Brilliant Achilles, noble but reckless, holds no interest for him without his better half. He's an incomplete man, and what he's missing comes in the shape of another human being; only forcefully deprived of Patroklos (and what it took to kill him!) does he develop these faculties for himself. And not for long, the poem ends with a foregone conclusion. No wooden horses, no tendons. It ends with a focus on Hector, tamer of horses. Hector suits Adrian well as well, but he's a family man, you're meant to shed a tear for him. Adrian sheds a non-literal tear for the minor characters, who appear only to die. And if he can't cry, he chokes back a distressed noise at Achilles' grief.

But the book is only a detour on the way to his real interests. (Heaven knows other authors saw parallels to the story in the life of Alexander, but Alexander has no parallel, not in another reckless storybook hero with an enduring companion. Hints and insinuations register on him, even when he is small.)

(He will encounter better translations, and superior original editions, but Adrian still prefers "spake" as the simple past tense of "speak".)

---

When Adrian Veidt is seventeen, he puts books aside. He leaves to find the real Alexander, not the one in a textbook, to roam the middle east like a pagan wanderer and grow his hair long, he takes little with him. Nothing his parents' money has touched, because he must make this voyage standing on his own feet; he's willing to work any job he's given rather than feel parasitic, an extra appendage of the family. (And wouldn't you, if you knew where the money came from already, your father's guilt and your mother's numb disinterest.) He hesitates before packing Lang's Iliad away, thinking achingly sentimental thoughts of Aristotelian annotations, but the risk that he might lose it is too great.

Adrian has the company of other travelers, an odd fraternity; he has the hospitality of strangers, who afford more kindness to a soft-spoken sunburned American with cropped blond hair and wide green eyes. He has the uncanny ability to make friends, if not to have them or keep them. Most of all he has his own will, that drives him across oceans to strange lands. He will beg and borrow, even steal, to make this trip (as soon as he has established himself as a man of business he meticulously retraces his steps to pay back what he's taken) and while it would be nice to have a permanent travelling partner, someone whose wits might complement his own, no such person exists. Or if he does, Adrian's never met him.