Although both Hecuba and his court try to convince him differently, considering the danger involved, Priam insists on going through with his plan. Burials are an important part of the Greek religious view of the afterlife, and so long as Hector's body is in the enemy camp, they can't properly mourn, and Hector can't begin his trek to the afterlife. He finds Hecuba, his wife, and tells that he intends to pay Achilles to recover Hector. She tells him to watch for chance, and when she leaves, he has a vision of himself and another man driving a chariot with a covered load. In the middle of the night of the eleventh day, he is visited by the goddess Iris. Although the past eleven days have been focused on mourning his son, Priam also mourns the city and the toll that ten years of warfare has taken on the Trojans. The story turns to Hector’s father, King Priam of Troy. The end of the opening leaves the reader with the disturbing image of Achilles desperately trying to find peace by dragging the body of his enemy over the grave of his friend, but he can't change the past. Achilles decides to defy the gods by mutilating Hector’s corpse, but every night, the gods restore his body as if it had never been violated.

To avenge Patroclus' death, Achilles kills Hector, and as Hector is dying, he predicts that Achilles will soon be dead as well.

He had decided to withdraw from the battle, after Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, decided to take Achilles’ slave. He also thinks of his son, Neoptolemus, and of his fallen close friend, Patroclus.Īchilles feels responsible for his friend's death because Patroclus was killed by Hector when Achilles wasn't in the battle to protect him. The narrative opens in medias res: after ten long, grueling years of combat against the city of Troy, Achilles is enjoying a moment alone on the beach, and his thoughts turn to his mother, a goddess of the sea. Ransom is a modern adaptation of Homer's Iliad, which is the story of the last year of the mythical Trojan war.

Ransom malouf