THE SPOILS OF WAR
Sep 03, 2021
3 minutes
By Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Troy has fallen. Its warriors are all dead. The mutilated body of the sacked city’s king, Priam, has been left lying in the dunes by the Greek camp, stinking and covered all over – as Pat Barker’s narrator horribly notes – with “flies, thousands of them … like a fuzz of black bristles”.
Now somebody has tried to bury Priam. The Greek Pyrrhus, who hacked him to death at the foot of an altar, is displeased. Who
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