The War That Killed Achilles Read online

  The Iliad, moreover, is not only the definitive telling of the iconographic Trojan War but also the most important seminal religious text of ancient Greece. “Homer and Hesiod are the poets who composed theogonies,” wrote Herodotus in his Histories, in the mid-fifth century B.C., “and described the gods for the Greeks, giving them all their appropriate titles, offices, and powers.”4 While Hesiod’s Theogony—literally, “the generations of the gods”—is a poetic list of deities, including the many outlandish creatures from the murky age before the establishment of Zeus, Homer’s pantheon comprised convincingly realized characters. Compelling enough to survive millennia of changing religious and artistic mores, the Iliad ’s portraits of the Olympian divinities drew from a variety of sources, in Greece and abroad, as well as Homer’s genius for characterization. The names of Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Ares, and Dionysos appear in the Linear B tablets among a list of deities receiving offerings of honey, olive oil, perfume, gold vessels, wine, grains, animals, and human slaves: “to Zeus”; “to the Poseidon sanctuary”; “to the Zeus sanctuary”; “for Zeus, Hera, Drimios the son of Zeus . . .” This last, otherwise unknown son of Zeus is edited out by passing generations, along with the Great Mistress, the Divine Mother, and the cult to the Winds, all similarly lost. Nor is it known if the familiar names that do appear in the tablets correspond with the deities of Homer. The tablets refer to a “spreading of the bed” in a ceremony for Poseidon, for example, which seems to imply some kind of marriage, or fertility rite, difficult to correlate with the Poseidon who appears in epic as lord of the sea and earthquakes.5

  The Iliad’s epithet for Zeus’ wife and sister, Hera—bo-ōpis, literally “cow-eyed” or “ox-eyed,” sometimes translated less literally as “having large, dark, soft eyes”—may derive from an Indo-European tradition associating the Sky God with cows and bulls: in Greek mythology specifically, Zeus couples with various partners while either he or they are in bovine form.6 The origins of Ares, god of war, are writ large in his name—arē, áros—“ruin,” “damage.”7 Despite the centrality of war in both myth and history, shrines and cult centers to Ares were rare in Greece. “ ‘Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar’ ” were Zeus’ dark words to his son at the end of Book Five. “ ‘To me you are most hateful of all gods who hold Olympos.’ ” Shunned in heaven as well as on earth, Ares is credited in the Iliad with not a single act of dignity; he is even disgraced by the goddess Athene in the physical contests in which, as the god of war, he ought to have been supreme.

  The prototype of Athene may possibly lie in Mycenaean depictions of helmeted and shield-bearing goddesses, and warrior goddesses, such as Ishtar and Anat, are also found in the Near East.8 Traditionally the pro tectress of favored heroes and especially cities, Athene is warlike, but rarely savage;9 the goddess’s vanquishing of Ares, in Book Five, is proof of her contempt toward this truly brutal bully. Athene is also the goddess of handiwork and craftsmanship, both male and female, and her patronage of domestic work such as weaving is further evidence of her essentially civilized sympathies; Athene is above all a friend to mankind. In the poetry of Hesiod, she is born full-grown from Zeus’ own head, owl-eyed and wearing armor.10 She is the closest to Zeus of all his many children, distinguished by her mētis, or “skill in counsel, . . . astuteness, shrewdness.” She is glaukōpis, “bright-eyed,” like the wise-seeming, all-discerning owl.11

  Appropriately, the lineage of the Father of Gods and men is of all the gods the most secure: He is Zeus pater—Zeus the father—Diespiter in Indo-European, eventually becoming the Latin Jupiter.12 His name means “the Bright One” and has cognates in a variety of Indo-European languages with words for “day” and “sky”;13 the God of the Bright Sky, he later appropriates the attributes of a storm god, analogous to the Hittite Weather God.14 Echoes of his original nature reverberate throughout the Iliad. “ ‘Father of the shining bolt, dark-misted,’ ” Athene addresses him. He sits on the loftiest summits, close to the sky; he is “Zeus who delights in the thunder” and “Zeus who gathers the clouds.” Such epithets and associations are very old; Zeus the cloud-gatherer may have inherited an Ugaritic epithet for Ba’al, the “cloud-gatherer or cloud-rider.”15 God of the sky, he is the all-seeing god, privy to all activities of men below.

