The War That Killed Achilles Read online

  Yet while a nexus of traditions speaks of Peleus’ good fortune, in the Iliad he is most memorably recalled as a forlorn object of pity, “ ‘ on the door-sill of sorrowful old age,’ ” and it is in this pathetic light that Achilles himself perceives his famous father. The striking disjunction between Peleus’ early legendary good fortune and later abandonment suggests that the characterizations preserved in both the Iliad and other traditions are mutually incomplete and that some other story, now lost, included him in an account of heroes whose fabled prosperity turned to fabled adversity.16

  Starkly contrasting with the unhappy ending of their famous marriage is the tradition of the actual wedding of Peleus and his divine bride, one of the favorite set pieces in early art as well as literature.17 The Cypria gave an account of the wedding: how “the gods gathered on Pelion to feast, and brought gifts for Peleus,” and, as Hera notes in the Iliad, “ ‘you all / went, you gods, to the wedding.’ ” Yet the origins of much tragedy and heartbreak lay in these joyous celebrations, for, as the Cypria also recounted, it was at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis that “Zeus confers . . . about the Trojan War. As the gods are feasting at the wedding of Peleus, strife appears and causes a dispute about beauty among Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite.”18 This rivalry led to the famous beauty contest between the goddesses, of which the Trojan prince Paris was selected, inexplicably, to be the judge; his reward for awarding the crown to Aphrodite was Helen, the wife of Greek Menelaos, and this event, as Zeus had planned, was the cause of the Trojan War.

  Various traditions describe the desperate tactics deployed by Thetis to rescue her mortal offspring from his mortal fate. A lost work attributed to Hesiod told of how “Thetis cast the children she bore to Peleus into a cauldron of water since she wanted to find out whether they were mortal. . . . And after many had been destroyed Peleus became annoyed and prevented Achilles from being cast into the cauldron.” In other accounts, Thetis secretly places the young Achilles in a fire at night to temper him; when Peleus intervenes, the spell is broken.19 The best-known story tells of how Thetis dipped Achilles in the river Styx to render him immortal but, holding him by his heel to do so, left his “Achilles’ heel” vulnerable.20

  The theme of tempering a child to make him invulnerable or immortal belongs, as do so many of the themes pertaining to Peleus and his household, to the world of folklore or fairy tale, rather than to heroic epic. Greek mythology tells of two other similar cases of such maternal “magic”: the goddess Demeter attempts to render a protégé immortal by placing him in a fire; and the hero Meleager, a participant in the Kalydonian Boar Hunt, is similarly tempered by fire but eventually killed by his mother, who one day burns the log that represents her son’s life.21 Significantly, Meleager will be evoked, in a story of great length and detail, as an example to Achilles in the Embassy scene.

  While other traditions speak of Peleus and Thetis’ multiple (if destroyed) offspring, the Iliad knows of only one—their single, wholly mortal son Achilles.22 His name may possibly appear in the Linear B tablets, as a-ki-re-u, in a context that suggests a common name,23 while attempts to determine the meaning of his name have drawn different conclusions. Its components—áchos laós—have been variously interpreted to mean either “grief/pain to the people” or “fear to the fighting men”; the latter has strong parallels in Germanic and Celtic languages.24

  In the Iliad, the epithets most commonly associated with Achilles among his companions are “shining, godlike” and “swift-footed”; the epithet used by Thetis, however, is minunthádios—“lasting but a short time,” “of persons, short-lived”:25 “ ‘Why did I raise you? . . . since indeed your lifetime is to be short, of no length’ ”; “ ‘Now give honour to my son short-lived beyond all other / mortals.’ ” To this inexorable, not-to-be-prayed-away fact, Thetis obsessively again and again returns. She can negotiate with Zeus for her son’s honor, but not for his life. For the immortal mother, her son’s fame, his prowess, his legendary feats count for nothing in the face of the fact that she knows that she will endure to see him die; an immortal goddess, she knows her grief will be everlasting. The keening of Thetis is one of the most consistent themes in the Iliad. She first appears as if shrouded in a mist of tears and at every appearance thereafter seems to be prostrate, paralyzed with grief for the event that she knows must come.

  It is a striking fact that in this epic dedicated to a heroic world essentially defined by father-son dynamics, the voice of Peleus is virtually not heard, as similarly the Iliad does not make even glancing reference to the heroic deeds attributed to him by other traditions. Unlike Nestor, the Iliad’s most conspicuous aged hero, Peleus is not around to recall continually the accomplishments of his youth. The only recollection anyone in the Iliad seems to have of Peleus is of his saying farewell to Achilles as he sets out for Troy.26 Yet while Peleus has been edited out of the epic, so to speak, Achilles’ emotional bonds are nonetheless unambiguously with his mortal father and not his divine, ever-present mother: the climax of the entire Iliad is in fact predicated on this filial bond. The nature of Achilles’ relationship to his mother is immediately apparent, from the moment in Book One when he retreats to the lonely shore to cry a favor: being divine, she is both magically ubiquitous, arising from the sea whenever he calls, and has access to valuable resources, such as the ear of Zeus. Achilles’ relationship to his father, by contrast, is subtly revealed only in the course of the epic; but the clues to his regard first surface in the Embassy scene.

