and eventually, building and manning the Trojan Horse. Odysseus has a close relationship with Helen and promises to keep her safe. At the end of the war, Odysseus beseeches Menelaus for Helen’s life, reuniting the couple.

Menelaus’s brother Agamemnon is the High King of Greece. After Paris and Helen run off, Agamemnon uses an ancient oath sworn by all the Greek kings to rally them and their men for help. He creates an army with many kings, including Nestor, Thisbe, Pytho, Ajax, Diomedes, and Odysseus, as his advisors.

During the war, furious at having to return Chryseis, the daughter of a Trojan priest of Apollo he had taken as a slave, and jealous of the way the Greek soldiers idolize the warrior Achilles, Agamemnon demands that Achilles give him Briseis, another slave woman. Feeling dishonored, Achilles leaves combat, hoping that Agamemnon will have to beg him to return. Through Agamemnon is too prideful to accede, eventually, he must placate Achilles. 

Nestor is one of the many kings roped into the war with the Trojans. He is a levelheaded mediator, so known for his wisdom and good advice that Zeus takes Nestor’s form to convince Agamemnon to attack the Trojans. Trying to settle the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, he first suggests that Patroclus don Achilles’s armor as a way of rallying the troops without Achilles giving up his point. Later, Nestor convinces Agamemnon to offer Achilles restitution to return to the frontlines. Finally, it is Nestor’s idea that the Trojan captives judge who should receive Achilles’ armor. 

The half-immortal Achilles, the figure around whom the story of the Iliad revolves, is the greatest Greek warrior. His only point of weakness is a spot on his ankle—the place his sea nymph mother Thetis held when she dipped him into the River Styx as an infant. Until the war, Achilles and his companion Patroclus study under Chiron, a wise Centaur. Achilles learns to fight and to be a gifted musician. To avoid Agamemnon’s call to war, Thetis hides Achilles as one of King Lycomedes’s daughters on the Isle of Scyros, but when Odysseus finds him, Achilles must make a choice guided by a prophesy about his fate: He can die young after winning fame and glory as a warrior, or grow old in safety and obscurity. Achilles chooses glory and battle honors.

During the war, this choice guides much of Achilles’s behavior. He is a legend on the battlefield, but is incredibly sensitive to any perceived insult. When Agamemnon takes away his war-prize slave woman Briseis, Achilles flies into a rage and refuses to continue fighting. Instead, he spends his days playing music and musing about the conflict between free will and destiny. Nursing his pride, Achilles begs his mother to ask Zeus for a Trojan victory so that Agamemnon has to grovel for his return.

After Hector kills Patroclus, Achilles goes mad with grief. Killing Hector does not sate Achilles. In his grief, Achilles dishonors the sanctity of burial rites, desecrating Hector’s corpse in a display of unmanly and disgraceful lack of self-control. Only through the intervention of Thetis and the self-denigrating plea of Hector’s father, King Priam, does Achilles return to his right mind, reclaiming his lost honor through mercy and empathy.

Achilles ultimately dies at the hand of Paris, with his prophesy fulfilled.

Patroclus, Achilles’s partner and closest companion, grows up with Achilles under Chiron’s guidance and follows him into the war. After Achilles refuses to fight, Patroclus finds Achilles’s actions disturbing, moved by the many injured in the war. Eager to help the Greeks, Patroclus seizes on Nestor’s idea that he don Achilles’s armor and lead the Myrmidons, Achilles’s crack commandos, into battle—the idea is that since the Trojans won’t know that it’s not really Achilles fighting, they will be scared. Patroclus dies in battle, killed by Hector.

As Achilles’s beloved, Patroclus is the only character who can stand up to Achilles. Patroclus’s death unhinges Achilles so much that he almost loses his honor and standing among the Greeks as a result. 

Hector is the war-leader and prince of the Trojans. He is methodical, duty-bound, and willing to fight even though his brother Paris is the one who started the war. Hector is Paris’s foil; while the latter is flighty, cowardly, and only play acts at war, Hector takes the defense of his city and family seriously. Hector’s love for his wife, Andromache, and his young son, Astyanax is clear when he bids them goodbye before rejoining the fight that he knows will result in his death. Hector fights bravely, consistently leading the Trojans into the battle, and almost pushing the Greeks back onto their ships. Hector kills Patroclus, which leads to his own death at the hands of Achilles. 

The Trojan ally Penthesilea, the young queen of the Amazon warrior women, is a parallel to Achilles. Filled with remorse after accidentally killing her sister Hippolyta, Penthesilea wishes to die in battle with glory. She is vicious, fights bravely, and believes that she will be the one to kill Achilles. She dies while attempting to do so. Though Achilles first mocks Penthesilea’s hubris, not least because of her gender, he soon weeps over having snuffed out her youth and beauty—he realizes that her fate closely mirrors his own.