Essay on the Iliad

My son Royce (11) wrote this essay with minimal assistance after reading the Iliad ( Translation, Oxford press,
1963) in three days. (It was my cries for help that brought me to the Well Trained Mind web site, and the book which finally got here so now I can stop reading it at the bookstore.) He has a severe fine motor delay so much of his writing is completed using a word processor.
We are holding off on the editing for another essay because one year ago you could not get him to write 3 sentences, and now he is producing this level of writing. We will continue to emphasis the mechanics of writing until his writing is on par with his math and reading.

The Iliad
By Royce Pruitt

The Iliad is based off the Trojan War and was written by the great Greek poet Homer in the around 400 B.C. The reason for the war was supposedly Helen Of The Fair Cheeks “the face that launch a thousand ships”. However, the book is manly about the 9th and 10th years of the war.

Some of the main characters are Odysseus King of Ithaca, Antiochus son of Nester, king of pylos; Diomedes of Tiryns and Sthenelus, his friend; Ajax, son of king of locris and podaleirius and machaon, the physicians. Paris another of the main charactors wooed Helen wife of the king of Sparta into coming back with him to troy which was the last straw for the Greeks and they declared war. With that Helen ernd her status of “the face that launched a thousand ships”.

When the Greeks landed in troy, they were met by a reasonably small resistance and made their camp. To make their camp they made a palisade wall then took there ships up on to the beach above the tide line were they put them in to rows then made huts for them to live in. During the war the Greeks did small raids on small villages along the coast for supplies and plunder.

After a while, both sides had gotten wary of war but persisted in fighting. The fighting went on for ten years each side loosing many men. But none of them got any were with it. There was times one side or the other got a strong foothold but neither cept it for long. Once the Trojans in to the Greek camp but were pushed back at the end.

Then there was a meager power swing that brought down troy. Odysseus got a plan. They would billed a hollow wooden horse and hide some soldiers in it. Then the rest of the Greeks sailed off behind an island and waited. When the Trojans found the horse they thought it was a gift and took it in to their city with the soldiers and then partied to their “victory”. Until night when the Greeks came out of the horse and from behind the island and opened the gate to let the rest of the army in and after that they destroyed the city and sailed off that ending the trojan war.

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