An Iliad Read Online Free PDF

to Paris. Why don’t you marry him, or become his slave? I will not go, it would be dishonorable. All the women of Troy would feel shame for me. Let me stay here, with my grief.”
    Then the old woman looked at me in fury. “Be careful,” she said, “and don’t make me angry. I could abandon you here and sow hatred everywhere, until you would find yourself dying a miserable death.”
She frightened me, I told you. Old people, often, inspire fear.
I held the shining white veil tight around my head and followed her. They were all looking down toward the plain. No one saw me. I went to Paris’s rooms and found him there. A woman who loved him had enabled him to enter Troy through a secret gate and had saved him.
    The old woman took a chair and placed it facing him. Then she told me to sit. I did. I couldn’t look him in the eyes, but I said to him, “So you escaped the battle. I wish you were dead, killed by that magnificent warrior who was my first husband. You who boasted you were the stronger … You should go back and challenge him again. But you know very well that it would be the end of you.”
    I remember that then Paris asked me not to hurt him with my cruel insults. He said to me that Menelaus had won that day, because the gods were on his side, but maybe the nexttime he would win, because he, too, had friends among the gods. And then he said to me: Come, let’s make love. He asked if I remembered the first time, on the island of Cranae, the day after he abducted me. And he said to me: Not even that day did I desire you as much as I desire you now. Then he rose and went to the bed. And I followed him.
    He was the man who in that moment everyone down on the plain was searching for. He was the man whom no one, neither Achaean nor Trojan, would have helped or hidden that day. He was the man they all hated, as the black goddess of death is hated.

Pandarus • Aeneas
    M y name is Pandarus. My city is Zelea. When I left to go and help defend Troy, my father, Lycaon, said to me, “Take horses and chariot to lead our people into battle.” We had in our splendid palace eleven new, magnificent chariots, and for each chariot two horses fed on white barley and spelt. But I didn’t take them. I didn’t listen to my father and went to war alone, with bow and arrow. The chariots were too beautiful to end up in a battle, and the animals, I knew, would only suffer hunger and fatigue. So I didn’t have the heart to take them with me. I left with bow and arrow. Now, if I could go back, I would break that bow with my hands and throw it in the fire to burn. In vain I brought it with me, and my fate was unhappy.
    Paris had just vanished into nothing, and the armies stared at each other mutely, wondering what to do. Was the duel over? Had Menelaus won, or would Paris return to fight? Just then
    Laodocus, the son of Antenor, approached and said to me, “Hey, Pandarus. Why don’t you shoot one of your arrows and take Menelaus by surprise, now? He’s standing there in the middle, defenseless. You could kill him, you’ve got the skill. You would be the hero of all the Trojans, and Paris, I’m sure, would cover you with gold. Think about it?”
    I thought about it.
I imagined my arrow flying to its target. And I saw the war end. It’s a question you could think about for a thousand years and you would never find an answer: Is it permissible to do a vile thing if by doing so you can stop a war? Is betrayal forgivable if you betray for a just cause? There, amid my people in arms, I didn’t have time to think about it. Glory drew me, and the idea of changing history with a simple, precise action.
So I grasped my bow. It was made from the horns of an ibex, an animal that I had hunted myself: I had killed it with a shot under the breastbone as it was jumping down a cliff, and from its horns, sixteen palms long, I had had my bow made. I stood it on the ground and bent it to hook the string, made of ox sinew, to the gold ring fixed