Nestor grabs Diomedes by his muscled throat. “What are you, six years old? Turn the fucking chariot, you asshole, or Hector will be wearing both our guts for garters before it’s teatime in Troy!”

Or some words to that effect. I am a hundred yards across the battlefield when this occurs, and the shotgun mike on my baton might not be working correctly. Also, since I am morphed into the shape of a Trojan foot soldier, I’m running with the rest, watching all this over my shoulder as Paris’s arrows fall around us and among us.

Diomedes wrestles with his dilemma for two or three seconds and then wrestles the horses instead, turning their heads, driving the chariot back toward the black ships and safety.

“Hah!” screams Hector over the din. He has a new driver—Archeptolemus, Iphitus’ handsome son—and is coming on again with the renewed vigor of a man truly enjoying his work. “Hah! Diomedes—made you run! You coward! You girly girl! You glittering little puppet! You quavering sparrowfart!”

Diomedes turns again in the chariot, glowering with fury and embarrassment, but Nestor has the reins now and the horses themselves have figured out which way safety lies. The chariot rolls over boulders, ruts, and fleeing Greek foot soldiers in the horses’ wild gallop toward the beach and safety, and the only way Diomedes can fight Hector now is by leaping off the chariot and fighting the thousands of Trojans on foot. He chooses not to do this.

“If you want to change our fates, you must find the fulcrum,” Helen had said that morning.

She’d asked me then about my knowledge of the Iliad—although she thought of it as my oracle-sense of the future—and pressed me to find the fulcrum of events, the single point in the ten-year war on which everything pivoted. Fate’s hinge, as it were.

I’d hemmed and hawed that morning, distracting her and myself with a final bout of lovemaking, but I’d thought about that question in the crazy hours since.

If you want to change our fates, you must find the fulcrum.

I’d bet my tenure as a Homerian scholar that the fulcrum of this particular tragic tale was fast approaching—the embassy to Achilles.

So far, events continue—more or less—to follow the poem, even with Aphrodite and Ares sidelined by wounds. Zeus has laid down the law and intervened on the side of the Trojans. I have no intention of QTing back to Olympos unless I have to, but I can guess that Homer’s narrative is being played out there as well—Queen Hera fretting that her Argives are getting pummeled and trying to persuade Poseidon to intervene on their behalf, but the “god who rocks the earth” being shocked by the suggestion—he has no desire to battle Zeus. Then, when the Greeks are really routed later today, Athena will strip naked, then dress in her best battle armor and glistening breastplate—well, I confess that it might be worth QTing to Olympos for that—but is stopped cold by Zeus’s messenger, Iris. Zeus’s message will be succinct—

“If you and Hera come to oppose me by clash of arms, my gray-eyed girl, I’ll maim your racers from beneath their yokes, hurl both you goddesses down from your chariot, smash your car, and rend both of you so terribly with my lightning bolts that you’ll be in the healing vats ten slow wheeling years before the green worms can stitch you together again.”

Athena will stay on Olympos. The Greeks, after a few hours of successful counterattack, will suffer heavier losses and fall back behind their own fortifications—a trench dug ten years ago shortly after landing, a thousand sharpened stakes, all the defenses recently deepened and built back up at Agamemnon’s order—but even behind their own wall, the panicked Achaeans will lose hope and vote to sail for home.

Agamemnon will try to rally them by throwing a great feast for his commanders—even as Hector and his thousands organize for the final charge that they know will end in the burning of the Achaeans’ black ships and the settling of this war for once and all—and at the Greek king’s feast, Nestor will argue that their only hope lies in Agamemnon making up with Achilles.

Agamemnon will agree to pay Achilles a king’s ransom—more than a king’s ransom—seven fire tripods, ten bars of gold, twenty burnished cauldrons, a dozen stallions, seven beautiful woman, and I can’t remember what else—a partridge in a pear tree, perhaps. Most important, the bribe will include Briseus’ daughter Briseis—the slave wench who was at the center of this whole argument. To wrap this gift in a red ribbon, Agamemnon will also swear that he’s never bedded Briseis. As a final incentive, he also throws in seven citadels, Greek kingdoms—Cardamyle, Enope, Hire, Anthea, Pherae, Aepea, and Pedasus. Of course, Agamemnon doesn’t own or rule these citadels—he’s giving away his neighbors’ lands—but I suppose it’s the thought that counts.

The one thing Agamemnon will not offer Achilles is his apology. The son of Atreus is still too proud to bow. “Let him bow down to me!” he’ll shout at Nestor, Odysseus, Diomedes and the other captains in a few hours. “I am the greater king, I am the elder born, and, I claim, the greater man.”

Odysseus and the other will see a way out despite Agamemnon’s arrogance. They realize that if they bring the message of Briseis’ return and all these other marvelous gifts—and just happen to leave out the “I’m the greater man” bit—there’s a chance that Achilles might rejoin the fight. At least this embassy to Achilles offers a ray of hope.

But here the complicated part begins—here the fulcrum may yet be found.

As a scholar, I know in my soul that the embassy to Achilles is the heart and pivot of the Iliad. Achilles’ decisions upon hearing the embassy’s entreaties will determine the flow of all future events—the death of Hector, the subsequent death of Achilles, the fall of Ilium.

But here’s the tricky part. Homer chooses his language very carefully—perhaps more carefully than any other storyteller in history. He tells us that Nestor will name five men for the embassy to Achilles—Phoenix, Big Ajax, Odysseus, Odios, and Eurybates. The last two are mere heralds, decorations for the sake of protocol, and will not walk to Achilles’ tent with the real ambassadors nor take part in the discussion there.

The problem here is that Phoenix is an odd choice—he hasn’t appeared in the story before, he’s more of a Myrmidon tutor and retainer to Achilles than a commander, and it makes little sense that he would be sent to persuade his master. To top that off, when the ambassadors are walking along the ocean’s edge—“where the battle line of breakers crash and drag”—on their way to Achilles’ tent, the verb form that Homer uses is a dual form—a Greek verb set between singular and plural always relating to two people—in this case, Ajax and Odysseus. Homer uses seven other words that, in the Greek of his day—this day—relate to two men, not three.

Where’s Phoenix during this walk from Agamemnon’s camp to Achilles’ part of the encampment? Is he somehow already in Achilles’ tent waiting for the embassy? That makes little sense.

A lot of scholars, before and during my time on earth, argued that Phoenix was a clumsy addition to the tale, a character added centuries later, which explains the dual verb form, but this theory ignores the fact that Phoenix will give the longest and most complex argument of the three ambassadors. His speech is so wonderfully digressive and complicated that it reeks of Homer.

It’s as if the blind poet himself had been confused about whether there were two or three emissaries to Achilles and what, exactly, Phoenix’s role was in the conversation that would decide all the players’ fates.

I have a few hours to think about this.

If you want to change our fates, you must find the fulcrum.

But that’s hours in my future. It’s still mid-afternoon here, and the Trojans are pausing on the Ilium-side of the Achaeans’ moat while the Greeks mill around like ants behind their wall of rocks and sharpened stakes. Still morphed as a sweaty Achaean spearman, I manage to get close to Agamemnon as the king first berates his men and then pleas for Zeus’s aid in their darkest hour.