The twelfth Book contains some of the most celebrated scenes in the Iliad: Hektor's riposte to Pouludamas at 231–50, Sarpedon's address to Glaukos at 310–28, and Hektor's breaking through the gates at 445–66, as well as some notable narrative scenes such as the Trojan storming party at 256–64. The Book also contains some of the finest Iliadic similes, the snowflakes of 278–86 and the lion of 299–306. However, these undoubted qualities of execution exist within one of the most weakly constructed Books of the Iliad. Yet all should have been clear: at 88–104 the Trojans divide themselves into five battalions; the attacks of each, thought of as simultaneous but narrated in sequence, should then have followed. The plan would have been simple, easy to handle, and above all clear. In fact, after the assault of Asios the storyline loses itself and only partially recovers with the attacks of Sarpedon and Hektor. For Leaf and other analysts the immediate solution was easy: the catalogue at 88ff. was the work of that author who ‘so often interpolated into the speeches of Nestor untimely displays of tactical erudition’. Surgery of that kind, however, does little to remove the impression that the shape and detail of the Achaean fortress has not been worked out in the Iliad so well as the geography of the main battlefield.