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Ransom by david malouf5/8/2023 ![]() ![]() In a moment of transformation, Achilles agrees, and Priam returns with the body. Hector, after all, had killed his friend Patroclus, the man who was as necessary to Achilles’s well-being as breath or water. A grieving father ignores the legitimate concerns of his aged wife and remaining sons and insists on going on a mad journey into the heart of the Greek camp to beseech the killer of his many sons, and most particularly his dearest son Hector, to give back Hector’s body, even though Achilles has shown nothing but a burning desire to wreak his continuing revenge on the corpse by dragging it daily behind his chariot. ![]() To choose that moment for a book’s primary subject! -audacious and, it turns out, wise.Īs far as plot or story goes, it’s as simple a book as could be. For me, it is the single most revealing moment in literature about what it means to be human. In twenty years of teaching that part of the epic, I never survived a class without having to wipe away tears. Ransom focuses on the moment in the Iliad when King Priam retrieves his son Hector’s body from Achilles. ![]()
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