  The individual deities in the Iliad are characterized not only by their unique attributes—power, wisdom, warfare—but also by their well-drawn personalities. Athene may “represent” wisdom, but there is nothing abstract about her compelling characterization. The contradictory range of attributes assigned to her—warfare and weaving—survive intact into later centuries because they work so well within the vivid personality created by Homer. Characterized in wholly human terms, the Olympians indulge in the pleasures, troubles, and pursuits of man. They can be wounded, scolded, punished, thwarted; they are loving, indulgent, petty, and jealous; they are just like man—except that the consequences of their actions are never terminal. They will survive their travails because unlike mortals they are one and all athánatos kaì agērōs—“deathless and unaging.”

  The epic tradition anointed Olympos, a 9,570-foot-high peak of a remote Macedonian range, to be the gods’ home. Here, above the world of men, they live lives of untroubled ease and luxury in their splendid houses crafted by Hephaistos. Yet, as the Iliad makes clear, notwithstanding the attractions of their abode above the clouds, the gods cannot tear themselves from the world of men. This is not only because mortals provide the savory burnt offerings and sacrifice they find so gratifying but because the lives and deeds of men are objects of endless fascination to them. The war at Troy provides the gods with excitement and stimulation. Seemingly, they cannot get their fill of watching it, arguing about it, and participating in it; the Trojan War is the best show playing.

  Deceptively, the actions of the gods blend perfectly with those of men. When Hera and Athene descend to fight for the Achaeans, and Apollo and Ares for the Trojans, for example, the gods are wholly assimilated into the ranks of mortals. They come as allies, distinguished from the diverse peoples gathered to fight at Troy only by the type of assistance—immeasurably greater—that they are able to render. Their aspirations, even their pride and anger, are in accord with those of their mortal comrades. It is this commonality of emotional and moral character, as much as the physical human disguises they so often assume, that allows the gods of the Iliad to infiltrate the company and confidence of mortal men.

  No testimonials of any kind survive to tell us whether an audience of Homer’s time was scandalized or entertained by such an irreverent depiction of divinity; the survival of the Iliad itself can be taken as evidence of a kind that audiences at some level “approved.” Some later audiences, however, did not. Three and a half centuries after Homer, Plato famously banned the works of Homer from his ideal republic on the grounds that shameful “stories about gods warring, fighting, or plotting against one another” were unsuitable material for the training of young souls as just citizens.16 But others, perceiving that the nature of the Homeric gods tempered the nature of Homeric man, were more generous.

  “I feel indeed,” wrote “Longinus,” in his first-century-A.D. treatise On the Sublime, “that in recording as he does the wounding of the gods, their quarrels, vengeance, tears, imprisonment, and all their manifold passions Homer has done his best to make the men in the Iliad gods and the gods men.”17

  Of all the antics performed by the gods in the Iliad, few are as mischievous, memorable, and ultimately disconcerting as those depicted in the extended scene in Book Fourteen traditionally known as Diòs apátē, or “the deception of Zeus.”18 The scene begins when Hera observes that Poseidon, unnoticed by Zeus, whose attention has drifted, has managed to deploy himself among the Achaeans. Supportive of Poseidon’s cham pioning of the Achaeans, Hera decides to help his efforts with a scheme of her own to “beguile the brain in Zeus”: And to her mind this thing appeared to be the best counsel,

  to array herself in loveliness, and
go down to Ida,

  and perhaps he might be taken with desire to lie in love with her

  next her skin, and she might be able to drift an innocent

  warm sleep across his eyelids, and seal his crafty perceptions.

  She went into her chamber, which her beloved son Hephaistos

  had built for her, and closed the leaves in the door-posts snugly

  with a secret door-bar, and no other of the gods could open it.

  There entering she drew shut the leaves of the shining door, then

  first from her adorable body washed away all stains

  with ambrosia, and next anointed herself with ambrosial

  sweet olive oil, which stood there in its fragrance beside her,

  and from which, stirred in the house of Zeus by the golden

  pavement,

  a fragrance was shaken forever forth, on earth and in heaven.

