74 pages • 2 hours read
Rosemary SutcliffBlack Ships Before Troy
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 6-10
Chapter 6 Summary: “The High King’s Embassy”
Paris catches up with Hector and they both rejoin the fight. The Trojans almost manage to push the Greeks back onto their ships. Athene notices that many Greeks have died and decides to stop the fight for the day. Despite the soothsayer’s instructions and Hecuba’s offering to Athene, the goddess is still firmly on the side of the Greeks and “paid no heed to the jeweled robe newly laid across the knees of her statue in the great temple of the high city of Troy” (41). Athene gives Hector the idea for a duel: Hector and Ajax of Salamis will duel to end the battle. Hector and Ajax are an even match; they both wound the other and they fight until they are exhausted and the sun sets. They part with a sense of respect for the other. Hector gifts Ajax a sword as a sign of friendship; Ajax returns the gesture by gifting Hector a rich purple belt. The armies call a truce the next day; they gather their dead to burn on funeral pyres.
The day after, the Greeks dig a ditch and drive stakes into the sand to defend their camp. Fighting resumes. Diomedes almost leads the Greeks into Troy, but Zeus, remembering his promise, sends a lightning bolt down to distract the warrior’s horses. The Trojans camp on the battlefield that night, sure that they will be victorious the next day. Agamemnon is discouraged by Zeus’s obvious bias against them and proposes that the Greeks return home. Diomedes refuses to hear this and Nestor suggests instead that they get Achilles back on their side. Agamemnon agrees, so Odysseus, Ajax, and his former tutor Phoenix, visit Achilles with the promise to return Briseis.
They find him playing his lyre on the beach while Patroclus polishes his helmet and looks on, clearly troubled. They feast and Odysseus finally tells Achilles about Agamemnon’s promise to return Briseis with “rich honor-gifts of gold and horses and slaves-the promise, too, of wide lands and his own daughter in marriage when they came again to their own countries” (47). Patroclus is hopeful that this will soothe Achilles’s anger, but the latter continues to hold a grudge against the king. No matter what the three men say to convince Achilles to join them once more, he refuses.
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Horses of King Rhesus”
Both the Greeks and Trojans attempt to get a spy into each other’s camp so that they might figure out the best strategy for battle the next day. Odysseus and Diomedes disguise themselves and head into the Trojan camp. As they are doing so, they see a young Trojan man named Dolon—Hector had promised him Achilles’s horses should he return with important information.
Odysseus and Diomedes capture Dolon and learn that while Hector and the Trojan armies are awake and on watch, many of their allies are asleep. Though Dolon pleads for his life, Diomedes beheads him. Odysseus and Diomedes then attack and kill the Thracian King Rhesus and steal the best of the Thracians’ horses hoping this viciousness makes the Thracians flee.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Red Rain”
The next day arrives with a clear omen of death for the Greeks. Rain as red as blood falls on the Greek camps while the sky is light and clear above the Trojans. The Greeks advance on the Trojans; the battlefield is in complete carnage and many men are slain. The Greeks lose their advantage when Agamemnon is wounded by a spear and forced to retreat. Hector leads the Trojans to victory once more, but Odysseus and Diomedes wound Hector and push him to retreat. In turn, though Paris “ke[pt] as usual to the fringe of the battle” (59), he wounds Diomedes with an arrow. Odysseus is the last Greek leader standing until a spear wounds him. Ajax and Menelaus rescue him, returning him to the Greek camp. Paris shoots another arrow that wounds Machaon, the Greeks’ healer.
Achilles watches the battle but refuses to join the fray. When he sees that Machaon has been wounded, he asks Patroclus to check on the healer. Nestor has an idea: Achilles should send someone out on the battlefield dressed as him so that Achilles’s warriors, the Myrmidons, can join the battle without Achilles ceding to Agamemnon. As Patroclus rushes to deliver this message to Achilles, he sees a hurt friend and helps tend to his wound.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Battle for the Ships”
With Zeus’s direct intervention, Hector’s men break through the Greeks’ palisades and ditches and enter the heart of the Greek camps. They drive the Greeks almost entirely back to their ships when Poseidon, god of the seas and Zeus’s brother, sees the desperation of the Greeks. Poseidon sends wave after wave of monstrous sea creatures to push the Trojans back. He then goes unseen amongst the Greeks, filling them with vigor and god-like strength, renewing them for the fight.
