Mark Gagnon

And they're both really crying.

And I think in a way Achilles is crying for the loss of his friend.

And obviously Hector's dad is crying for the loss of his son.

And...

That, you know, more than any battle scene, more than any of the themes of honor or glory, that is why the Iliad has endured for like literally almost 3,000 years.

So Homer doesn't describe the fall of Troy in the Iliad, and this is told about in later epics and tragedies.

And for that story, we have to rely on the so-called epic cycle, a collection of poems by other ancient authors, most of which survive only in fragments or pieces or summaries and later works where they reference them.

And this is especially prominent in Virgil's Aeneid, written nearly 700 years after Homer.

Now, according to these traditions, Achilles didn't survive the war.

He's killed by Paras, of all people, the weakest warrior on the field, the guy who literally gets this whole thing kicked off because he goes and steals slash seduces a woman from the Spartans.

And he literally shoots him with an arrow guided by Apollo.

The arrow strikes his heel, at least according to the later tradition.

None of the earliest sources agree on the exact manner of his death.

The heel shot is a detail that kind of grew in the retelling, which is not derived from the Iliad.

But, of course, the image stuck.

The greatest warrior of the age, the most fearsome man to ever live, brought down by the one man that no one really respected, hitting the one spot where he was vulnerable.

The Greeks said even the gods had a sense of irony.

After Achilles' death, Odysseus devises a plan that will end the war.

The Greeks get together and build this enormous wooden horse.

You've probably heard of this or at least seen it.