The War That Killed Achilles Read online

  Death: the Iliad is ever mindful that war is about men killing or men killed. In the entire epic, no warrior, whether hero or obscure man of the ranks, dies happily or well. No reward awaits the soldier’s valor; no heaven will receive him. The Iliad’s words and phrases for the process of death make clear that this is something baneful: dark night covers the dying warrior, hateful darkness claims him; he is robbed of sweet life, his soul goes down to Hades bewailing its fate.11 Again and again, relentlessly, the Iliad hammers this fact: The death of any warrior is tragic and full of horror. Even in war, death is regrettable.

  Diomedes’ aristeía overruns the boundaries of Book Five, continuing into Book Six, where his martial success serves to inspire his Achaean companions to battle fever. Amid the ensuing wave of slaughter, Menelaos captures a Trojan warrior, Adrestos, alive. At Menelaos’ knees, the captive begs for his life to be spared in exchange for a ransom from his father. Moved, Menelaos is on the point of sparing him when his brother, Agamemnon, comes “on the run” to dissuade him:“Dear brother, o Menelaos, are you concerned so tenderly

  with these people? Did you in your house get the best of treatment

  from the Trojans? No, let not one of them go free of sudden

  death and our hands; not the young man child that the mother

  carries

  still in her body, not even he, but let all of Ilion’s

  people perish, utterly blotted out and unmourned for.”

  The hero spoke like this, and bent the heart of his brother

  since he urged justice.12 Menelaos shoved with his hand Adrestos

  the warrior back from him, and powerful Agamemnon

  stabbed him in the side and, as he writhed over, Atreides,

  setting his heel upon the midriff, wrenched out the ash spear.

  Nestor in a great voice cried out to the men of Argos:

  “O beloved Danaan fighters, henchmen of Ares,

  let no man any more hang back with his eye on the plunder

  designing to take all the spoil he can gather back to the vessels;

  let us kill the men now, and afterwards at your leisure

  all along the plain you can plunder the perished corpses.”

  It is no surprise, perhaps, that Agamemnon should reject an offer of ransom; nor that his actions should be enthusiastically endorsed by zealous Nestor. Nestor’s suggestion that plunder be gained by stripping the dead corpses, rather than by taking ransom, is a potent reminder that the war at Troy is principally about the acquisition of possessions. The terms of Menelaos’ duel with Paris were that if Menelaos won, the Trojans would give back not only Helen but “Helen and all her possessions.” There has been no evidence to this point in the epic that heroes fight for anything as insubstantial as glory.

  The onslaught of Diomedes, aided by Athene, has made nonsense of the pledge Zeus gave Thetis to honor Achilles—“ ‘to help the Trojans, / and pin the Achaeans back against the ships and the water, / dying.’ ” With the Trojans in near rout, the Trojan prince Helenos urges on his brother Hektor a course of action that will have momentous consequences for the epic: Hektor will return to the city and instruct their mother, Hekabe, and the other women to make an offering to the city’s cult statue of Athene, promising the goddess rich gifts “ ‘if only she will have pity / on the town of Troy, and the Trojan wives, and their innocent children.’ ”

  Obediently, Hektor strides away to the city, his shield—a Mycenaean relic, to judge from its description—across his back: “against his ankles as against his neck clashed the dark ox-hide, / the rim running round the edge of the great shield massive in the middle.”13 If the ensuing scene between Hektor and the women of Troy was as famous in Homer’s time as it has become today, then the lengthy interlude that now intervenes between his departure and arrival, retarding the anticipated scene, may have been a tactic to increase audience expectation. As it is, as Hektor recedes, Glaukos “sprung of Hippolochos” and Diomedes emerge as if from nowhere to encounter each other in the space between the two armies.

  “ ‘Who among mortal men are you, good friend?’ ” Diomedes inquires, adding unconvincingly that if he is “ ‘some one of the immortals come down from the bright sky, / know that I will not fight against any god of the heaven.’ ”

  “ ‘High-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask of my generation?’ ” Glaukos responds.

