 |
Apollodorus - The Library
The landing at Troy, and the first nine years of the war:
After the death of Protesilaos, Achilles disembarked with the Myrmidons, and killed Cycnos by hurling a stone at his head. When the barbarians saw that Cycnos was dead, they fled to the city, and the Greeks, leaping ashore from their ships, filled the plain with dead bodies; amd when they had penned the Trojans in, they put them under siege, and hauled their ships from the water.
Since the courage of the barbarians had failed, Achilles laid an ambush for Troilus in the sanctuary of Thymbrian Apollo and slew him, and raided the city by night and captured Lycaon.
And then, taking some of the foremost warriors with him, he laid waste to the land, and went to Mount Ida to rustle the cattle of Aeneas and Priam. When Aeneas fled, Achilles killed the herdsmen and Mestor, son of Priam, and drove away the cattle.
He also captured Lesbos and Phocaia, then Colophon and Smyrna, and Clzomenai, and Cyme, and after these, Aigalos and Tenos; and then, successively, Adramytion and Side, and then Endion, Linaion and Colone.
The Kypria - a lost epic
The war begins
The history of the first nine years of the war, up to the beginning of the Iliad, was told in an epic known as the Kypria, which has not survived.
It was certainly known to the vase painters of the heyday of Athenian ceramics, and many of the stories told in the Kypria were represented on vases.
Once Agamemnon had established a beachhead, he proceeded to wage a war of attrition for nine years, before the final assault which took place in the tenth.
This was fought in fits and starts; the large number of vases showing Achilles and Ajax playing dice - a game invented for the occasion by Odysseus' rival Palamedes - attest to the inactivity of the army for much of the time. |
