Greek mythology by edith hamilton review

It is said that after he had been burned on the funeral pyre his bones were placed in the same urn that held those of his friend Patroclus. He died, and Ajax carried his body out of the battle while Odysseus held the Trojans back.

His mother Thetis when he was born had intended to make him invulnerable by dipping him into the River Styx, but she was careless and did not see to it that the water covered the part of the foot by which she was holding him. There Paris shot an arrow at him and Apollo guided it so that it struck his foot in the one spot where he could be wounded, his heel. He had driven the Trojans before him up to the wall of Troy. Then he himself fell beside the Scaean gates. Finally, Achilles killed Memnon in a glorious combat, the Greek heroвЂ™s last battle. Prince Memnon of Ethiopia, the son of the Goddess of the Dawn, came to the assistance of Troy with a large army and for a time, even though Hector was gone, the Greeks were hard-pressed and lost many a gallant warrior, including swift-footed Antilochus, old NestorвЂ™s son. One more great feat of arms he did before his fighting ended forever. WITH Hector dead, Achilles knew, as his mother had told him, that his own death was near. Just this, a ruined town, a dead baby, a few wretched women. What was the end of that far-famed war? Euripides seems to ask. Four hundred years before Virgil a Greek poet looked at it differently. To Virgil as to all Roman poets, war was the noblest and most glorious of human activities.

It is a curious contrast to the martial spirit of the Aeneid. The end, the tale of what happened to the Trojan women when Troy fell, comes from a play by SophoclesвЂ™ fellow playwright, Euripides. I have taken the story of Philoctetes and the death of Ajax from two plays of the fifth-century tragic poet Sophocles. The beginning and the end of my account are not in Virgil. The capture of Troy is the subject of the second book of the Aeneid, and it is one of the best, if not the best, story Virgil ever told-concise, pointed, vivid. The greater part of this story comes from Virgil.

Greek mythology by edith hamilton review