The Whole Story, Told as a Story القصة كاملة — كما تُروى من البداية إلى النهاية

It begins, absurdly, with a beauty contest.

Three goddesses — Hera, queen of the gods; Athena, goddess of wisdom; and Aphrodite, goddess of love — quarrel over which of them is the most beautiful. Zeus refuses to judge. Instead he hands the decision to a young man on a hillside: Paris, a prince of Troy.

Each goddess tries to bribe him. Hera offers power. Athena offers victory in war. And Aphrodite offers him the most beautiful woman alive.

Paris chooses Aphrodite.

The most beautiful woman alive is Helen — and she is already married, to Menelaus, king of Sparta.

Paris sails to Sparta and is welcomed into Menelaus' house as a guest. And then he leaves with Helen.

This is not merely theft. In the Greek world, xenia — guest-friendship — is a sacred law protected by Zeus himself. To eat a man's food and then steal his wife is a crime against the king of the gods.

Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and Menelaus' brother, gathers a thousand black ships and prepares to sail for Troy.

But the goddess Artemis holds back the wind. The fleet cannot move. And the price she names is unbearable: Agamemnon must sacrifice his own daughter, Iphigenia.

He does it. The wind returns. The ships sail.

Behind him, in Mycenae, his wife Clytemnestra watches her daughter die — and begins to wait.

The poem opens by announcing exactly what it is about, in its very first word:

Not the war. Not Troy. Rage.

The Greeks — called the Achaeans — have been camped on the beach below Troy for nine years. They cannot take the city. The Trojans cannot drive them into the sea. Both sides are exhausted, and both sides now regret that the war ever started.

The Greeks raid a nearby town and divide the spoils. Two women are taken: Chryseis, who goes to Agamemnon, and Briseis, who goes to Achilles.

Chryseis' father is Chryses, a priest of Apollo. He comes to the camp with a ransom and asks, humbly, for his daughter back. Agamemnon refuses — and insults him.

So the old man walks down the beach and prays. And Apollo comes down from Olympus with his arrows, and for nine days a plague burns through the Greek army.

The prophet Calchas finally names the cause. Agamemnon must give the girl back. He agrees — furiously — and then takes Briseis from Achilles instead, in front of the whole army.

Achilles walks away from the war.

Then he does something stranger. He goes down to the sea and calls his mother, Thetis, a sea-nymph, and asks her to go to Zeus and beg him to make the Greeks lose — so that they will learn what he is worth.

Zeus agrees. And the Trojans begin to win.

Day after day, Hector drives the Greeks backwards across the plain, until they are penned against their own ships. In desperation Agamemnon sends an embassy — Odysseus, Ajax and Phoenix — offering gifts, treasure, land, and Briseis untouched.

Achilles refuses. He tells them his mother has given him a choice between two fates: a long quiet life at home with no fame, or a short life at Troy and glory forever. And he says he is going home.

The Trojans reach the ships and set one on fire.

And now Patroclus — Achilles' dearest friend, who grew up beside him — comes to him weeping and asks for one thing: let me wear your armour. If the Trojans merely think Achilles has returned, they will run.

Achilles agrees, on one condition: drive them from the ships, and come straight back.

Patroclus does not come back. He drives the Trojans all the way to the walls of Troy. And there, in the dust below the gate, Apollo strikes him from behind and stuns him — and Hector drives a spear through him and strips the armour from his body.

When the news reaches Achilles, he falls to the ground and pours dust over his head. His mother rises from the sea and hears him say the thing she has dreaded: he will kill Hector, and he knows that his own death follows soon after.

She goes to Hephaestus, the smith god, who forges new armour overnight — including a great Shield covered not with battles but with peacetime life: weddings, harvests, dancing, a city at peace.

Achilles returns to the field and the Trojan army breaks. Only Hector stays outside the walls. His father screams at him from the tower to come inside. He does not.

Then Achilles appears — and Hector's nerve fails. He runs. Three times they circle the walls of Troy. Finally Athena takes the shape of his brother and tricks him into stopping. Hector turns, realises he is alone, and fights anyway.

Achilles kills him, ties the body to his chariot, and drags it back to the ships.

Achilles burns Patroclus and holds funeral games in his honour. He also sacrifices twelve Trojan prisoners on the pyre.

And every morning for nine days, he ties Hector's body behind his chariot and drags it in circles around his friend's grave.

Even the gods are appalled. This is no longer war. It is a man trying to destroy a corpse because he cannot bring back the dead.

That night, guided invisibly by Hermes, an old man walks alone into the camp of the enemy who has killed his son.

Priam, king of Troy, kneels down and kisses the hands of Achilles — the hands that killed his children — and says the only thing that could possibly work:

And Achilles breaks. He thinks of Peleus, waiting at home for a son who will never come back, and the two men — the killer and the father of the killed — sit together on the floor of the tent and weep.

He gives the body back. A truce is agreed. And The Iliad ends, not with a victory or a fall, but with the funeral of Hector, breaker of horses.

Achilles does not live much longer. At Hector's funeral feast he sees Polyxena, Priam's daughter, and falls in love. He goes to Apollo's temple to negotiate peace — and Paris, the man who avoids battle, shoots him in the heel, the one place he can be hurt.

Ajax and Odysseus carry his body out. Thetis says the armour should go to the worthiest hero. It is awarded to Odysseus — and Ajax, the second-strongest man in the army, kills himself from shame.

Then Odysseus has an idea.

