The War That Killed Achilles Page 3

  When the Iliad opens, the Achaean and Trojan armies are mired in a stalemate after a decade of hostilities. The huge fleet of ships drawn from all parts of the Greek world lie beached on the sands below Troy’s fortified city, their ropes and wooden hulls rotting with disuse; and, as the epic makes very clear, the troops are desperate to go home.

  Within the first of its total 15,693 lines, the Iliad tells of the confrontation between the hero Achilles and his inept commander in chief, Agamemnon, the ruler of wealthy Mycenae. Following their confrontation, Achilles angrily withdraws himself and his men from the common cause and threatens to return to his home in Thessaly. These events occur in Book One (by early convention—or possibly by Homer himself—the Iliad is divided into twenty-four chapters or “Books”),38 and Achilles remains withdrawn until Book Eighteen; most of the epic’s action, then, takes place with its main hero absent. When his closest companion, Patroklos, is killed by the Trojan hero Hektor, Achilles returns to battle with the single-minded intent of avenging his friend. This he does, in a momentous showdown that ends with the death of Hektor. After Achilles buries Patroklos with full honors, Hektor’s father, Priam, the king of Troy, comes at night to the Greek camp to beg for the body of his dead son. Achilles relents and returns the body, and Hektor is buried by the Trojans. The epic ends with the funeral of Hektor. From ancient times, this epic has been called the Iliad (the first mention of its title is made by Herodotus39)—“the poem about Ilios,” Ilios and Ilion being the alternative names for Troy. Remarkably, there are no accounts, in Greek epic or mythology, of the fall of any of the Greek cities; all emotional pathos was invested in the loss of the Asiatic settlement of Troy.

  While Homer’s epic told of the events of a very narrow slice of the ten-year war, the full legend supported a sprawling web of subplots and a broad cast of both momentous and minor characters. The complete story of the war was once told by a series of six other epics, known collectively as the Trojan War poems of the Epic Cycle. Composed at various dates, all considerably later than the Iliad, they also, like the Iliad, drew on much older, common traditions. The Iliad itself shows a keen awareness of these other, possibly competitive narratives by making allusion to events and characters distinctive to them. Those places where it does so are always worth close study, for they can reveal traditional elements that the Iliad adapted or rejected—junctures, in other words, where our Iliad made deliberate, transforming choices. The epics of the cycle have long been lost to time, and only their rough outlines and a few stray lines survive, the primary source being a compendium of “useful literary knowledge” cautiously believed to have been written by a philosopher named Proclus, in the fifth century A.D. From these summaries we learn that the epic Cypria had told of the origins of the war, for example, while the Aethiopis told of the death and funeral of the war’s greatest hero, Achilles. Other epics told of the capture of Troy by the Greeks, the destruction of Troy, and the return of the Greek veterans to their homes.40

  Given the wide array of topics available, the Iliad’s selection of the narrowest sliver of the least consequential period of this all-encompassing war—a quarrel between a warrior and his commander during the protracted stalemate of the siege—is striking. Behind this choice there undoubtedly lay a much older epic song built on the familiar theme of wrath, revenge, and the return of a slighted warrior. As it is, the Iliad ’s chosen structure necessarily rivets attention on Achilles. This epic rendering thus focuses less on the launching of fleets or the fall of cities than on the tragedy of the best warrior at Troy, who, as the Iliad makes relentlessly clear, will die in a war in which he finds no meaning.41

  There is much evidence within the Iliad to suggest that Achilles was originally a folk hero possessed of magical traits and gifts that made him invulnerable, and that he was brought into epic at a relatively late date. In the Iliad, he bears the indelible traces of his earlier folk origins but has been stripped of all magically protective powers. Homer’s Achilles, the son of the goddess Thetis and the hero Peleus, is wholly mortal, and indeed his mortality is one of the unmoving poles around which the epic turns.

