The Iliad

Having recently seen the movie "Troy" it got me thinking of my studies of the Iliad back in college. You know the basic story--a pretty-boy named "Paris" who was a prince of Troy goes and wins over a really hot chick named Helen, who had been Queen of Sparta. This makes her husband and Spartan king Menelaus pissed, and he gets all the other Greek kings to send a massive fleet to go destroy Troy and all its inhabitants and bring Helen back because if there's one thing that impresses a woman, it's genocide. During the ten year war that ensued, Greece's best warrior, Achilles, learns that his gay lover Patroclos was killed in single combat against Trojan prince Hector (Paris' brother), and this sends Achilles into a rage. He ultimately fights against Hector, killing him, then doing all sorts of disrespectful things to the man's body which this being Greece we can only imagine involved having sex with the corpse because there weren't enough sheep around. That night, Hector's father and king of Troy, Priam, sneaks into Achilles' tent and convinces the angry warrior to let him bring the body back to Troy for a decent burial. Rather than grab the old man and say "hey, we can end this war pretty quick now that we have the Trojan king!", Achilles gets sentimental and agrees to give up the defiled corpse. Later, in ensuing battles, Paris shoots and arrow at Achilles, getting him in the heel and killing him, but not before remarking at how ironic it is that he got Achilles in the Achilles Tendon. Ultimately the Greeks couldn't defeat Troy because of that city's huge walls (and the lack of young boys to have sex with in the surrounding countryside was doing hell to their morale), so Greek leader Odysseus hatched a cunning plan, if by "cunning" we mean "shitballs retarded but it might work if the Trojans are also shitballs retarded". The Greeks built a big wooden horse, filling it with some picked warriors, and left it outside the Trojan gates. The Trojans said "hey, look, free horse sculpture, this will go great in our garden" and they brought it into the city. At night the warriors broke out of the horse, seized the front gate and let the rest of the Greek warriors in, where they promptly destroyed the city and slaughtered the population except for Aeneus' crew which went off to found Rome. This gives rise to the expression "don't trust a Greek bearing a gift or standing behind you in the shower".