After Achilles fell and Ajax was gone, Troy still stood — until the oracle named Philoctetes and his bow, Paris died by Heracles' arrows, Helenus was taken and forced to reveal the city's talismans, Neoptolemus came from Scyros in his father's armour, Odysseus and Diomedes stole the heaven-fallen Palladium, and Epeius built the wooden horse that would end the war.1
The city that would not fall
Hector was ash and Achilles was ash, and still the walls of Ilion held. The Aethiopis had taken Penthesilea and Memnon and the son of Peleus himself; the nested episode on Ajax and the Arms tells how the funeral games judged his panoply to Odysseus and drove the Telamonian to madness and death. Yet Priam's house endured, guarded by oracles the Greeks did not yet know — and Calchas, reading the signs, told the kings that one more season of stratagems remained before the tenth year could end in fire.2
Philoctetes on Lemnos
From the first voyage the archer had been left behind — the nested episode on Philoctetes on Lemnos tells the snakebite, the abandonment, and the years of solitary survival with the bow of Heracles. When the seers at last declared that Ilium could not be taken without those weapons, the indispensable man the Greeks had cast away had to be fetched back from sacred Lemnos.3
The bow fetched at last
When the seers declared that Ilium could not be taken without the bow and arrows of Heracles, Odysseus sailed with Diomedes to Lemnos. By craft and persuasion they got the weapons and brought the embittered archer back to the camp — the indispensable man the Greeks had once cast away. Sophocles' tragedy knows the bitterness of that return; Apollodorus tells it straight: fetched, healed, and armed for the last act of the war.4
The death of Paris
Cured at Troy by Podalirius son of Asclepius, Philoctetes drew the great bow and shot Alexander — Paris, the thief of Helen, whose arrow guided by Apollo had brought down Achilles. Hyginus counts the kill in his Trojan roll: Achilles, Penthesilea, Memnon, Antilochus — and Philoctetes with Alexander. Apollodorus adds the Ida epilogue: wounded Paris sought healing from Oenone, the nymph he had abandoned for Sparta; she refused, and when she repented and came with her drugs he was already dead — and she hanged herself on the mountain.5
Helenus and the suitors of Helen
With Paris dead the prize of the war was disputed within the walls. Apollodorus says Helenus and Deiphobus quarrelled over which of them should marry Helen; Deiphobus was preferred, and the augur left Troy to live on Ida — yet Calchas told the Achaeans that Helenus alone knew the oracles that protected the city. Odysseus waylaid and captured him, and the seer, forced to speak, set out three conditions without which Ilium could not fall.6
The three conditions
First, the bones of Pelops must be brought from the Peloponnese to the camp — the eponym of the peninsula whose line had bred Agamemnon and Menelaus. Second, Neoptolemus son of Achilles must fight for the Greeks; Odysseus and Phoenix sailed to Scyros and persuaded Lycomedes to let the boy go, and in the camp Odysseus willingly resigned to him the arms of Peleus. Third, the Palladium — the image that had fallen from heaven when Ilus founded the city, spear in one hand and distaff in the other — must be stolen from within the walls; while it remained in Troy, the city could not be taken.7
Neoptolemus and Eurypylus
The son fetched from Scyros proved his father's son. In counsel at Troy Neoptolemus was ever first to speak, godlike Nestor and Odysseus alone surpassing him; in the fighting he ran far to the front and killed many — among them Eurypylus son of Telephus, comeliest of the champions Odysseus named to Achilles' shade after Memnon, and his Ceteian comrades, slain because of gifts a woman craved. The Mysian line that had once wounded Achilles on the mistaken landing was broken by Achilles' heir.8
The theft of the Palladium
Odysseus went with Diomedes by night to the city. Diomedes waited while Odysseus, disfigured and in mean attire, entered as a beggar — and was recognized by Helen, who helped him steal the image and kill many of the guards before the two brought the Palladium to the ships. Pausanias saw what was said to be the very image at Athens, in the temple of Athena Polias on the Acropolis. Ovid counts the exploit among the night-works of Ulysses: Rhesus sleeping, Dolon unwarlike, Helenus taken, and now the talisman of the city carried away.9
The wooden horse
With the Palladium gone and the conditions met, the last stratagem remained — the nested episode on the Wooden Horse tells how Epeius built the hollow engine with Athena's help, how the doughtiest hid inside while the fleet sailed to Tenedos, how Sinon lied and Laocoon died warning in vain, and how the Trojans dragged the gift into the citadel. The Little Iliad ends where that episode ends; the nested Sack of Troy tells the night the warriors descended.10
· EXEUNT ·
Episodes
How the centuries saw it
In play
Little Iliad
The lost Epic Cycle poem after Achilles' death — Philoctetes fetched, Paris slain, Helenus captured, Neoptolemus armed, and the wooden horse built.
Philoctetes (Sophocles play)
Sophocles
Sophocles' prize-winning tragedy of the Lemnos retrieval — Odysseus' craft and Neoptolemus' conscience over the bow Troy cannot fall without.
Epic Cycle
The Trojan cycle that slots the Little Iliad between Aethiopis and Iliou persis — the stratagems that finish what Homer left standing.