  Achilles is the vehicle for the Iliad’s greatness. It is his speeches that galvanize the defining events, his thrashing questioning that gives the poem its powerful meaning. “ ‘I for my part did not come here for the sake of the Trojan / spearmen to fight against them, since to me they have done nothing,’ ” he rages at his commander in chief, Agamemnon, in the heat of the quarrel that sets off the epic; “ ‘but for your sake, / o great shamelessness, we followed, to do you favour.’ ”

  “ ‘Nor, son of Peleus,’ ” says the Achaeans’ aged adviser Nestor, seeking to rein Achilles in, “ ‘think to match your strength with / the king, since never equal with the rest is the portion of honour / of the sceptred king to whom Zeus gives magnificence.’ ”

  “ ‘So must I be called of no account and a coward’ ” is Achilles’ response, ignoring old Nestor and speaking directly to Agamemnon, “ ‘if I must carry out every order you may happen to give me. / Tell other men to do these things, but give me no more / commands, since I for my part have no intention to obey you.’ ”42

  Thus, drawing on its long tradition, the Iliad used conventional epic events and heroes to challenge the heroic view of war. Is a warrior ever justified in challenging his commander? Must he sacrifice his life for someone else’s cause? How is a catastrophic war ever allowed to start— and why, if all parties wish it over, can it not be ended? Giving his life for his country, does a man betray his family? Do the gods countenance war’s slaughter? Is a warrior’s death compensated by his glory? These are the questions that pervade the Iliad. These are also the questions that pervade actual war. And in life, as in epic, no one has answered them better than Homer.

  Chain of Command

  Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles

  and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaeans,

  hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls

  of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting

  of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished

  since that time when first there stood in division of conflict

  Atreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

  —Iliad 1.1-7

  In the tenth year of the war against Troy, the two armies, Achaean and Trojan, are locked in what has become a long stalemate. In lieu of sacking Troy itself, the Achaeans have taken to raiding cities and settlements throughout the region, both on foot and from the sea, in the old Mycenaean manner.

  Now the victim of a recent raid comes forward to supplicate the plunderers. Chryses is a priest of the god Apollo, and among the war booty the Achaeans carried away was his daughter, Chryseis. With great courage, the old priest has traveled to the Achaean camp, displaying the gold staff of his priesthood and “carrying gifts beyond count” to supplicate the Achaeans and in particular “Atreus’ two sons, the marshals of the people,” Menelaos and Agamemnon.

  In his brief appearance, Chryses makes a sympathetic figure, as evidenced by the reaction of the Achaean army, which shouts its assent to his plea. Compliance with the priest’s humble and respectful request, then, will earn countless gifts of ransom, the support of the Achaeans, and undoubtedly the goodwill of Apollo, the god whom Chryses serves. There is, as it turns out, only one individual within the broad Troad for whom this straightforward act of both compassion and self-interest is unacceptable, and that is the commander in chief of the Achaean army, who also happens to be the person to whom, when the spoils were divided, the priest’s daughter was given:Yet this pleased not the heart of Atreus’ son Agamemnon, but harshly he drove him away with a strong order upon him: “Never let me find you again, old sir, near our hollow ships, neither lingering now nor coming again hereafter, for fear your staff and the god’s ribbons help you no longer. The girl I will not give back; sooner will old age come upon her in my o
wn house, in Argos, far from her own land, going up and down by the loom and being in my bed as my companion. So go now, do not make me angry; so you will be safer.”

  Thus does Agamemnon, son of Atreus and king of Mycenae, the wealthiest of all the coalition states, make his appearance in the Iliad, in a manner that has been found offensive down the ages. The ancient commentator Aristarchus, writing in the second century B.C., wished to delete his words on the grounds that it was “unfitting that Agamemnon should say such things,” while a modern commentator characterizes them as being “typical of Agamemnon at his nastiest.”1 The immediate consequence of Agamemnon’s arrogant dismissal of the priest is that he angers Phoibos Apollo—the god of healing, the archer who shoots from afar, and also, as it turns out, the bringer of plagues: Smintheus, “mouse-slayer,” is the epithet by which the priest Chryses addresses Apollo, from smínthos—“mouse”—the bringer of plagues, in Mysian, one of the languages of the Troad.2

  High on Mount Olympos, Apollo hears the prayer of his aggrieved priest and, enraged, strides down from the mountain pinnacles, his arrows clattering in his quiver. Taking aim first at the army’s animals, the mules and dogs, he then lets fly his arrows against the men:The corpse fires burned everywhere and did not stop burning.

