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Back The Arrow of Apollo Save as PDF
Chapters (52)
  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. About the Author
  4. Dedication
  5. By the Same Author
  6. Author’s Note
  7. Map
  8. Domus Libris
  9. House of the Wolf
  10. The House of the Wolf
  11. One
  12. Two
  13. Three
  14. Four
  15. Five
  16. Six
  17. Seven
  18. Eight
  19. Nine
  20. Ten
  21. Eleven
  22. Twelve
  23. Thirteen
  24. Fourteen
  25. Fifteen
  26. Sixteen
  27. Seventeen
  28. Eighteen
  29. Nineteen
  30. Twenty
  31. Twenty-One
  32. Twenty-Two
  33. Twenty-Three
  34. Twenty-Four
  35. Twenty-Five
  36. Twenty-Six
  37. Twenty-Seven
  38. Twenty-Eight
  39. Twenty-Nine
  40. Thirty
  41. Thirty-One
  42. Thirty-Two
  43. Thirty-Three
  44. Thirty-Four
  45. Thirty-Five
  46. Thirty-Six
  47. Thirty-Seven
  48. Thirty-Eight
  49. Timeline of the Trojan Cycle
  50. Further Reading
  51. Acknowledgements
  52. Supporters

Achilles, the greatest warrior, withdraws from the war when his war prize, the maiden Briseis, is taken from him by Agamemnon.

The Greeks begin to be beaten back to their ships. Achilles’s companion Patroclus puts on his armour, and fights in his place. He is killed.

Furious, Achilles enters the fray, slaughtering many Trojans, eventually killing Hector, their greatest prince.

Later in the war, Achilles is killed by Paris. The city eventually falls when Odysseus tricks the Trojans into pulling in a wooden horse, full of Greek fighters.

The Greeks are merciless in their destruction of the city, killing Priam, and taking his wife and daughters captive.

They return home. Agamemnon, when he reaches his palace, is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, in revenge for his killing of Iphigenia.

Orestes, who had been sent away, returns, and murders Clytemnestra along with her new husband Aegisthus, with the help of his sister Electra.

Appalled by the murder, the gods send the Furies to hound Orestes, chasing him through Greece, until he ends up in Athens.

He is absolved by Apollo. In some versions, the Furies continue to haunt him, so he is sent to retrieve a sacred statue of Artemis from Tauris.

Here Orestes eventually meets Iphigenia, recognises her, and the cycle is over.

Or is it?

Further Reading

I hope that you will want to read more about the wonderful stories that helped to inspire this novel.

For the tale of Aeneas, go to Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid. Here you will find a passionate and vivid account of the fall of Troy, as well as the story of Dido, Queen of Carthage.

The cycle of Orestes is a dark one, and it is told best in Aeschylus’s powerful trilogy, The Oresteia, which comprises three plays: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides. These relate how Agamemnon was killed, and Orestes took revenge on his mother and was then pursued by the Furies. Euripides’s Orestes shows a less heroic side of the prince. We also have Electra, as told by both Euripides and Sophocles.

Homer’s The Iliad concerns a few weeks in the long cycle of the Trojan War, in which the great fighter Achilles withdraws from battle.

If you are interested in Greek and Roman myth, a wealth of interpretations and retellings are available. My favourites as a boy were Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tales of the Greek Heroes, and his charming The Luck of Troy.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my family: my wife, Tatiana von Preussen, my parents, Richard and Marie Womack, and my parents-in-law, Andrew and Alexandra von Preussen, for helping to give me the space and time to write this book.

Thank you to Fiona Lensvelt, for taking on this project, and to Liz Garner, for her excellent, elegant editing skills, and to the rest of the team: Alexander Eccles, Hayley Shepherd, and everyone else at Unbound.