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Sat 01 Jan 2010Our tragic will to violence
POETRY:The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of the Iliadby Caroline Alexander, Faber & Faber, 296pp, £20
IT WAS A 10-YEAR CONFLICT that “established no boundaries, won no territory and furthered no cause”, and yet, thanks to Homer’s epic poems and their manifold reworkings through the centuries, the Trojan War has come to signify all wars. The universality of the struggles depicted in the Iliadand the moral questions it raises preoccupy the American author and classicist Caroline Alexander, in her new book.
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