The War That Killed Achilles Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  The Things They Carried

  Chain of Command

  Terms of Engagement

  Enemy Lines

  Land of My Fathers

  In God We Trust

  Man Down

  No Hostages

  The Death of Hektor

  Everlasting Glory

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  SELECTED FURTHER READING

  INDEX

  ALSO BY CAROLINE ALEXANDER

  The Bounty

  The Endurance

  Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition

  Battle’s End

  The Way to Xanadu

  One Dry Season

  CAROLINE ALEXANDER

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Caroline Alexander, 2009

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from The Iliad of Homer, translated by Richmond Lattimore. Copyright 1951 by the University of Chicago. Copyright renewed 1979 by Richmond Lattimore. Used by permission of the University of Chicago Press.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Alexander, Caroline, 1956-

  The war that killed Achilles : the true story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War / Caroline Alexander.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-14885-3

  1. Homer. Iliad. 2. War in literature. 3. Trojan War—Literature and the war. 4. Achilles (Greek mythology)

  I. Title.

  PA4037.A5955 2009

  883’.01--dc22 2009020160

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  TO SMOKEY

  oὐ μὲν γàρ ζωοί γε ϕίλων ἀπáνευθεν ἑταίρων

  βουλàϚ ἑζόμενοι βουλεύσομεν

  PREFACE

  The Iliad is generally believed to have been composed around 750 to 700 B.C. and has been in circulation ever since.1 The reason for this is not difficult to fathom. In addition to being a poem of monumental beauty and the origin of some of literature’s most haunting characters, the Iliad is first and foremost a martial epic, its subject warriors and war. If we took any period of a hundred years in the last five thousand, it has been calculated, we could expect, on average, ninety-four of these years to be occupied with large-scale conflicts in one or more parts of the world.2 This enduring, seemingly ineradicable fact of war is, in the Iliad’s wise and sweeping panorama, as intrinsic and tragic a component of the human condition as our very mortality.

  Today, headlines from across the world keep Homer close by. The dragging of the bodies of U.S. Rangers behind their killers’ jeeps through the streets of Mogadishu evoked the terrible fate of the Trojan hero Hektor. A young American widow was reported as saying that she had tried to close the door against the soldier who appeared at her home in dress greens, believing that if she could keep him from speaking his news of her husband in Iraq, she could keep his news at bay—a small domestic scene that conjured the heartbreaking words of Hektor’s widow, Andromache: “May what I say come never close to my ear; yet dreadfully I fear . . .” The Iliad ’s evocation of war’s devastation, then, is as resonant today—perhaps especially today—as it was in Homer’s Dark Age. Now, as at any time, Homer’s masterpiece is an epic for our time.

  The classical age of ancient Greece knew the Iliad well, and the events surrounding the Trojan War furnished subjects for the great tragedians. Plato quoted and criticized Homer; Aristotle commented on him; Aristotle’s most famous pupil, Alexander the Great, is alleged to have slept with a copy of the Iliad annotated by Aristotle under his pillow. More tellingly, it is said that when the conqueror of the known world himself arrived at what remained of Troy, he lamented the fact that unlike the hero Achilles, he, Alexander, had no Homer to glorify his deeds.

  Knowledge of Homer was brought to Rome in the third century B.C. by one Livius Andronicus, who composed Latin versions or imitations (as opposed to faithful translations) of the Odyssey, Homer’s sequel to the Iliad, as well as of the works of the Athenian playwrights. Perhaps more important, he established a curriculum of study of the Greek language and letters, of which Homer’s epic poems took pride of place. The centrality of Homer’s epics to the education of the Roman elite was never displaced, and indeed, the works of Homer formed the foundation of Greek studies in the schools of the empire. Young Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, is reported to have quoted the Iliad following the death of his uncle Caesar: “I must die soon, then; since I was not to stand by my companion / when he was killed.”3 Horace and Pliny knew Homer, Cicero criticized him, while Virgil’s epic imitation borders at times on plagiarism.