  When with this she had anointed her delicate body

  and combed her hair, next with her hands she arranged the shining

  and lovely and ambrosial curls along her immortal

  head, and dressed in an ambrosial robe that Athene

  had made her carefully, smooth, and with many figures upon it,

  and pinned it across her breast with a golden brooch, and circled

  her waist about with a zone that floated a hundred tassels,

  and in the lobes of her carefully pierced ears she put rings

  with triple drops in mulberry clusters, radiant with beauty,

  and, lovely among goddesses, she veiled her head downward

  with a sweet fresh veil that glimmered pale like the sunlight.

  Underneath her shining feet she bound on the fair sandals.19

  Like a mortal hero, Hera is arming for battle and her detailed head-to-toe preparations, reversing the usual feet-first heroic formula, suggest a kind of tongue-in-cheek arming scene: “First he placed along his legs the fair greaves. . . . Over his powerful head he set the well-fashioned helmet.”

  Armed like a warrior, Hera sets forth to conquer a hated adversary—her husband. And like a strategizing general, she solicits allies. For her plan to succeed, she needs both the seductive charms of Aphrodite and the complicity of Sleep. To both of these deities, Hera spins a story, “with false lying purpose,” about needing their help to reconcile discord that has arisen between the sea gods Okeanos and his wife, Tethys.20 From Aphrodite, Hera extracts the loan of the goddess’s charm, apparently an amulet, on which “are figured all beguilements, and loveliness / is figured upon it, and passion of sex is there, and the whispered / endearment that steals the heart away even from the thoughtful.” From Sleep, bribed by the promise of marriage to one of the Graces, Hera extracts a pledge to descend upon Zeus after she has seduced him.

  Her attack meticulously prepared, Hera now drifts casually past her lord, where he sits alone on towering Ida. “Zeus who gathers the clouds saw her, / and when he saw her desire was a mist about his close heart,” and, as planned, he suggests they lie together. Answering him again “with false lying purpose,” Hera protests that they cannot do so on the peaks of Ida in the open where “ ‘everything can be seen.’ ”

  Then in turn Zeus who gathers the clouds answered her:

  “Hera, do not fear that any mortal or any god

  will see, so close shall be the golden cloud that I gather

  about us. Not even Helios can look at us through it,

  although beyond all others his light has the sharpest vision.”

  So speaking, the son of Kronos caught his wife in his arms. There

  underneath them the divine earth broke into young, fresh

  grass, and into dewy clover, crocus and hyacinth

  so thick and soft it held the hard ground deep away from them.

  There they lay down together and drew about them a golden

  wonderful cloud, and from it the glimmering dew descended.

  So the father slept unshaken on the peak of Gargaron

  with his wife in his arms, when sleep and passion had stilled him.

  The length of this sequence and the luxurious pace at which it is unfolded suggest that it was a set piece, undoubtedly famous in its own day; one of its jokes is the utilitarian use Zeus makes of his trademark cloud gathering. Similar stories about the trickery of the gods are found in Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, while in the Odyssey the poet Demodokos sings a lengthy story “about the love of Ares and sweet-garlanded Aphrodite,” who are caught in adultery.21

  As a piece of pure entertainment, the Deception serves the dramatic function of breaking what would otherwise have been a long, unrelieved battle narrative. The scene begins while fierce fighting is under way, and when Zeus awakens, he opens his eyes to see Hektor, who had been almost killed by a boulder hurled by Aias, “lying in the plain, his companions sitting / around him, he dazed at the heart and breathing painfully, / vomiting blood,” with carnage all around. While Zeus slept, Poseidon has done much damage to the Trojans. At face value, then, the Deception is simply an amusing interlude within a long, grim sequence.

  But it is its very function as an interlude that is most disconcerting. Men are fighting for their lives, suffering mutilating wounds, and dying—and Zeus the father, distracted, is heedless of them.