Ajax injures Hector gravely; the Trojan is taken away vomiting black blood. However, bidden by Zeus, Apollo comes down and breathes life and god-like strength into Hector. Reinvigorated by Apollo’s gift, Hector leads another strike against the Greeks, burning their ships and black sails. Patroclus sees the scene before him and rushes to Achilles, crying.
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Armor of Achilles”
Achilles teases Patroclus for his tears, mocking him for crying about the Greeks and their dead. Patroclus corrects Achilles—“it is not for their own folly that they die, but for the ill-doing of [Agamemnon]; and he has already offered [Achilles] full amends” (70). Patroclus tells Achilles of Nestor’s proposal, and Achilles agrees. Achilles makes Patroclus promise to drive the Trojans back from the ships and immediately return to him.
Patroclus dresses in Achilles’s armor and mounts the chariot driven by Automedon the charioteer and harnessed to Xanthus and Balius, the two immortal horse sons of the west wind, and the mortal horse Pedasus. Achilles does not watch Patroclus lead the charge of the Myrmidons; instead, he prays to Zeus to grant Patroclus courage and glory, and to “let him return to [Achilles] unharmed” (71). Zeus only grants half of Achilles’s request.
Patroclus and the Myrmidons successfully drive the Trojans back from the ships so that the fires can be put out. Patroclus kills many men, including Zeus’s son Sarpedon. Zeus bids Death and Sleep take Sarpedon’s body away so the Greeks cannot disturb it. Zeus fills Patroclus with mindless battle madness, so that the mortal forgets his promise to Achilles. Patroclus attempts to climb the walls of Troy and comes head to head with Hector and the Trojan army. He kills many men but Apollo pushes Patroclus off the wall and onto his back, knocking off his helmet and revealing the fact that he is Patroclus and not Achilles. Hector spears Patroclus through his belly, killing him. The Trojans strip Patroclus of the armor.
The Greeks and Trojans fight over his naked dead body, one to honor it and the other to desecrate it. Automedon is unable to join the fight because the immortal horses are weeping for Patroclus, their dear friend. Zeus sees their grief “and, for the sake of their father the west wind, put fire back into their hearts” (74). The battle wages on and the Myrmidons successfully bring Patroclus’s body, “battered and torn like an old cloak” back to camp.
Chapters 6-10 Analysis
This section of the novel emphasizes the horrors of the war. Neither the Trojans nor the Greeks are able to gain any permanent advantage; Countless people die in the constant push and pull between the two armies.
The gods play a more prominent role, directly interfering in events. Gods working on behalf of the Trojans do this by manifesting physical distractions. Zeus’s bolt of lightning, his dark clouds and blood rain, and his appearance as an eagle holding a snake, all push and encourage the Trojans. Later, Apollo hits Patroclus between his shoulder blades, sending Achilles’s helmet falling off his head, and revealing that he is not the famed warrior—a turning point in the battle.
The gods who favor the Greeks use subtler magic. Poseidon, who has thus far not been involved in the events of the war, helps the Greeks drive the Trojans back by invisibly and silently filling their hearts with courage and renewed vigor to keep fighting. These emotional or mental transferences of power are seen numerous times in this section, and often turn the tide of the battle from one way to another.
The gods are split into different sides, but instead of fighting against one another, they work out their grievances through mortals. Zeus, for example, cannot prevent Poseidon from helping the Greeks: “he knew that these things were his brother Poseidon’s doing. There was little enough he could do about Poseidon, who was almost his equal in power” (66). All Zeus can do is interfere directly at a different moment of the fighting.
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By Rosemary Sutcliff
