THE war that lasted 10 years. One thousand ships and 100,000 soldiers mobilized, and Troy, a city thought to have been on the northwestern point of Turkey, razed to the ground. People fell in droves, the warriors died. Robert Fagle's powerful translation of the famous epic depicts the battlefield brutally:

Idomeneus skewered Erymas straight through the mouth,
the merciless brazen spearpoint raking through,
up under the brain to split his gli