  “As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.

  The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber

  burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.

  So one generation of men will grow while another

  dies. Yet if you wish to learn all this and be certain

  of my genealogy: there are plenty of men who know it.

  There is a city, Ephyre, in the corner of horse-pasturing

  Argos . . .”

  The famous opening lines of Glaukos’ speech are one of the Iliad’s more obvious debts to Eastern literature, and a close counterpart can be found, to choose one example from the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Psalms: “Man’s days are like grass, like the blossom of the field, so he blooms. For the wind passes over it and it is not there.”14 (On the other hand, similar words of the later Ecclesiasticus are probably inspired by Homer: “As with the leafage flourishing on a dense tree—it drops, and puts forth others—so with the generation of flesh and blood).15

  The story of Glaukos’ forebears forms a long, dense digression. At the heart of his tale is the saga of Bellerophontes “ ‘the blameless,’ ” who was falsely accused of trying to seduce the wife of a political rival, Proitos, whose advances he had in fact spurned. Reluctant to have him killed outright, Proitos instead sent Bellerophontes to Lykia, in southwest Asia Minor, bearing “ ‘murderous symbols, / which he inscribed in a folding tablet, enough to destroy life,’ ” which Bellerophontes was instructed to show to Proitos’ father-in-law. These “murderous symbols” are the Iliad’s only reference to writing and are thought to refer either to some memory of the Linear B pictograph script or to Hittite cuneiform. A folding tablet of wood such as Glaukos describes has been discovered in the wreck of a Bronze Age ship dating to the fourteenth century B.C., off the southern coast of Turkey.16

  The point of this digression is the revelation that Glaukos’ forebear migrated from Greece to Lykia, the land of a Trojan ally, and that in this complicated story Diomedes, who has been patiently standing on the battlefield listening, recognizes that he and the enemy before him are descended from men who were guest friends, men who had honored the sacred laws of hospitality to strangers. “Gladdened,” Diomedes drives his spear into the ground and extends his hand in friendship: “ ‘See now, you are my guest friend from far in the time of our fathers. . . . Let us avoid each other’s spears, even in the close fighting.’ ”

  Elsewhere in the epic, an exchange of genealogies between heroes establishes bragging rights as much as identity. Here, however, it serves the unheroic function of suggesting that if a hero tells his biography long enough, a common story may be found. Some of the very little that can be safely surmised of the Dark Age populations, and audiences, of Homer’s time is the fact that their forebears had traveled—from land to land and from people to people. Guest friendships—always a potent concept in Greek culture—had surely been formed along the way and would have been retained in long family memory. This function of genealogical recitations still persists today. In her memoir of coming of age in Somalia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes how “Somali children must memorize their lineage. . . . Whenever a Somali meets a stranger, they ask each other, ‘Who are you?’ They trace back their separate ancestries until they find a common forefather.”17

  The interlude between Glaukos and Diomedes concludes, and abruptly the Iliad has us back with Hektor, at the very gates of Troy. Immediately he is besieged by the Trojan women, asking “after their sons, after their brothers and neighbours, / their husbands; and he told them to pray to the immortals, / all,
in turn; but there were sorrows in store for many.”

  Hektor’s arrival marks the second time the Iliad has opened up the civilian world inside the walls of Troy. The first occasion mostly served to introduce Helen, at which time, during the optimistic lull preceding the duel between Paris and Menelaos that was intended to end the war, there was a sense of something close to peace: from the walls of Troy, Priam and Helen had looked down on the men of both camps lolling in the grass, their armor piled beside them. Now Troy is again at war, and from the walls where Helen watched her husbands prepare for battle, the city’s desperate women have been forced to watch the devastation of their men; “but there were sorrows in store for many,” and this despite their pleas to every god in heaven.