  Nine days up and down the host ranged the god’s arrows, but on the tenth Achilles called the people to assembly.

  From this, his first action, Achilles declares himself the hero of the Achaean army and the hero of the epic. The son of the Thessalian king Peleus and an immortal goddess, Achilles is not Agamemnon’s equal in rank. Nonetheless, he takes charge of the crisis with authoritative confidence, displaying the leadership that his commander in chief lacks. Before the assembled men, he calls for “ ‘some holy man, some prophet, / even an interpreter of dreams . . . who can tell why Phoibos Apollo is so angry.’ ” In response, Kalchas, “the best of the bird interpreters,” such as every good army carries, steps forth with trepidation. Kalchas knows that his words will incite Agamemnon’s anger, and only after Achilles personally offers assurances for his safety does the old man speak.

  Apollo’s anger, and the plague, Kalchas declares, will continue to rage until Chryseis is returned to her father, “ ‘without price, without ransom. ’ ” Agamemnon’s reaction to this pronouncement, which is tantamount to a public rebuke, is immediate and unseemly. Insulting Kalchas, he nonetheless sourly agrees to surrender his prize—but only if he receives another prize as compensation. Once more it is Achilles who takes the initiative, stepping in to reason with his commander:“Son of Atreus, most lordly, greediest for gain of all men,

  how shall the great-hearted Achaeans give you a prize now?

  There is no great store of things lying about I know of.

  But what we took from the cities by storm has been distributed;

  it is unbecoming for the people to call back things once given.

  No, for the present give the girl back to the god; we Achaeans

  thrice and four times over will repay you, if ever Zeus gives

  into our hands the strong-walled citadel of Troy to be plundered.”

  “ ‘What do you want?’ ” is Agamemnon’s outraged and panicked response. “ ‘To keep your own prize and have me sit here / lacking one? Are you ordering me to give this girl back?’ ” Lashing out, he issues the threat to Achilles that will haunt him and the entire Achaean army for the rest of the epic: “ ‘Either the great-hearted Achaeans shall give me a new prize . . . or else . . . I myself shall take her, / your own prize, or that of Aias, or that of Odysseus.’ ” And in this way Agamemnon unleashes the wrath of Achilles.

  “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles.” The anger of Achilles is the engine that drives the epic. How that wrath is aroused, however, the fact that Achilles’ protagonist is Agamemnon as opposed to any of his other companions, is of singular importance.

  The summaries of the lost Trojan Cycle poems indicate that quarrels between allied heroes was a favorite theme of ancient epic.3 In the lost epic Cypria, for example, “Achilles quarrels with Agamemnon because he received a late invitation” to a feast. In the Aethiopis, “Achilles kills Thersites after being abused by him and insulted over his alleged love” of the Amazon queen. Also in the Aethiopis, “a quarrel arises between Odysseus and Ajax over the arms of Achilles,” which were to be awarded after his death to the best of the Achaeans .4 Finally, the Odyssey relates at some length a quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus. This last example is particularly noteworthy, as the story is sung by a Homer-like singer of tales: But when they had put away their desire for eating and drinking, the Muse stirred the singer to sing the famous actions of men on that venture, whose fame goes up into the wide heaven, the quarrel between Odysseus and Peleus’ son, Achilles, how these once contended, at the gods’ generous festival, with words of violence . . .

  —Odyssey 8.72ff.

  Given that he appears as a protagonist in most of the heroic quarrels cited, Achilles was evidently a character who attracted éris, or strife: “ ‘For- ever quarrelling is dear to your heart,’ ” Agamemnon says to Achilles in the heat of their confrontation, a knowing nod toward his wider reputation. Audiences of Homer’s time, therefore, would not necessarily have found the Iliad’s opening lines to be fully explanatory, since the “anger” or “wrath” of Peleus’ son could have referred to any of several possible epic stories.