  Of greater interest than the nature of the gods per se is the nature of their relationship with mortal men. The Olympians of the Iliad know everything about the mortals they look down upon; Zeus himself is eurúopa, “far-seeing,” a direct legacy of his origins as the all-seeing God of the Bright Sky, to whose celestial vantage the events on earth are laid bare.22 Rarely indolent, usually zestful and opinionated, the extended family of Zeus aggressively engages with the mortal world. In disguise, the Olympians move, speak, and act freely among men, partaking of the human experience. There is nothing about the men and women at Troy that the gods do not know, even to foreknowledge of their individual fates.

  By contrast, despite the busy flow of divine activity that drums through their lives, the Homeric heroes and heroines know very little about their gods. Few could claim to know what a god looks like, as most encounters take place with the deity in disguise. There are exceptions: Helen famously recognizes Aphrodite, despite her masquerade as an old servant woman, by the “round, sweet throat of the goddess / and her desirable breasts and her eyes that were full of shining.” Likewise, Poseidon’s disguise as the seer Kalchas is betrayed by his footprints: “ ‘this is not Kalchas, the bird interpreter of the gods,’ ” Aias the son of Oïleus says to Telamonian Aias, “ ‘for I knew / easily as he went away the form of his feet, the legs’ form / from behind him. Gods, though gods, are conspicuous.’ ”

  By and large, however, the men at Troy fight in a kind of fog of existential ignorance, never knowing where or who the gods are or what divine activities and plans already under way may affect their own actions. Nor do they know what they must do for their supplications and prayers to be received. A very few incidents appear to suggest that Zeus, at least, punishes the wicked, which, if true, would furnish some minimal guidance for gaining his favor and avoiding his wrath. Menelaos, for example, rants at the Trojans for taking Helen away: “ ‘wretched dogs, and your hearts knew no fear / at all of the hard anger of Zeus loud-thundering, / the guest’s god, who some day will utterly sack your steep city.’ ” On closer look, however, in this and other such cases, it is clear that punishment is to be meted out by Zeus only in his capacity as patron of a specific institution: he is Zeus Orkios, “Zeus who upholds oaths,” or Zeus Xenia, the god of guest friendship.23 Zeus’ loyalty, then, is in fact to himself in his particular cultic aspects, not to a principle of overarching justice.

  If no clear principles sway the gods, how can mortals fathom their divine will? Seers, the interpreters of omens and dreams like Kalchas, on occasion provide guidance by clarifying a particular god’s wishes, as Kalchas does so effectively at the outset of the epic, divining the cause of Apollo’s plague. But the I
liad also takes pains to demonstrate that omens can be problematic, as is seen in a critical, extended exchange between Hektor and the wise Poulydamas. As the two men stand on the edge of the Achaeans’ defensive ditch, deliberating whether to cross it, an immense eagle appears overhead, carrying a “gigantic snake, blood-coloured, / alive still and breathing.” Writhing upward, this monstrosity bites its captor, causing the eagle to drop it to the ground, where it lands conspicuously on the field of battle. Turning to Hektor, Poulydamas cautions his brother not to venture against the Achaeans in the face of this evil portent:Looking darkly at him tall Hektor of the shining helm answered:

  “Poulydamas, these things that you argue please me no longer.

  Your mind knows how to contrive a saying better than this one.

  But if in all seriousness this is your true argument, then

  it is the very gods who ruined the brain within you,

  you who are telling me to forget the counsels of thunderous

  Zeus, in which he himself nodded his head to me and assented.

  But you: you tell me to put my trust in birds, who spread

  wide their wings. . . .

  One bird sign is best: to fight in defence of our country.”

  The incident contains a menacing, tragic irony. Zeus had indeed earlier sent his personal messenger, Iris, to declare to Hektor that “ ‘Zeus guarantees power to you / to kill men, till you make your way to the strong-benched vessels, / until the sun goes down and the blessed darkness comes over.’ ” Day is far from over when the baneful snake drops with a thud at the feet of the Trojans. The snake is an omen to be heeded, clearly, but on the other hand Hektor’s directives came from Zeus. Nonetheless, as the epic audience knows, it is Poulydamas, not pious, trusting, “Zeus-loved” Hektor, who reads the situation correctly; Hektor’s delusion will destroy him.