The War At Troy

They Lived Like Men, But They Fought Like Gods . . .

Vigorous new life is breathed into the myths of Homer's 'Iliad' in Lindsay Clarke's new dramatic retelling of the wars fought for the Bronze Age city of Troy.

"The people who lived in those days were closer to gods than we are, and great deeds and marvels were commoner then, which is why the stories we have from them are nobler and richer than our own. So that those stories should not pass from the earth, I have decided to set down everything I know of the stories of the war at Troy - of the way it began, of the way it was fought, and of the way in which it was ended."

With these words, Phemius, the bard of Ithaca and friend to Odysseus, opens Lindsay Clarke's compelling retelling of the myths and legends that grew up around the war that was fought for Troy and have magnetised the imagination of the world ever since.

Here are the tales of two powerful generations of men and women, living out their destinies in the timeless zone where myth and history intersect and where the conflicts of the human heart are mirrored by quarrels among immortal gods. Peleus and Thetis, Paris and Helen, Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, Achilles, Odysseus and Hector - all are given vigorous new life in a version of their stories which remains faithful to the mythic form in which they first appeared, yet engages the reader in a startlingly contemporary drama of the passions.

'The War At Troy' speaks to a world still racked by violent conflict in ways which address important aspects of our own experience while at the same time providing imaginative access to the rich store of mythology which is our heritage from the ancient world.