Representations of the military in the media date from the beginnings of recorded history and since that time soldiers and armies have featured widely in popular culture. In addition to the countless images of military leaders in heroic poses from antiquity, they have been an enduring source of inspiration in war literature. Not all of this has been entirely complementary and the military have been lampooned or ridiculed as often as they have been idolized. Classical antiquity The classical Greek writer Aristophanes, devoted an entire comedy, the Lysistrata, to a strike organised by military wives where they withhold sex from their husbands to prevent them from going to war. The Iliad, an ancient Greek epic poem in dactylic hexameters traditionally attributed to Homer, is set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, and tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles. The Odyssey, also ascribed to Homer, is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, and is fundamental to the modern Western canon. The Aeneid, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. Middle Ages In Medieval Europe, tales of knighthood and chivalry, the officer class of the period, captured the popular imagination. Writers and poets like Taliesin, Chrétien de Troyes, and Thomas Malory wrote tales of derring-do featuring Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and Galahad. Even in the 21st century, books and films about the Arthurian legend and the Holy Grail continuing to appear. A century or so later, in the hands of writers such as Jean Froissart, Miguel de Cervantes, and William Shakespeare, the fictional knight Tirant lo Blanch and the real-life condottiero John Hawkwood would be juxtaposed against the fantastical Don Quixote and the carousing Sir John Falstaff. In just one play, Henry V, Shakespeare provides a whole range of military characters, from cool-headed and clear-sighted generals, to captains, and common soldiery. Ludovico Ariosto's romance epic, Orlando Furioso (1516), is a continuation of Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, which describes the adventures of Charlemagne, Orlando, and the Franks as they battle against the Saracens with diversions into many sideplots. Torquato Tasso's poem Jerusalem Delivered (La Gerusalemme liberata, 1580), depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between