The War That Killed Achilles Read online

  The convoluted action transpiring since Thetis’ delivery of armor to Achilles has neither furthered the narrative nor heightened dramatic expectations. One can only assume that the broad entertainment afforded by divine foolery and clever references to other epic stories was not felt by ancient audiences to dissipate the dramatic tension—and this consideration is in itself enlightening. Despite the summaries that we possess of the lost epics of the Trojan Cycle, and the many scattered references in later literature, we today know very little about how these other traditions told their stories. But comparison with epics in other times and other cultures suggests they may have looked a lot like the interludes here that accompany Achilles’ aristeía. Distracting as they are, these “un-Homeric” passages, then, serve modern audiences well—as reminders that the traditional story elements of the Iliad did not of themselves guarantee greatness.

  The Iliad does not regain its high tone and gravitas until the end of Book Twenty, when Achilles’ aristeía is under way in earnest. There is now nothing amusing about his confrontations with the enemy as he storms across the Trojan plain “as inhuman fire sweeps on in fury,” slashing through the Trojan forces, his chariot axle-high in blood and his immortal team of horses trampling underfoot the dead. Achilles’ own hands are “spattered with bloody filth” as he drives the terror-stricken Trojans into the river Skamandros (also called Xanthos), leaping in after them so none can escape.

  He, when his hands grew weary with killing,

  chose out and took twelve young men alive from the river

  to be vengeance for the death of Patroklos, the son of Menoitios.

  These, bewildered with fear like fawns, he led out of the water.

  These will fulfill his vow to “ ‘behead twelve glorious / children of the Trojans’ ” before the pyre of Patroklos. And it is here, by the tamarisk-lined river, that Achilles meets a Trojan named Lykaon blundering out of the water.

  Lykaon is a son of Priam by a concubine, and as evil fate would have it, this is his second encounter with Achilles, who had captured him in a night raid during some earlier stage of the war. At that time, Achilles had spared his life and sold him in Lemnos, where eventually he was redeemed by a family friend. Now, as Achilles prepares to make his kill, Lykaon runs under the upheld Pelian ash spear. Grasping it with one hand, he clasps Achilles’ knees in supplication with the other, begging that his life be spared again for ransom:So the glorious son of Priam addressed him, speaking

  in supplication, but heard in turn the voice without pity:

  “Poor fool, no longer speak to me of ransom, nor argue it.

  In the time before Patroklos came to the day of his destiny

  then it was the way of my heart’s choice to be sparing

  of the Trojans, and many I took alive and disposed of them.

  Now there is not one who can escape death, if the gods send

  him against my hands in front of Ilion, not one

  of all the Trojans and beyond others the children of Priam.

  So, friend, you die also.”

  Buried in the pathos of Lykaon’s death is a revelatory fact: in the days before Patroklos’ death, it was Achilles’ “ ‘heart’s choice to be sparing.’ ” Achilles’ actions—and character—in the early days of the war have remained more or less obscure, falling as they do outside the Iliad ’s chosen time frame. Yet sufficient small hints of the kind of man he was can be gleaned from other incidents in the epic and tend to substantiate his claim that he is now a changed man. The departure of Briseis from his shelter is one such example, who, captive though she was, leaves “all unwilling,” and there is the testimony of Andromache, whose father Achilles slew “but did not strip his armour, for his heart respected the dead man.” Nor does it appear that bloodlust overwhelmed Achilles in the heat of these early battles. The self-portrait he offers during both his confrontation with Agamemnon in Book One and the Embassy in Book Nine is that of a weary man engaged in the exhausting work of war, which he performs expertly but without much appetite: “ ‘Always the greatest part of the painful fighting is the work of my hands.’ ” When, therefore, Achilles tells Lykaon that “ ‘it was the way of my heart’s choice to be sparing / of the Trojans,’ ” this is not a rhetorical flourish to make the death of Lykaon more pathetic. Achilles the warrior was once gallant and chivalrous; since the death of Patroklos, he is a different, murderous man.