  Turning from them, Hektor enters the palace of Priam, with its smooth-stone cloister walks and sleeping chambers—fifty in all for his many sons and twelve for his daughters, where, in pointed comparison with Paris and Helen, each son sleeps “beside his own wedded wife,” each son-in-law beside “his own modest wife.” In the wonderful calm of these smooth-stone cloisters, Hektor meets his mother, Hekabe, and one of his sisters, the lovely Laodike. Resisting their pleas to take a rest, Hektor charges his mother with the task of making an offering to the statue of Athene, repeating the injunction given to him by Helenos. He himself will look for Paris and, once again, drag him out to battle:“So go yourself to the temple of the spoiler Athene,

  while I go in search of Paris, to call him, if he will listen

  to anything I tell him. How I wish at this moment the earth might

  open beneath him. The Olympian let him live, a great sorrow

  to the Trojans, and high-hearted Priam, and all of his children.

  If only I could see him gone down to the house of the Death God,

  then I could say my heart had forgotten its joyless affliction.”

  Just as Glaukos’ exchange with Diomedes established that friendship is not confined to allies, so Hektor’s relationship with Paris establishes that hatred is not confined to the enemy. When Hektor leaves, the women select an elaborate robe and with tearful supplication one of them lays their offering on the knees of Athene’s statue, praying for pity upon “ ‘the town of Troy, and the Trojan wives, and their innocent children.’ / She spoke in prayer, but Pallas Athene turned her head from her.”

  Hektor finds his brother Paris in his chamber, “busy with his splendid armour,” where Helen is sitting with her women; this, it appears, is how Paris and Helen spend most of their days. “ ‘Strange man!’ ” Hektor rebukes him. “ ‘The people are dying around the city and around the steep wall / as they fight hard; and it is for you that this war with its clamour / has flared up about our city.’ ” Compliant, almost cheerfully so, as is his way, Paris allows that Helen had just been “ ‘winning me over / and urging me into the fight.’ ”18 Turning from her women, Helen herself addresses Hektor, “in words of endearment” and also with characteristic words of self revilement.

  This second meeting with Helen and Paris essentially repeats many of the elements of the first. Then as now their relationship is most starkly defined by Helen’s loathing of her Trojan husband and herself. Yet the repetition is strategic. The sad, bitter union between these two agents of the war is reestablished here in order to set at best advantage one of the Iliad’s most memorable scenes—the meeting of Hektor with his own wife, Andromache, and their son.

  Hektor had returned to Troy, it will be recalled, only to enjoin his mother and the Trojan women to supplicate Athene. Now, spontaneously, he decides to look for his own wife. When he does not find her at home, he asks their housekeeper of her whereabouts and is told that, hearing the Trojans were falling back, Andromache had gone to the wall “ ‘like a woman / gone mad, and a nurse attending her carries the baby.’ ” Hektor, believing he has missed his wife, returns the way he had come and is nearing the Skaian Gates, “whereby he would issue into the plain.” Suddenly Andromache comes running to meet him—a few steps more and Hektor would have been out the gate and one of the most celebrated scenes in literature would not have happened.

  She came to him there, and beside her went an attendant carrying

  the boy in the fold of her bosom, a little child, only a baby,

  Hektor’s son, the admired, beautiful as a star shining,

  whom Hektor called Skamandrios, but all of the others

  Astyanax—lord of the city; since Hektor alone saved Ilion.

  Hektor smiled in silence as he looked on his son, but she,

  Andromache, stood close beside him, letting her tears fall,

  and clung to his hand and called him by name and spoke to him:

  “Dearest,

  your own great strength will be your death, and you have no pity

  on your little son, nor on me, ill-starred, who soon must be your

  widow;

  for presently the Achaeans, gathering together,

  will set upon you and kill you; and for me it would be far better

  to sink into the earth when I have lost you, for there is no other

  consolation for me after you have gone to your destiny—

  only grief.”

