The
siege endured ten years because the supreme god, Zeus, had taken the
side of the Trojans. All the Greek chiefs participated in this
adventure. Achilles, the bravest and the most beautiful of these,
killed Hector, the principal defender of Troy, and dragged his corpse
around the city; he fought clad in divine armor which had been
presented him by his mother, a goddess of the sea; in turn he died,
shot by an arrow in the heel. The Greeks, despairing of taking the
city by force, employed a trick: they pretended to depart, and left an
immense horse of wood in which were concealed the chiefs of the army.
The Trojans drew this horse into the city; during the night the chiefs
came forth and opened the city to the Greeks. Troy was burnt, the men
slaughtered, the women led away as slaves. But the chiefs of the
Greeks on their return were beset by tempest. Some perished in the
sea, others were cast on foreign shores. Odysseus, the most crafty of
the chiefs, was for ten years buffeted from one land to another,
losing successively all his ships, himself the sole survivor of the
disasters.
All antiquity had steadfast faith in the Trojan War.
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