  In his study of combat trauma on American veterans of the Vietnam War, Dr. Jonathan Shay was struck by how vividly and realistically the descriptions of Achilles’ actions and state of mind after the death of Patroklos resembled those of the veterans under his psychiatric care. This was particularly striking of the phenomenon, triggered by some incident—injustice, betrayal, loss of a friend—of the so-called berserk state. As one veteran recalled:I just went crazy. I pulled him out into the paddy and carved him up with my knife. When I was done with him, he looked like a rag doll that a dog had been playing with. . . . I lost all my mercy. I felt a drastic change after that. . . . I couldn’t do enough damage. . . . For every one that I killed I felt better. Made some of the hurt went [sic] away. EVERY TIME YOU LOST A FRIEND IT SEEMED LIKE A PART OF YOU WAS GONE. Get one of them to compensate what they had done to me. I got very hard, cold, merciless. I lost all my mercy.31

  Combat trauma undoes character.32 The cosmic reach of Achilles’ furious, raging aristeía is evoked by the striking similes clustering around him since his return: fire blazes around his head like the signal flares of a besieged city; his eyes glitter “like sunflare”; his shield glimmers like fire across the water, like moonlight; his helmet shines like a star. These elemental images set up Achilles’ elemental battle with one of the few foes capable of threatening him—the river Skamandros, a force of nature. Its eddying waters clogged with the bodies of men Achilles has slaughtered, Skamandros raises his voice in protest and indeed supplication: “ ‘O Achilles, your strength is greater, your acts more violent / than all men’s,’ ” the river implores. “ ‘For the loveliness of my waters is crammed with corpses, I cannot / find a channel to cast my waters into the bright sea / since I am congested with the dead men you kill so brutally. / Let me alone, then; lord of the people, I am confounded.’ ”

  Achilles’ slighting response—that he will not leave off killing until Hektor “ ‘has killed me or I have killed him’ ”—goads Skamandros into hostile action, and, rearing his waters, he comes at Achilles in a dangerous wave. Scrambling out of the river, Achilles makes an undignified dash across the plain, with the river, now surging out of its banks, in fierce pursuit. The lengthy episode is another of the nonheroic interludes that perplexes Achilles’ aristeía. Its outlandish, fabulous tone, so uncharacteristic of Homer, leads one to suspect an older myth lurking behind the episode, one in which the warrior hero did actual battle against powers of nature and monsters, as in Near Eastern archetypes where a hero battles the Flood.33

  At length, Hera calls on her lame son for help, and Hephaistos makes a spectacular and unexpected appearance as pure Fire, parching the plain, drying the land, and burning the many corpses:Then he turned his flame in its shining

  into the river. The elms burned, the willows and tamarisks,

  the clover burned and the rushes and the galingale, all those

  plants that grew in abundance by the lovely stream of the river.

  Blighting the kind of peaceful landscape he so lovingly evoked on Achilles’ shield, Hephaistos brings his involvement in Achilles’ fate full circle. He cannot keep death from the son of Thetis, but he can fulfill the smith’s traditional epic role of protecting young heroes. This swift, startling scene is also the Iliad’s only description of the physical damage done to the plain of Troy, and it unnervingly conjures timeless images of the scorched-earth tactics that invading armies inflict upon their enemies’ land.

  Achilles’ savage scamper over the plain drives the Trojans before him, back to Troy. Simultaneously the gods terminate their own battles,
and abruptly, with little prelude, return to Olympos. Watching from the battlements of his doomed city, Priam groans aloud and calls for the guards to open the city gates for his routed army. One warrior, Agenor, holds his ground, inspirited by Apollo, the only god who has not left for Olympos, but who stands close by the Trojan, “leaned there on an oak tree with close mist huddled about him.” Thus unnaturally emboldened, Agenor calls out to Achilles:“You must have hoped within your heart, o shining Achilles,

  on this day to storm the city of the proud Trojans.

