The hero of the Trojan War, divinely invulnerable except in his heel, is the central figure of the composition. The theme of the battle, which Sassu studied in depth in his time in prison in 1937-38, is here developed in a tangle of limbs feverishly locked in battle, as in a classical frieze or a reminiscence of Poussin’s compositions. From the middle of the 1930s compositions of this sort inevitably contain symbolic and metaphorical meanings, linked to myth but alluding to the political reality of Italy.