  Andromache is already a casualty of the war. Her father, Eëtion, was killed by Achilles along with her seven brothers; her mother, who had been captured and ransomed by Achilles, died shortly afterward, perhaps of grief.

  “Hektor, thus you are father to me, and my honoured mother, you are my brother, and you it is who are my young husband. Please take pity upon me then, stay here on the rampart, that you may not leave your child an orphan, your wife a widow, but draw your people up by the fig tree, there where the city is openest to attack, and where the wall may be mounted. . . .”

  Then tall Hektor of the shining helm answered her: “All these

  things are in my mind also, lady; yet I would feel deep shame

  before the Trojans, and the Trojan women with trailing garments,

  if like a coward I were to shrink aside from the fighting;

  and the spirit will not let me, since I have learned to be valiant

  and to fight always among the foremost ranks of the Trojans,

  winning for my own self great glory, and for my father.

  For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it:

  there will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish,

  and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear.

  But it is not so much the pain to come of the Trojans

  that troubles me, not even of Priam the king nor Hekabe,

  not the thought of my brothers who in their numbers and valour

  shall drop in the dust under the hands of men who hate them,

  as troubles me the thought of you, when some bronze-armoured

  Achaean leads you off, taking away your day of liberty,

  in tears; and in Argos you must work at the loom of another,

  and carry water from the spring Messeis or Hypereia,

  all unwilling, but strong will be the necessity upon you;

  and some day seeing you shedding tears a man will say of you:

  ‘This is the wife of Hektor, who was ever the bravest fighter

  of the Trojans, breakers of horses, in the days when they fought

  about Ilion.’

  So will one speak of you; and for you it will be yet a fresh grief,

  to be widowed of such a man who could fight off the day of your

  slavery.

  But may I be dead and the piled earth hide me under before I

  hear you crying and know by this that they drag you captive.”

  So speaking glorious Hektor held out his arms to his baby, who shrank back to his fair-girdled nurse’s bosom screaming, and frightened at the aspect of his own father, terrified as he saw the bronze and the crest with its horse-hair, nodding dreadfully, as he thought, from the peak of the helmet. Then his beloved father laughed out, and his honoured mother, and at once glor
ious Hektor lifted from his head the helmet and laid it in all its shining upon the ground. Then taking up his dear son he tossed him about in his arms, and kissed him.

  With the baby in his arms, Hektor prays aloud to Zeus that his son will thrive and grow great and come to rule over Ilion, that the Trojans will say of him “ ‘He is better by far than his father.’ ” Listening to her husband’s prayer, Andromache smiles through her tears, and Hektor, pitying her, strokes her hand and takes his leave.

  “Hektor of the shining helm”: this was not, as it turns out, a heroic attribute. Unheroic, too, is Hektor’s unique prayer that his son be called “better by far than his father,” a father’s instinctive inversion of the conventional dictate that sons are inferior to the heroic generation that preceded them. Much in this scene has been inverted. It is Andromache who, with her naïve and pitiful plea, gives military directives, begging her husband to “ ‘stay here on the rampart, . . . draw your people up by the fig tree, there where the city / is openest to attack’ ”: the Hellenistic commentator Aristarchus wanted to excise these lines on the grounds that “the words are inappropriate to Andromache, since she sets herself up against Hektor in generalship.”19 On the other hand, it is Hektor the warrior who disarms to toss and kiss his child.

  The actions that most memorialize Hektor, here and later, are emphatically unheroic, and commentators over the years have sourly remarked upon the discrepancy between his outstanding reputation as a warrior and, relative to other heroes, his modest accomplishments—and even weaknesses—on the battlefield; but it is precisely these inconsistencies that render him one of the most believable and sympathetic figures in the Iliad. Perhaps not a warrior by nature—“ ‘I have learned to be valiant’ ”—the husband and father shoulders the burden that has fallen unfairly upon him and fights the war he hates for a cause he disowns out of honor and duty. 20