  You fool! There is much hard suffering to be done for its winning,

  since there are many of us inside, and men who are fighters,

  who will stand before our beloved parents, our wives and our

  children,

  to defend Ilion.”

  But this is not true—the fighters have fled; everyone has fled. Even the gods have fled. Moments later, Agenor has also fled, spirited away by Apollo “in a dense mist,” out of the battle and Achilles’ range. Apollo himself takes on the likeness of Agenor and in this impersonation goads Achilles into giving chase, leading him away from the walls of Troy and allowing the terrified Trojans to bolt for the city.

  Playful on the surface, the interlude of futile chase directly pits Achilles against his own most implacable and malevolent enemy. No god hates him more personally than does Apollo.34 Dubbed “the most Greek” of the gods, Apollo of later classical times embodied the physical perfection of male youth and the cool rationalism and serene aloofness of the cultivated soul. In the Iliad, the traits that will later closely define him are discernible but not necessarily prominent.35 The god who sends the devastating plague in Book One, Apollo is also the god who can recall it—who can loigón amúmein, or “ward off destruction”—a prelude to his later attribute as a healer. He is the “God of Afar,” the god of withdrawal, at a distance from man, for whom he manifests disdain. His preferred dwelling is among the Hyperboreans, mysterious dwellers of the Far North, away from the imperfect, impure world of man.36 To round out his civilized virtues, Apollo is the god of music, associated particularly with the lyre. Reference is made to this skill by Hera, when she reminds Apollo that at the marriage of Achilles’ parents, “ ‘ you too feasted among them / and held your lyre, o friend of the evil, faithless forever.’ ”37

  The traits that define Apollo—bringer and averter of destruction, healing powers, aloofness and withdrawal, youthful beauty, skill in the lyre—have a striking counterpart in the Iliad: these are the traits that also define Achilles, the most beautiful hero at Troy, whose wrath has wrought plaguelike destruction, who was taught healing arts by Cheiron, and who is discovered by the Embassy in his tent “delighting his heart in a lyre.”38 That their actions as well as attributes are parallel is made clear in the opening lines of the Iliad, which foretell how both god and man direct their divine wrath at the same person, Agamemnon.39 A tradition survives of an alternative proem for the Iliad that made this yet more explicit:Sing for me now Muses, who have your homes on Olympos, how wrath [mēnis] and anger took hold of the son of Peleus, and the shining son of Leto; for angered at the king . . .40

  These striking similarities are of profound, tragic importance. In myth, “the gods often have a mortal double who could almost be mistaken for the god except for the fact that he is subject to death, and indeed is killed by the god himself.”41 That Apollo will be Achilles’ slayer, as he was the slayer of Patroklos, has long been known to Achilles. His mother has told him “ ‘that underneath the battlements of the armoured Trojans / I should be destroyed by the flying shafts of Apollo’ ”; another trait Achilles shares with Apollo, to a limited degree, through his divine mother, is the gift of prophecy.42

  Now, as Achilles gives chase to Apollo, the plain of Troy belongs to these two, the hero and the dark angel who shadows him so closely.43 Once the fleeing Trojans are safely battened inside the city walls, Apollo abruptly reveals his disguise in mocking triumph: “ ‘Why, son of Peleus, do you chase me, with those swift feet?’ ”

  “ ‘You have thwarted me,’ ” Achilles retorts, “ ‘most malevolent of all the gods,’ ” and as Apollo vanishes to Olympos, Achilles turns back to the walls of Troy. Suddenly the plain has emptied of the clamorous throngs. The Achaeans draw near Troy’s battlements, but as a silent and inconsequential presence. The great panorama of battle has telescoped down to a small, hard point, and there are only two persons visible on the plain—indeed, only two in the entire cosmos: Achilles and somewhere, not yet quite in focus, alone and very small, Hektor.

  The narrative point of view shifts starkly to Hektor and the inner turmoil of his soul. As Achilles approaches the Skaian Gates, murderous and invincible, it dawns on the Trojan hero, as it has never before, that there is an alternative to standing his ground. His nerve breaks; “trembling took hold of Hektor,” and, with the most swift-footed of all heroes in pursuit, he runs.