  Peleus, whether because he was “annoyed” at the murder of his other children or because he believed that his only son would benefit from a particular, if eccentric, upbringing, is presented in all known traditions as handing the young Achilles over to the righteous centaur Cheiron to raise amid the wild animals of the Pelion Mountains. Although the Iliad characteristically suppresses such far-fetched, outlandish stories, it allows this tradition to stand. Achilles’ tutelage under Cheiron is mentioned pointedly in the Iliad: at the height of battle, an appeal is made to Achilles’ friend Patroklos to lend his medicinal art to a wounded warrior, “ ‘which they say you have been told of by Achilles, / since Cheiron, most righteous of the Centaurs, told him about them.’ ”27 A lost poem attributed (wrongly) to Hesiod called the Precepts of Cheiron was devoted to the instruction that this good centaur imparted to Achilles, an indication of the popularity and strength of this particular tradition; from the pitiful few surviving fragments, however, these precepts seem to have been bland stuff (“Whenever you come home, make a beautiful sacrifice to the eternally living gods. . . .”).28 Emerging from all this is the fact that Achilles, the most effective killer at Troy, is also the most adept in the art of healing.29

  The manner in which Achilles came to Troy is also decidedly unheroic. Hesiod relates how all other Achaeans came to Troy because they were formerly suitors of Helen and took an oath to her father that they would come to her aid if she were ever abducted; Homer does not refer to this oath overtly, but the fact that their united cause is Helen, of course, is unambiguous in the Iliad. Achilles, however, was too young to have been one of the suitors. In this all-important respect, he again stands apart from his comrades.30 Why, then, if Achilles and his family have no personal stake in the war, are he and his considerable force of Myrmidons at Troy?

  An early tradition tells of Thetis’ knowledge that Achilles was destined to die at Troy—in folklore, creatures of the sea are often attributed prophetic powers.31 Disguising her son as a girl, she hid him on the island of Skyros, amid the many women of King Lykomedes’ court. One unforeseen result of this ploy was that the youthful Achilles impregnated one of the women, Deidameia, who later bore his son; the Iliad makes brief reference to this son’s being raised on Skyros.32 Later narratives pick up the tale: Odysseus and Diomedes arrive on Skyros to seek out the young man who is destined to be the war’s greatest warrior. Hidden amid the bales of beautiful clothing that the two bring as gifts are various armaments, and when one of the “gir
ls,” ignoring the other finery, grasps these, they know they have found their man.33 The fact that Achilles was not immediately recognizable as a young man is intended to be a tribute to his striking beauty. Other Achillean trivia: his name among the women was “Pyrrha,” supposedly a reference to his red-gold hair (from purrós, “flame-colored”), while modern scholarship, after considerable sober study, has declared that the son of Peleus was not quite eighteen when he went to Troy.34

  Where now does this mass of information take us? What bearing does all this have on Achilles in the Iliad and, specifically, on the Embassy scene of Book Nine? First, it tells us that Achilles’ origins lie not only on the fringes of the Greek world, in remote Thessaly, but also outside epic tradition. In contrast to a hero like Diomedes, whose father, Tydeus, was well established in such epic narratives as the war at Thebes, Achilles and his parents come from the world of folklore, their histories embedded in tales of magical and supernatural events, as opposed to narratives dedicated to heroic, warlike accomplishments. This in turn partly accounts for Peleus’ striking absence in the Iliad; Peleus, great hero though he is, does not authentically belong to this tradition, does not share these heroic mores, and the community of heroes in the Iliad knows him only as the father of Achilles. In this way, as befits his unique destiny, Achilles is in fact proved to be greater than his father; alone of the heroes at Troy, it is he who defines his sire.

  Folklore heroes, it has been said, “tend to stand out as lonely wander ers, as folk from far away or from nowhere.”35 The aloofness of Achilles from the rest of the Achaeans, his essential isolation, is another attribute of his parents’ legacy.36 But most poignantly, and most useful to Homer’s vision, the hero of this war epic, is not, in his essence, a military figure. Famously vulnerable and unnaturally defined by his mortality, raised to know the arts of healing, a figure not of men but of the wild beasts of the mountains, Achilles does not belong in the warrior company at Troy. He did not cross the wine-dark sea for the common cause, nor did he come for glory. Achilles came to Troy because he was tricked into doing so.

  It appears, then, that this distinctive Thessalian folk hero, with his magic arts and mystical birth, was swept from his folktale moorings and appropriated into the evolving story of the siege and sack of Troy; his inclusion suggests that he was a charismatic figure even before he was brought to epic. Most probably, his entry came at a relatively late stage. Alone of the Iliad’s major heroes, Achilles dies before Troy is taken, for instance, indicating that his role was not an essential element in the overarching story of its siege and capture. His distinctive characterization also reveals a number of typically late features: no one in the Iliad speaks as idiosyncratically as Achilles, with less use of traditional expressions, for example, and no one makes more frequent use of similes, which generally belong to the later stages of the epic.37

  In the mythic background of Achilles, a great poet could discern exciting possibilities: Here was a peerless warrior with a life unrelated to war, a loner and an outsider who could see in the collective military endeavor nothing that pertained to himself, the most poignantly mortal of all heroes whose business was the daily hazard of war. Here was a hero with both the nature and the stature to think and speak as an individual, to stand apart and challenge heroic convention. In the hyperstated mortality of Achilles lay the origins of something potentially greater even than epic—and that was tragedy.

