The Greek ships lay drawn up in the water off Troy, and it was the war that began with a golden apple (chapter 38). Somehow it had come into its tenth year.
And what was raining on the camp now was arrows, and they were not the arrows of the Trojans. They were the arrows of Apollo, which is to say plague.
Soldiers went down and the pyres burned all night, and for nine days the camp was a house of mourning. On the tenth day Achilles called an assembly.