  When the Roman Empire split in the sixth century A.D., knowledge of Greek, which flourished in Byzantium, or the Eastern Empire, all but vanished in the West. The Iliad itself was forgotten, and in its stead stories about the war at Troy flourished, which, along with romantic sagas about Alexander the Great, formed the most popular “classical” material of the Middle Ages. The primary sources for these post-Homeric renderings of the matter of Troy, as the body of romance came to be called, were the Latin prose works of Dictys of Crete and Dares of Phrygia, dated to the third and fifth or sixth centuries A.D., respectively—both of whom were fancifully believed to have been eyewitnesses to the Great War at Troy. In these Latin renderings, Achilles, the complex hero of Homer’s Iliad, stripped of his defining speeches, devolved into a brutal, if heroically brave, action figure. In the hands of medieval writers, sentiment hardened further against him. The twelfth-century Roman de Troie takes pains, in thirty thousand lines of French verse, to ensure that Achilles is depicted as in all ways inferior, even in martial prowess, to the noble Trojan hero Hektor. Such interpretive touches would remain potent down the ages, arguably into the present time.4

  England, as late as the Elizabethan age, wa
s largely Greekless, and the first translation of a substantial portion of the Iliad (ten books) into the English language was made by way of a French text and published in 1581 by Arthur Hall, a member of Parliament until he suffered disgrace for, among other offenses, “sundry lewd speeches” and debt. His translation flirts with doggerel:And often shall the passers-by say, Look who yonder is,

  The wife of valiant Hector lo! Who in the field with his

  Such fame and great renown did get, when Grecians compassed

  round

  The great and mighty town of Troy and tore it to the ground.

  Then, between 1598 and 1611, George Chapman’s landmark translation of the Iliad appeared, made from Greek and other texts (and Latin translations), and was followed in five years by his translation of the Odyssey. It was the latter that, two hundred years later, Keats, who did not know Greek, read and commemorated unforgettably in his sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,

  And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

  Round many western islands have I been

  Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

  Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

  That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;

  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

  Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

  Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

  When a new planet swims into his ken;

  Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

  He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

  Looked at each other with a wild surmise—

  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

  The ice had been broken, and “there is since the late sixteenth century hardly a generation in the English-speaking world which has not produced its ‘Homers.’ ”5

  But as knowledge of Homer was disseminated by English translations, as well as by knowledge of the original Greek, the perception of the Iliad’s central hero, Achilles, shifted, and so accordingly did the perceived meaning of the epic. Not only had Achilles been tarnished by the medieval lays, but from the time of Augustan England of the eighteenth century, he was further diminished by the ascendancy of another ancient epic: Virgil’s Aeneid, which related the deeds and fate of the Roman hero pius Aeneas—Aeneas the pious, the virtuous, dutiful, in thrall to the imperial destiny of his country. In contrast to this paragon of fascism, Achilles, who asserts his character in the Iliad’s opening action by publicly challenging his commander in chief’s competence and indeed the very purpose of the war, was deemed a highly undesirable heroic model.6

  Thus, while the Iliad’s poetry and tragic vision were much extolled, the epic’s blunter message tended to be overlooked. Centuries earlier, tragedians and historians of the classical era had matter-of-factly understood the war at Troy to have been a catastrophe: “For it came about that, on account of the length of the campaign, the Greeks of that time, and the barbarians as well, lost both what they had at home and what they had acquired by the campaign,” wrote Strabo in the early first century B.C., in what can be seen as a summation of the ancient view of the Trojan War, “and so, after the destruction of Troy, not only did the victors turn to piracy because of their poverty, but still more the vanquished who survived the war.”7 But now, later ages marshaled the Iliad’s heroic battles and heroes’ high words to instruct the nation’s young manhood on the desirability of dying well for their country. The dangerous example of Achilles’ contemptuous defiance of his inept commanding officer was defused by a tired witticism—that shining Achilles had been “sulking in his tent.”

  Homeric scholarship goes back to the dawn of literary scholarship, to the work of Theogenes of Rhegium, around 525 B.C., and in most Western—and some non-Western—universities continues to this day. Thousands of books, articles, and lectures, beyond tabulation, have been composed on this epic, and an incalculable mass of scholarship has examined and analyzed the Iliad from almost every conceivable angle of approach.

  This book is not about many of the things that have occupied this scholarship, although inevitably it will touch on the same themes. This book is not an examination of the transmission of the Homeric text or of what Homer has meant to every passing age. It is not an analysis of the linguistic background of the epic, and it is not about the oral tradition behind the poem; it is not about formulaic expressions or whether “Homer” should refer to an individual or a tradition. It is not about Bronze Age Greece nor the historicity of the Trojan War. This book is about what the Iliad is about; this book is about what the Iliad says of war.

