Baricco has reread (and rewritten) the Iliad in order to bring it onto the stage. Maintaining the original text based on the translation by Maria Grazia Ciani, the author has simplified the prose and reorganized the text into twenty-one monologues that correspond to as many characters in the poem and to a poet who, at the end, recounts the seige and the fall of Troy. At the same time, he excludes the gods from the tale as too distant from modern sensitivity and concentrates instead on depicting the heroes in all their humanity and greatness. Living figures that move against a background of battlefields and Achaean palaces, behind the walls of the besieged city, around the black ships; accomplished warriors who, drained by ten years of war, convey a startling, unceasing love of peace. This is the key to unlocking Baricco's work: discovering, in the Iliad, which is a war poem, a population in search of peace as transpires from the Greek assemblies during which the princes discuss strategies, putting off battle as they talk. The same merciless warriors who kill on the battlefield with a lust for death and victory, deep down in their hearts want simply to return home, to mourn their dead and find once again their wives, the latter too protagonists, albeit on a lesser scale, of the poem. And it is precisely the female voice, according to Baricco, that ever so faintly embodies the possibility of an alternative society, free from the duty of war. In front of the legation sent to him by Agamemnon, Achille himself, the strongest, fiercest Achaean of all, virtually a superhuman personification of war, makes a violent cry for peace: "For not the stores which Troy, they say, contain'd/ In peaceful times, ere came the sons of Greece/ Nor all the treasures which Apollo's shrine/ The Archer-God, in rock-built Pythos holds/May weigh with life; of oxen and of sheep/ Successful forays may good store provide/ And tripods may be gain'd, and noble steeds/ But when the breath of man hath pass'd his lips / Nor strength nor foray can the loss repair". Baricco's adaptation of the Italian text brings Homer's immortal lines closer to the modern reader, thanks to the successful expedient of subjective narration which detracts nothing from the original, but allows greater empathy and strong emotional involvement.