The Greeks build a huge hollow wooden horse, hide men inside it, burn their camps and sail away over the horizon. They leave behind one soldier, Sinon, who tells the Trojans the horse is a gift to Athena: destroy it and she will be angry; take it inside and she will bless the city.

They take it inside. That night the men climb out, kill the guards and open the gates. Troy burns. Only Aeneas escapes, carrying his father on his back, and sails west to found the line that becomes Rome.

Helen goes home with Menelaus. And Agamemnon sails home to Mycenae, where his wife has been waiting ten years with a memory of a daughter on an altar. She kills him in his bath.

Twenty years after he sailed for Troy, Odysseus has still not come home.

In Ithaca, everyone assumes he is dead. Over a hundred young noblemen have moved into his palace, eating his cattle, drinking his wine, and pressing his wife Penelope to choose one of them and marry. Whoever marries the queen gets the kingdom.

She has held them off for years by cunning. His son Telemachus, a boy when his father left, is now a young man with no power to stop any of it.

And Odysseus himself? He is on an island in the middle of the sea, held for seven years by the nymph Calypso, who loves him and has offered to make him immortal. He sits on the shore every day, looking at the water, and weeps.

On Olympus, Athena finally speaks up for him. She persuades Zeus to act, and two things happen at once.

Hermes is sent to Calypso's island with an order: let him go.

And Athena herself flies to Ithaca, disguised, and tells Telemachus to stop being a boy. Go and look for your father. Sail to Pylos and ask old Nestor; sail to Sparta and ask Menelaus.

Nestor knows nothing. But Menelaus tells him he heard, from the shape-changing sea god Proteus, that Odysseus is alive — alive, and trapped on an island.

Odysseus builds a raft and sails for seventeen days. Then Poseidon sees him — and smashes the raft to pieces.

He washes ashore naked, half-drowned, in the land of the Phaeacians, and falls asleep in a pile of leaves. In the morning a princess, Nausicaa, finds him. Her maids run away from the wild-looking stranger. She does not.

She feeds him, clothes him, and takes him to the palace of her parents. And there, at the feast, a blind bard begins to sing about the Trojan War — and the stranger covers his face and weeps.

The king asks him who he is. And Odysseus says his name, and begins to tell his story.

What follows is the most famous part of the poem — and it is all told in flashback, by Odysseus himself, at a dinner table.

The Cicones, where his men were punished for greed. The Lotus Eaters, whose flowers made them forget they had a home at all. Then the cave of the Cyclops — where the one-eyed giant Polyphemus ate his men one by one, and Odysseus told him his name was “Nobody”, got him drunk, and drove a burning stake into his single eye. When the giant screamed “Nobody is killing me!”, his neighbours went back to bed.

And then, sailing away safe, Odysseus could not resist. He stood up in the boat and shouted his real name across the water.

So the blinded giant prayed to his father, Poseidon.

After that: the bag of winds that his crew opened while he slept. The cannibal Laestrygonians. The witch Circe, who turned his men into pigs. The journey to the land of the dead, where the prophet Tiresias warned him about the Cattle of the Sun. The Sirens, whose song he survived by having his crew plug their ears and tie him to the mast. Scylla and Charybdis — six heads or a whirlpool — where he chose to lose six men rather than the ship.

And finally the Island of the Sun, where the starving crew killed the sacred cattle while he slept. Zeus destroyed the ship with a thunderbolt. Every man died except Odysseus. He floated alone to Calypso's island, where the poem found him.

The Phaeacians give him a ship and treasure and sail him home while he sleeps. He wakes on the beach of Ithaca after twenty years — and does not know where he is.

Athena appears and tells him the truth about his house. Then she disguises him as a filthy old beggar and sends him, not to the palace, but to a pig farm.

There he meets Eumaeus, his swineherd, who has stayed loyal for twenty years without any reason to. He feeds the beggar and shares what little he has. Telemachus comes; father and son reveal themselves to each other and begin to plan.

Then the beggar walks into his own hall. His old dog Argos, lying on a dung heap, lifts his head, knows him instantly — and dies. His old nurse Eurycleia, washing his feet, finds the hunting scar on his knee and nearly cries out.

The suitors throw things at him and mock him. He says nothing at all.

Penelope, apparently in despair, announces a contest. She will marry whichever man can string Odysseus' great bow and shoot an arrow through the sockets of twelve axe-heads set in a row.

One by one the suitors try. Not one of them can even bend the bow enough to string it.

Then the beggar asks if he may try.

They laugh at him. He takes the bow, turns it over in his hands — and strings it as easily as a musician fitting a new string to a lyre. He sets an arrow, and it flies clean through all twelve axes.

Then he turns, and empties the quiver at his feet, and says:

With Telemachus, the swineherd, the cowherd and Athena beside him, he kills every suitor in the hall.

Penelope comes down to the hall. She looks at the man who has just killed a hundred men in her house, and she does not run to him.

Instead she sets one more test. She tells a servant to move their marriage bed out of the bedroom for the stranger to sleep on.

And Odysseus loses his temper — because that bed cannot be moved. He built it himself, carving one of its posts from a living olive tree still rooted in the ground, and built the room around it. Only two people alive know that.

Penelope's knees give way. It is him.

The families of the dead suitors gather for revenge, but Zeus orders them to stop. Odysseus must still make one short journey to make peace with Poseidon. But Ithaca is quiet again, and the king is in his own house, in his own bed, after twenty years.