Ginger's Spy School Oneshots

have none of you actually read the Iliad?

Author's Note: The Trojan horse was never even alluded to in the Iliad, and I, as a Classics nerd, staunchly refuse to believe that there was not a single person in the room who didn't know that.

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Erica was frantically racking her brains, trying to think of what significance the Iliad could possibly hold to Agent Durkee. She didn't remember those quotes being in the Iliad, but she hadn't read it in a couple years and that hadn't been a book she'd committed to memory. Besides, it was the only lead they'd been able to find.

Did Agent Durkee see herself in Achilles perhaps? Some sort of great warrior robbed of her glory by a selfish uncaring other, and having subsequently lost a hold on her moral compass through the ensuing events, now ready to go on a homicidal rampage? She guessed that was a fairly likely option, but that didn't get them any closer to figuring out what the Croatoan were actually planning. Besides, Agent Durkee didn't seem nearly self-aware to see something along those lines.

It seemed unlikely that she saw herself any of the Trojans, since Priam was old and ineffectual, Hector died tragically, and who on earth would want to be Paris? Unless she saw herself in Aeneas, who was barely even an afterthought in that epic, destined to found a new empire in honor of the one that had gotten destroyed in his own epic? Although, that was bringing in an epic from a completely different era in a completely different language. Although, although, translations into English were readily available for consumption and they were often thought of together in conjunction with the Odyssey. That could work, but that also didn't provide any hints as to what she was planning.

And while the Aeneas interpretation seemed the most plausible things she'd come up with so far, why would Agent Durkee quote the Iliad? No matter where you came down on the debate of whether Vergil or Homer was the truly superior poet, surely Vergil could have written something suitably inspiring, especially if the point was to have a quote in a memo to make sure everyone knew what was going on. She hadn't memorized the Aeneid, so she wasn't quite sure what the quote would be, but the quality of prose expected in such things as work memos wasn't necessarily high.

She was mulling all this over as quickly as she possibly could, trying to puzzle out what Agent Durkee could possibly mean, when Mike said, "The Trojan horse, obviously. The most ridiculous military tactic of all time."

It was at that moment, as Jawa and Mike began to squabble about whether or not the Trojan horse was brilliant or laughable, that Erica was violently reminded that not only had no one else in the room read the actual Iliad, there was a really good chance that Agent Durkee probably hadn't either and she'd probably just Googled "quotes from the Iliad" and copy-pasted the first couple into the memo.