Book review: Black Ships Before Troy by Rosemary Sutcliff

The sixth book I read in 2016 was Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of the Iliad by Rosemary Sutcliff.  I picked it up in Half Price Books because I have enjoyed her Roman Britain books so much.

This is a very different book, however; rather than setting her own characters within a historic milieu, she sets out a straightforward retelling of the Greek epic from the original Homer.  I never read the Iliad straight through; but we did the Odyssey in 9th grade English, and the Homerisms are evident, from grey-eyed Athene to the wine-dark sea, as well as the interminable funeral games, which are thankfully abbreviated in this telling.

One is struck by the Trojans' dumb tactics, as they have various allies arriving throughout the seige and, instead of waiting until they're all there and launching a coordinated assault on the Greeks, one set of allies arrives, attacks, and is wiped out before the next group of allies shows up.  But the whole point of the Greek worldview is that mortals don't have any agency but serve as pawns of the gods, so I guess Troy was fated to fall anyway.  Thus Virgil would have one believe, at any rate.

This would make a good classroom text for a middle school study of Classical history.