  NOTE TO THE READER

  The translation used throughout this book, with one exception, is that of Richmond Lattimore, whose landmark Iliad was first published in 1951 by the University of Chicago Press. It was Lattimore’s translation that introduced me to the Iliad at the age of fourteen and inspired me to learn Greek, and my appreciation of its plain diction but epic gravitas and tone has only increased over the years. I am very grateful to the University of Chicago Press for permission to quote from this work.

  The excerpts used in this book are faithful to Lattimore’s translation with a few exceptions. The more familiar “Achilles” has been substituted for Lattimore’s strictly correct transliteration of the Greek name “Achilleus,” just as “Achaeans” has been substituted for his “Achaians” and “Mycenae” for “Mykenai.” There is no single orthography for the rendering of Greek names, and readers will therefore encounter, in the quoted translation and in transliterations used by editors of the many other works cited, both “Athene” and “Athena,” “Hektor” and “Hector,” “Aias” and “Ajax,” the Greek “Aineias” and the Roman “Aeneas,” and so forth. In addition, the “Greeks” of Homer’s Iliad are called variously Achaeans, Argives, and Danaans, just as some Trojans are also Dardanians.

  The ninth chapter of this book, “The Death of Hektor,” is the author’s own translation of the Iliad ’s Book Twenty-two. The translation was not made because it was felt that Lattimore’s work could be improved upon, but because this Book is too perfect to be fragmented by commentary, and it seemed an impertinence to lift an entire chapter of another scholar’s work.

  The Things They Carried

  It is the epic of epics, the most celebrated and enduring of all war stories ever told. In sparest outline, the ancient legend of the Trojan War tells of the ten-year-long siege of the Asiatic city of Troy, or Ilion, by a coalition of Greek forces to regain Helen, a famously beautiful Greek noblewoman, who had been taken to Troy by the Trojan prince Paris. The war was won by the Greeks—or Achaeans, as they were known—who finally gained entrance to the fortified city by hiding their best men inside the belly of a gigantic wooden horse alleged to be an offering to the god Poseidon. After the deceived Trojans dragged the horse inside their own fortifications, the hidden Achaeans emerged at night, sacked the city, set it aflame, and killed or enslaved all remaining Trojans.

  The greatest war story ever told commemorates a war that established no boundaries, won no territory, and furthered no cause. The war is cautiously dated to around 1250 B.C. Its story was memorialized by the Iliad, an epic poem attributed to Homer and composed some five centuries later, around 750-700 B.C. Homer’s Iliad is the only reason that this inconclusive campaign is now recalled.

  Across the perilous gulf between the Bronze Age and Homer’s time, generations of poetic storytellers had passed the legend of the war down the centuries. Many of the episodes evoked by these forgotten bards in their now-lost poems were ignored or rejected by the Iliad. Homer’s epic does not tell of such seemingly essential events as the abduction of Helen, for example, nor of the mustering and sailing of the Greek fleet, the first hostilities of the war, the Trojan Horse, and the sacking and burning of Troy.

  Instead the 15,693 lines of Homer’s Iliad describe the occurrences of a roughly two-week period in the tenth and final year of what had become a stalemated siege of
Troy. Thus the dramatic events that define the Iliad are the denouncement by the great Achaean warrior Achilles of his commander in chief as a mercenary, unprincipled coward; the withdrawal of Achilles from the war; and the declaration by Achilles that no war or prize of war is worth the value of his life. Homer’s Iliad concludes not with a martial triumph but with Achilles’ heartbroken acceptance that he will in fact lose his life in this wholly pointless campaign.

  In Homer’s day, the ruins of what had once been the well-built walls of Troy, on their commanding site overlooking the Hellespont, as the Dardanelle Straits were then known, were visible to any traveler; the Iliad ’s close description of the Troad, the region around Troy, suggests that it was known to its poet at first hand. The war, then, was real, not mythic, to Homer and to his audience. Similarly, the major Greek principalities named by the Iliad as participating in the war also existed. Their ruins, too, were visible to any traveler.

  Knowledge of Troy and Troy’s time has been advanced by archaeology. The Trojan War itself, however, the terrible conflagration that unmoored whole nations, remains mysterious. Regardless of whatever facts may come to light, the Iliad ’s unambiguous depiction of what this war meant remains unchanged. Reaching deep into his already ancient story, Homer had grasped a savage and enduring truth. Told by Homer, the ancient tale of this particular Bronze Age war was transported into a sublime and sweeping evocation of the devastation of all war of any time.