Nine years of siege have ground to nothing. In the tenth, a plague from Apollo forces Agamemnon to give up a captive woman, and to save face he seizes Achilles's war-prize instead. Achilles, insulted before the whole army, withdraws from the war and asks his mother to have Zeus turn the tide against his own side, so they will learn what he is worth.

This quarrel, not the war itself, is where the Iliad begins: not with Troy's fall but with one man's rage. The Greeks bleed. The Trojans, led by Hector, push them back to the ships, and still Achilles will not fight.

The Iliad ends before Troy falls; the rest is told in the Epic Cycle and sung back to Odysseus in the Odyssey. Achilles dies from an arrow, guided by Apollo, to his one mortal spot, the heel. And at last Odysseus conceives the trick that ten years of force could not achieve: a hollow wooden horse, an army hidden in its belly, and a fleet that pretends to sail away.

Cassandra screams that the horse means ruin, and no one believes her, as no one ever does. Troy drags its own doom through the gates and celebrates. At midnight the Greeks pour out. The city burns; Priam dies at his altar; Aeneas escapes the flames carrying his father to found a line that will one day raise Rome. Menelaus reclaims Helen, and the war that began with a golden apple ends in ash.