Scribner & Son's Hardcover, copyright 1970 with 378 pages. About the In the fall of 1924 Richard Powell began studying Virgil's Aeneid in Latin class at the Episcopal Academy, On Philidelphia's Main Line, and became fascinated by the great characters and tremendous story of the Trojan War. He did not expect that 44 years later he would be climbing around the actual site of ancient Troy, as part of his research for his book. Powell lived in Fort Myers, Fl. About the Thirty-two hundred years ago, the people of a shining civilizton apparently set out to prove the truth of the saying that whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad. The civilization was the long-forgotten one that is now called Mycenaean. The madness that destroyed it was the Trojan War. Powell has gone back to this fabled period to write a big and colorful and lovingly-researched novel of its people and events. His central character is Helios, a kitchen boy in the palace at Troy, who may or may not be the bastard son of Priam, the High King. The story begans two years before the Trojan War. One of the author's aims in writing this book was to introduce modern readers to the golden people of the Illiad and Odyssey and Aeneid. Nearly all of them are here-Achilles and Odysseus, Agamemnon and Menelaus, Hector, Paris, Helen, Great Ajax, and Little Ajax, Cassandra, Aeneas-and they are depicted from a fresh viewpoint.