—lines 1398-1402

Ajax was, next to Achilles, the strongest of the Greeks; Ulysses (Odysseus) the craftiest; Nestor the wisest. All play important parts in Troilus and Cressida (see pages I-86, I-91, and I-92) and their listing here symbolizes Troy being assailed by strength, cunning, and wisdom.

Beyond that, Troy is confronted also by irresistible fate, as epitomized by the transcendent hero Achilles:

—lines 1424-26

The spear was symbol enough; the obscured hero was more an impersonal and relentless force than a man. He too plays his part, in an all-too-human fashion, in Troilus and Cressida (see page I-114).

What's more, the picture shows the Trojan War in its various stages. At another place, Lucrece sees Troy fallen and finds in it a face with sorrows to match her own:

—lines 1447-49

This incident is past the ending of Homer's Iliad and of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. It represents the tendencies of the later mythmakers to pile horror on horror and to multiply the tragedy of Troy's final destruction.

The Trojan King, Priam (see page I-79), had witnessed his city besieged for ten years and, one by one, nearly every one of his fifty sons killed. Now at last the Greeks were gone, but they had left behind a large wooden horse (see page I-188). Priam and the Trojans are persuaded to drag the horse into the city and the Greek warriors hidden within emerge at night, open the gates for the remainder of the army, and begin their slaughter.

Priam and his aged wife, Hecuba (see page I-85), flee to an altar of Zeus where they might be safe. Polites, one of Priam's very few surviving sons, comes running madly toward the altar too. Behind him is Pyrrhus (or Neoptolemus) (see page I-115), the son of Achilles.

Pyrrhus has been brought to the field of Troy after his father has been killed by an arrow in the heel from the bow of Paris. He quickly proves himself as brave and as cruel as his father.

Now it is his cruelty that is predominant. He kills Polites even at the altar and in the presence of his parents. Priam, driven mad at the sight, feebly casts a spear at Pyrrhus, who promptly kills him as well.

Lucrece sadly views the depicted miseries of falling Troy:

—lines 1485-86

Hector was the greatest of the Trojan warriors (see page I-188), but in the medieval versions of the story of Troy, it is his younger brother, Troilus, who rises to prominence, and it is Troilus who is the titular hero of Troilus and Cressida.

Lucrece finally concentrates, however, on a Greek captive, taken by the Trojans after the Greeks had built their wooden horse. This captive, Sinon, who pretended to be a refugee from the Greeks, told a false story that the wooden horse was an offering to Athena and would forever protect Troy from conquest if brought within the city. He is therefore described as:

—lines 1521-22

The story which Priam believed brought about the death of the old king. It is to Sinon, the very symbol of treachery in aftertime, that Lucrece compares Tarquin.

Finally Collatine arrives home from the siege, anxious to know what emergency had caused his wife to write. With him are other men of senatorial rank. To them all, Lucrece tells the story, and while they stand there horrified, she draws her knife and kills herself.

For a moment, all stand transfixed. Lucretius, her father, throws himself in sorrow on her body:

—lines 1734-35

This is the first mention of Lucius Junius Brutus, an aristocrat who had escaped the deadly attentions of King Tarquin by pretending to be a moron and therefore harmless. ("Brutus" means "stupid," and this name was, supposedly, given to him because of his successful play acting. However, the truth may be the reverse. It may have been known that one of the destroyers of the Tarquinian kingdom was named Brutus and for lack of other hard details after the Gallic sack in 390 b.c., the meaning of the name was allowed to inspire the tale of his pretending to be a moron.)

Brutus had good reason to play it safe in any way he could, for according to the legend, his father and older brother had been among those executed by Tarquin-something which did not cause him to love the king either.

Now, seeing the shock, horror, and hatred sweeping the spectators, Brutus feels that he will be able to head a popular movement against the kingdom. He no longer needs his pretense of stupidity:

—lines 1807-10

Brutus rouses the crowd and the poem ends with a final (and 265th) verse:

—lines 1850-55

Thus did the Roman kingdom come to an end. In its place was established the Roman Republic, which five centuries later was to rule all the Mediterranean world.

Oe of the most popular of the ancient historians was Plutarch, a Greek who was born in Chaeronea, a town about sixty miles northwest of Athens, in a.d. 46. In his time, Greece had long passed the days of its military splendor and was utterly dominated by Rome, then at the very height of its empire.

Anxious to remind the Romans (and Greeks too) of what the Greeks had once been, Plutarch wrote a series of short biographies about a.d. 100 in which he dealt with men in pairs, one Greek and one Roman, the two being compared and contrasted. Thus, Theseus (see page I-18), the legendary unifier of the Attic peninsula under Athens, was paired with Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome. For this reason, the book is commonly called The Parallel Lives. Plutarch's style is so pleasing that his book, with its gossipy stories about great historical figures, has remained popular ever since.