Iliad III · The Duel and the Oath

The armies meet, and Paris challenges Menelaus to fight for Helen and the treasures. Both sides swear an oath: the winner will take Helen and end the war. Menelaus nearly kills Paris and drags him by the helmet strap, but Aphrodite wraps Paris in mist and sets him down in his bedroom.

Helen is brought to the wall, where Priam asks her to identify the Achaean commanders. She names Agamemnon, Odysseus, Aias, and others. The old king treats her with courtesy, and the poem shows both the scale of the coalition and the domestic damage at the heart of Troy.

Now when they were marshalled, the several companies with their captains, the Trojans came on with clamour and with a cry like birds, even as the clamour of cranes ariseth before the face of heaven, when they flee from wintry storms and measureless rain, [5] and with clamour fly toward the streams of Ocean, bearing slaughter and death to Pigmy men, and in the early dawn they offer evil battle. — Homer, Iliad III.1ff., trans. A. T. Murray (Loeb; Perseus Digital Library, CC BY-SA 4.0).