  Epic tradition, then, appears to have offered numerous possibilities for igniting Achilles’ dramatically necessary anger. The fact that the Iliad rejected traditions about a quarrel between Achilles and a comrade-in-arms and chose instead to pit him against his commander in chief immediately establishes a more dangerous and interesting arena of contention. The éris is now more than a “quarrel,” and not only because Achilles is guilty of insubordination. What interests Homer are issues of authority and leadership on the one hand and duty and individual destiny on the other, issues brought swiftly to the fore by Achilles himself:“I for my part did not come here for the sake of the Trojan spearmen to fight against them, since to me they have done nothing. Never yet have they driven away my cattle or my horses, never in Phthia where the soil is rich and men grow great did they spoil my harvest, since indeed there is much that lies between us, the shadowy mountains and the echoing sea; but for your sake, o great shamelessness, we followed, to do you favour.”

  It is a great gauntlet-throwing speech, particularly remarkable for occurring at the very outset of the epic. What Achilles is challenging is the bedrock assumption of military service—that the individual warrior submit his freedom, his destiny, his very life to a cause in which he may have no personal stake. In modern times, the speech finds its counterpart in Muhammad Ali’s famous refusal to fight in Vietnam:I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. . . . No Viet Cong ever called me nigger. . . . I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder, kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people.

  Like Ali’s, Achilles’ words are particularly dangerous in that one can assume he is speaking aloud words that other, less charismatic men had long thought.

  The critical exchange, with the full tide of Achilles’ eloquence is as follows:“. . . but for your sake,

  o great shamelessness, we followed, to do you favour,

  you with the dog’s eyes, to win your honour and Menelaos’

  from the Trojans. You forget all this or else you care nothing.

  And now my prize you threaten in person to strip from me,

  for whom I laboured much, the gift of the sons of the Achaeans.

  Never, when the Achaeans sack some well-founded citadel

  of the Trojans, do I have a prize that is equal to your prize.

  Always the greatest part of the painful fighting is the work of

  my hands; but when the time comes to distribute the booty

  yours is the greater reward, and I with some small thing

  yet dear to me go back
to my ships when I am weary with fighting.

  Now I am returning to Phthia, since it is much better

  to go home again with my curved ships, and I am minded no longer

  to stay here dishonoured and pile up your wealth and your luxury.”

  “ ‘Run away by all means’ ” is Agamemnon’s retort, and recklessly he repeats, and now confirms, his earlier threat to strip Achilles of his prize, a captive woman named Briseis:“. . . that you may learn well

  how much greater I am than you, and another man may shrink back

  from likening himself to me and contending against me.”

  Achilles’ instinct is to draw his sword and kill the king; he is checked, hand on hilt, by the sudden intervention of the goddess Athene, visible to Achilles alone, who offers sympathetic words but counsels him to stay his hand. Whether Athene’s appearance is taken literally or metaphorically—the sober second thought sent by the goddess known for wisdom—Achilles is receptive and sheathes his sword.

  The full import of Achilles’ rebellion is difficult to gauge given the Iliad’s vagueness on the nature and basis of Agamemnon’s power. In other legend, related in detail by Hesiod, an epic poet following Homer, the coalition of Achaean forces was the result of a vow made years earlier by each of Helen’s many suitors to her father: each man pledged that, regardless of whom she married, he would unite with her other suitors to come to her aid, if the need should ever arise. All the major Greek heroes at Troy appear to have made this pledge—save Achilles, who was too young to have been a suitor (but, according to Hesiod, “neither warlike Menelaus, nor any other human on the earth would have defeated him in wooing Helen, if swift Achilles had found her still a virgin”). 5 The Iliad makes no mention of this legendary pact, but some kind of agreement like it nonetheless informs the epic. Consequently, Agamemnon appears to be commander in chief not only because he is king of the wealthiest kingdom of the coalition but because he is brother to Menelaos, husband of Helen, whose cause the coalition fights. Minor kings such as Achilles, Diomedes, and Odysseus, then, have come to Troy with their own troops voluntarily, not as vassals beholden to the Great King.