The visual impact is stunning: mile upon mile of lighted tents, campfires, sharpened-stake defenses, miles of trenches dug in the hard ground above the beaches—not for hiding and hunkering in, but as a deterrent to Trojan cavalry—and, illuminating all those miles of tents and men and shining on polished spears and bright shields, thousands of bonfires and cooking fires and corpse fires burning bright.

Corpse fires.

For the past few weeks, pestilence has been creeping through the Greek ranks, first killing donkeys and dogs, then dropping a soldier here, a servant there, until suddenly in the past ten days it has become an epidemic, slaying more Achaean and Danaan heroes than the defenders of Ilium have in months. I suspect it is typhus. The Greeks are sure it is the anger of Apollo.

I’ve seen Apollo from a distance—both on Olympos and here—and he’s a very nasty fellow. Apollo is the archer god, lord of the silver bow, “he who strikes from afar,” and while he’s the god of healing, he’s also the god of disease. More than that, he’s the principle divine ally of the Trojans in this battle, and if Apollo were to have his way, the Achaeans would be wiped out. Whether this typhoid came from the corpse-fouled rivers and other polluted water here or from Apollo’s silver bow, the Greeks are right to think that he wishes them ill.

At this moment the Achaean “lords and kings”—and every one of these Greek heroes is a sort of king or lord in his own province and in his own eyes—are gathering in a public assembly near Agamemnon’s tent to decide on a course of action to end this plague. I walk that way slowly, almost reluctantly, although after more than nine years of biding my time, tonight should be the most exciting moment of my long observation of this war. Tonight, Homer’s Iliad begins in reality.