The War that Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander – review

Although Caroline Alexander quotes chunks of the Iliad as translated in a plain, brusque manner by Richmond Lattimore, her gloss reads better with a complete text beside you. Her scholarship works as a theme-by-theme, not book-by-book, commentary – an epic, running footnote, branching into its own footnotes, 40 pages of 'em, cross-referring to archaeology, legends of the eastern Mediterranean proved linguistically to have had origins in historical catastrophe, fictional back stories and their alternative versions, ditto sequels, psychological truths and the precise medical understanding of Homer (or sequential bards of the oral tradition anthologised into Homer). That is, he knew where the major organs were, but not what they did, only that a sword swipe or a spear thrust to them was fatal. She's at her best on Homer's – and his fellow Greeks' – bleak acceptance that death is it, the end, nothing beyond but shades flitting and twittering by the Styx, unable to luxuriate in war-earned glory, no fame worth an hour's real life.