Troy · A Retelling of the Trojan War

These pieces are designed to transpose the myth and the epic from their original lyric language to a more human perspective. No longer are Achilles and Agamemnon shrouded in the glory of The Iliad; instead, their emotions are laid bare to the reader. It is up to the reader to decide whether he sides with Hector or Achilles, Troy or Argos. And, of course, this is what literature is designed to do: Texts are not dead things, locked into stasis by their authors, but they are living, breathing, ever changing. Homer’s epics should not be shelved because of their lofty words and complex intertwining but opened and loved because of the heroes they laud.

And yet, they are not necessarily the heroes we would have them be. Homer was, after all, writing about men, as were Ovid and Euripides. It is time for them to be treated as men, for the reader to understand and resonate with them as mortals of a different era, when gods and men walked the earth together.

This manuscript reimagines only a small part of the story, and perhaps the story is not one person’s to tell. I should like to tell the path that leads to Troy, to sing the lyrics of Ovid in a different rhyme, and to tell the beginnings of the remnant of Troy. The pieces I have here are far from perfect, although the majority is edited. But since the manuscript lives, and we are only human, can we ever truly be satisfied with work born of our vulnerability?