Agamemnon agrees to return his captive, but then claims Briseis, the war prize of Achilles-and Achilles refuses to fight.
The greatest warrior the Greeks have is Achilles, leader of the Myrmidons, but during the fighting, which lasts years, the chief commander Agamemnon takes a priestess of Apollo, Chyrseis, as his captive and servant, for which Agamemnon is offered a paternal ransom he refuses, and his men seem cursed by the gods with a plague. Sparta and Mycenae (or Argos), whose king-Agamemnon-is the elder brother of Menelaus, and their allies declare war and sail for Troy, which has withstood many invaders. In The Iliad, Helen, the wife of Menelaus, the king of the city-state Sparta in Greece, has fallen in love with Paris, a prince of Troy, with the aid of the goddess Aphrodite, and been brought by Paris to Troy, a walled city, also known as Ilium (in western Turkey). The poem may have been inspired by events occurring centuries before, around 1194 B.C., events that have been told and retold by storytellers throughout the ages, including filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen in the popular film Troy and Michael Cacoyannis in the film The Trojan Women. In Homer’s long and legendary poem The Iliad, one of the founding works of Greek and world literature, written in the eight century before the existence of Christ, a great cast of characters, conflicts, and choices seems to contain the wealth and wisdom of the ages: about the seduction and abduction of the Spartan queen Helen by a prince of Troy, and the war that follows, including a fight between the princes Achilles and Hector, there is a clash of cultures, and an exploration of heroism and hubris, that suggest the fundamentals of civilization.
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