The Sack of Troy

The sack is the event that the Iliad’s ending holds in reserve. The Odyssey refers to it repeatedly: Odysseus is the man who sacked the sacred citadel of Troy, and the returning heroes measure their lives against it. The later epic tradition, especially the Iliou persis and Euripides’ Trojan Women, gives a detailed account.

The city is burned, its men killed, its women divided as prizes. Priam is killed at the altar, Cassandra is taken by Ajax the Locrian, Astyanax is thrown from the walls, and the temples are violated. The victory is total and morally compromised.

The sack is the origin of the nostos theme. Every Achaean who survives must carry the memory of what was done, and the gods punish some of them for it. Ajax the Locrian is drowned, Agamemnon is murdered at home, and Odysseus’s long wanderings are partly a consequence of his own conduct.

The Iliad chooses not to show the sack. Its last scene is a funeral inside Troy, and the city is still standing. The Odyssey begins after the destruction, and the difference between the two poems is one of the great structural decisions in Western literature.