  There can be few passages in all of literature that evoke with such fierce veracity the complexity of a soldier’s courage. Like Achilles’, Hektor’s character has been undone. “I have learned to be valiant,” Hektor told Andromache, during their interlude together that now seems a very long time ago. At length, aided, deceitfully, by Athene, Hektor draws once more on this learned, unnatural knowledge and recollects himself.

  “Courage is a moral quality,” wrote Lord Moran in 1945, in his classic examination of the same, drawing upon his memory of behavior he had witnessed—and medically treated—in the trenches of an earlier war; “it is not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives.”44 Hektor’s choice and its tragic consequences occupy the entirety of Book Twenty-two—all of which follows here. And when at the last he determines to stand firm, the engagement commences between two noble men who both, when the Iliad opened, had wanted only to live.

  The Death of Hektor

  So those who had fled terrorized like fawns into the city

  dried off their sweat and drank and slaked their thirst,

  slumped on the splendid ramparts. The Achaeans, however,

  drew near the walls with shields inclined against their shoulders;

  and there ruinous fate bound Hektor to stand firm,

  before the Skaian Gates of Ilion.

  Now Phoibos Apollo hailed Peleion:

  “Why, son of Peleus, do you chase me, with those swift feet,

  you a mortal, I an undying god? You must not yet

  know that I am divine, you rage after me so strenuously.

  Is it of no concern, this business with the Trojans, whom you scattered

  in fear—

  who are by now cowering in the city, while you slope off here?

  You will never kill me; I am not marked by fate.”

  Then greatly stirred, swift-footed Achilles answered him:

  “You have thwarted me, most malevolent of all the gods, you who

  strike from afar,

  turning me here away from the city walls; otherwise many would

  have bitten the dirt before they arrived at Ilion.

  Saving them, you have robbed me of great glory,

  lightly, without fear of retribution;

  I would pay you back, if that power were in me.”The translation of this chapter is the author’s. Use of Lattimore’s translation resumes on page 192.

  So speaking, he made toward the city, intent on great things,

  straining like a prizewinning horse who with his chariot

  runs effortlessly, stretching over the flat—

  so swiftly did Achilles move his feet and knees.

  Old Priam first beheld him with his eyes

  as, shining like a star, Achilles streaked across the plain,

  the star that comes at summer’s end, its clear gleaming

  in the milky murk of night displayed among the multitude of stars

  —the star they give the name Orion’s Dog;

  most radiant it is, but it makes an
evil portent

  and brings great feverish heat on pitiful mortal men—

  just so did his bronze breastplate shine about Achilles running.

  The old man cried out and hammered his head

  with his hands; crying mightily, he called,

  imploring his beloved son; for he before the gates

  continued to stand firm, intent on combat with Achilles.

  To him the old man called piteously, reaching out his hands:

  “Hektor, for my sake, do not wait for this man

  on your own, without allies, lest you push your fate,

  broken by Peleion; he is so much stronger

  and is pitiless; would that he were as dear to the gods

  as he is to me—in short order would the dogs and vultures devour him

  prostrated, and bitter pain would leave my heart.

  This is the man who has bereaved me of many sons, brave sons,

  killing them, or selling them to the outlying islands.

  Even now there are two, Lykaon and Polydoros,

  whom I cannot see in the city of the cowering Trojans,

  sons whom Altes’ daughter Laothoë bore me, a queen among women.

  If they are alive somewhere among the army, then

  I will ransom them for bronze or gold; all this is inside—

  old, illustrious Altes endowed his daughter richly.

  But if they have already died and are in the house of Hades,

  this is grief to my heart, grief to their mother, we who bore them;

  but to the rest of the people, it will be grief less lasting

  than if you also should die, broken by Achilles.

  Come inside the walls, my child, that you may save the

  Trojan men and Trojan women; do not make a gift of glory to

  the son of Peleus, who will rob you of your very life.