  Above all, Achilles afforded Homer, the tradition’s last poet, the means by which the epic could convincingly be taken into a new direction. Through Achilles, the ancient story of the Trojan War would not culminate as an epic extolling martial glory but as a dark portrayal of the cost of war, even to its greatest and most glorified hero. And it is in the Embassy scene that Homer gives his hero the freest rein; and so, with an eye to these complex antecedents, we rejoin the delegation.

  Achilles’ rejection of Agamemnon’s offer is immediate, decisive, and unambiguous: “ ‘ without consideration for you I must make my answer,’ ” he tells the Embassy spokesman Odysseus; “ ‘that you may not / come one after another, and sit by me, and speak softly. / For as I detest the doorways of Death, I detest that man, who / hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another.’ ”

  With angry authority, Achilles unfurls for his companions the dark tale of his warrior life. Great hero though he is, worshipped, as more than one Achaean will tell him, like a god among them, his existence is joyless and his war work thankless; his life always at hazard, he has lain “ ‘the many nights unsleeping, / such as I wore through the bloody days of the fighting, / striving with warriors for the sake of these men’s women.’ ” By contrast, Agamemnon, waiting by his ships, has piled up the plunder that other men, like Achilles, brought to him—yet it is Agamemnon who has taken the bride of his heart: “ ‘Yet why must the Argives fight with the Trojans? / And why was it the son of Atreus assembled and led here / these people? Was it not for the sake of lovely-haired Helen? / Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives?’ ” Three days’ sailing will bring one to Phthia—his home. Here aged Peleus lives, amid all his own possessions, and it is to home, to Phthia, to Peleus, that Achilles will now return. This is the sudden prospect against which Agamemnon’s glittering gifts and all the honor they imply are now weighed and found resoundingly, unnegotiably wanting:“I hate his gifts. I hold him light as the strip of a splinter. . . .

  . . . For not

  worth the value of my life are all the possessions they fable

  were won for Ilion, that strong-founded citadel, in the old days

  when there was peace, before the coming of the sons of the

  Achaeans. . . .

  Of possessions

  cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting,

  and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses,

  but a man’s life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted

  nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth’s barrier.

  For my mother Thetis the goddess of the silver feet tells me

  I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death. Either,

  if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans,

  my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting;

  but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers,

  the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life

  left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly.

  And this would be my counsel to others also, to sail back

  home again, since no longer shall you find any term set

  on the sheer city of Ilion, since Zeus of the wide brows has strongly

  held his own hand over it, and its people are made bold.

  Do you go back therefore to the great men of the Achaeans,

  and take them this message, since such is the privilege of the

  princes:

  that they think out in their minds some other scheme that is better,

  which might rescue their ships, and the people of the Achaeans

  who man the hollow ships, since this plan will not work for them

  which they thought of by reason of my anger. Let Phoinix

  remain here with us and sleep here, so that tomorrow

  he may come with us in our ships to the beloved land of our fathers,

  if he will; but I will never use force to hold him.”

  So he spoke, and all of them stayed stricken to silence

  in amazement at his words.

  Life is more precious than glory; this is the unheroic truth disclosed by the greatest warrior at Troy. More extraordinary than its subversion of a conventional story line—the anticipated and triumphant return of the gift-laden hero—is the Iliad ’s very deliberate confrontation with the core tenets of its own tradition. That glory, honor, and fame are more important than life is a heroic convention so old it can be traced
securely to Indo-European tradition; integral to this heroic view is the belief that glory—kléos—is achieved through heroic poetry, in other words, through epic.38 But with his unimagined speech, Achilles hijacks the Iliad, taking this particular epic onto thrilling new ground.39

  The magnitude of Achilles’ words is dramatically underscored by the reaction of aged Phoinix, the third member of the Embassy party, who “in a stormburst of tears” embarks upon a lengthy, digressive speech jumbling personal emotion with a heroic, cautionary tale. “ ‘How then shall I, dear child, be left in this place behind you / all alone?’ ” he begins, and by addressing this most fearsome of man slayers as “ ‘dear child,’ ” he establishes his position as a long-serving family retainer, who was sent to Troy by Peleus himself as a guardian of the young Achilles. Phoinix, it will be recalled, had first come to Phthia many years earlier, when he fled his own country after almost killing his father. Awarded care of Peleus’ single child, Phoinix became nurse and mentor to Achilles:“I made you all that you are now,

  and loved you out of my heart, for you would not go with another

  out to any feast, nor taste any food in your own halls

  until I had set you on my knees, and cut little pieces

  from the meat, and given you all you wished, and held the wine

  for you.