Homer breaks off with the burial of Hector, whose body has just been ransomed by the disconsolate Priam; while the lost poem of Arctinus, entitled the AEthiopis, so far as we can judge from the argument still remaining of it, handled only the subsequent events of the siege.  The poem of Quintus Smyrnaeus, composed about the fourth century of the Christian era, seems in its first books to coincide with AEthiopis, in the subsequent books partly with the Ilias Minor of Lesches.

The Trojans, dismayed by the death of Hector, were again animated with hope by the appearance of the warlike and beautiful queen of the Amazons, Penthesilia, daughter of Ares, hitherto invincible in the field, who came to their assistance from Thrace at the head of a band of her country-women.  She again led the besieged without the walls to encounter the Greeks in the open field; and under her auspices the latter were at first driven back, until she, too, was slain by the invincible arm of Achilles.  The victor, on taking off the helmet of his fair enemy as she lay on the ground, was profoundly affected and captivated by her charms, for which he was scornfully taunted by Thersites; exasperated by this rash insult, he killed Thersites on the spot with a blow of his fist.  A violent dispute among the Grecian chiefs was the result, for Diomedes, the kinsman of Thersites, warmly resented the proceeding; and Achilles was obliged to go to Lesbos, where he was purified from the act of homicide by Odysseus.

Next arrived Memnon, son of Tithonus and Eos, the most stately of living men, with a powerful band of black Ethiopians, to the assistance of Troy.  Sallying forth against the Greeks, he made great havoc among them:  the brave and popular Antilochus perished by his hand, a victim to filial devotion in defence of Nestor.  Achilles at length attacked him, and for a long time the combat was doubtful between them:  the prowess of Achilles and the supplication of Thetis with Zeus finally prevailed; while Eos obtained for her vanquished son the consoling gift of immortality.  His tomb, however, was shown near the Propontis, within a few miles of the mouth of the river AEsopus, and was visited annually by the birds called Memnonides, who swept it and bedewed it with water from the stream.  So the traveller Pausanias was told, even in the second century after the Christian era, by the Hellespontine Greeks.

But the fate of Achilles himself was now at hand.  After routing the Trojans and chasing them into the town, he was slain near the Scaean gate by an arrow from the quiver of Paris, directed under the unerring auspices of Apollo.  The greatest efforts were made by the Trojans to possess themselves of the body, which was, however, rescued and borne off to the Grecian camp by the valor of Ajax and Odysseus.  Bitter was the grief of Thetis for the loss of her son; she came into the camp with the Muses and the Nereids to mourn over him; and when a magnificent funeral-pile had been prepared by the Greeks to burn him with every mark of honor, she stole away the body and conveyed it to a renewed and immortal life in the island of Leuce in the Euxine Sea.  According to some accounts he was there blest with the nuptials and company of Helen.