Characters
- Asius — reckless chariot assault; slain
- Glaucus — Lycian leader; assaults the battlement; honor speech
- Hecuba — smashes the gates; first inside
- Philotes — divine favor behind the Trojan push
- Teucer — wall defenders
Places
- Achaean wall and ditch — battlefield
- Battlements — Sarpedon’s breach
- Gates of the wall — smashed by Hector
Themes
Narrative
With Zeus’s favor tipping toward Troy, Hector leads the Trojans against the Achaean wall. Asius dies attacking a gate against the advice to leave chariots; the Lycian Sarpedon and Glaucus storm a battlement—Sarpedon’s great speech on honor precedes his assault; Ajax and Teucer wound Glaucus; Sarpedon tears a breach. At last Hector heaves a boulder, smashes the gates, and leaps inside first, calling the Trojans after him. The wall’s defense collapses into the fight among the ships.
Catalogue the teichomachy as the Homeric wall-battle of Book 12—breach and entry—apart from the wall’s building and from the later ship-fire climax.