Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  chirping to break the heart but the snake gulped them down

  and the mother cried out for her babies, fluttering over him …

  he coiled, struck, fanging her wing—a high thin shriek!

  But once he’d swallowed down the sparrow with her brood,

  the son of crooked Cronus who sent the serpent forth

  turned him into a sign, a monument clear to see—

  Zeus struck him to stone! And we stood by,

  amazed that such a marvel came to light.

  So then,

  when those terrible, monstrous omens burst in

  on the victims we were offering to the gods,

  Calchas swiftly revealed the will of Zeus:

  ‘Why struck dumb now, my long-haired Achaeans?

  Zeus who rules the world has shown us an awesome sign,

  an event long in the future, late to come to birth

  but the fame of that great work will never die.

  As the snake devoured the sparrow with her brood,

  eight and the mother made the ninth, she’d borne them all,

  so we will fight in Troy that many years and then,

  then in the tenth we’ll take her broad streets.’ ”

  It may be hard—from the point of view of a twenty-first-century Westerner—to imagine what comfort such an omen could give the Greek troops. Indeed, Homer calls its symbols “terrible, monstrous” and, by his repetition of the phrase “she’d borne them all,” hints at his sympathy for the Trojans in their coming demise, as well as for the sparrows “chirping to break the heart.” Such omens were of but fitful comfort not only because of their obscurity—as Odysseus says, “Courage, my friends, hold out a little longer. / Till we see if Calchas divined the truth or not”—but because they lack detail. All right, perhaps the Greeks will win, but the omen does not count the cost either to the army or to individuals.

  Despite the limited insights that an individual can gain into his (or another’s) fate, there is also a way in which the vast interaction of the Trojan War can be plotted with almost mathematical precision, as if it were an extremely complex and elusive algebraic formula in game theory. It is this formula that Homer means to reveal to us, a deliriously elaborate three-dimensional portrayal of human affairs, which can show us just how each rounded figure has played his or her part and how each one’s part has interacted with the others’ parts to make the story that we have. Homer, therefore, intends to offer us prognostication in reverse, insight after the fact. Eleven centuries after Homer, the Greek Sophist Philostratus will articulate a creed on prognostication that shows us how long the Greeks believed the same thing: “Gods perceive future events, mortals present ones, whereas the wise sense those that are imminent.” Though not all are equally far-seeing, there is a pattern to be discerned, and Homer will unveil it for us.

  To do this, he relies on a seemingly divine ability—aided, no doubt, by the Muse he regularly invokes—to give us living portraits in a few deft strokes. He must handle three immense casts of characters—the gods, the Greeks, and the Trojans—each replete with quirks and characteristics of its own. Yet he manages to give to each a concrete realm that lends it vivid reality. It is perhaps not so surprising that the self-defeating struggles within the Greek army are given with characterization, force, and familial details (a sense of the place each champion hails from, what kind of people he left behind), details that evoked recognition and emotion from Homer’s proudly Greek audiences. Nor do we, so many centuries since anyone prayed to a Greek god, find it so very unlikely that the gods can still thrill us with their size and speed, their combination of divine generosity and supernal fury, their everlasting banquets and their spite. They are, after all, the eternal superheroes of human imagination.

  Surely astonishing, though, is the presentation of the Trojans, who, though the sworn enemies of Homer’s Greeks, are given full humanity. The legendary New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges has written that war normally creates a cruel dynamic: “We demonize the enemy so that our opponent is no longer human.… In most mythic wars this is the case. Each side reduces the other to objects—eventually in the form of corpses.” Though no one in history has greater claim to Greek nationality than Homer, nor is there a war more mythic than the Trojan War, amazing Homer never fails to make his Trojans at least as sympathetic as his Greeks. Homer in his generosity toward the Trojan enemy serves as the exception that proves Hedges’s rule.

  Thus do the unassailable towers and ramparts of “holy Troy” rise once more for each of Homer’s readers, its mighty Scaean Gates, its plain intersected by the flowing Scamander and ending at the Ocean’s edge where the thousand hollow ships are beached, its “deep-breasted women” standing on the battlements “trailing their long robes.” Even the Trojan fighting style is distinctive, hysterical in comparison with the Greek:

  Now with the squadrons marshalled, captains leading each,

  the Trojans came with cries and the din of war like wildfowl

  when the long hoarse cries of cranes sweep on against the sky

  and the great formations flee from winter’s grim ungodly storms,

  flying in force, shrieking south to the Ocean gulfs, speeding

  blood and death to the Pygmy1

  warriors, launching at daybreak

  savage battle down upon their heads.

  But Achaea’s armies

  came on strong in silence, breathing

  combat-fury,

  hearts ablaze to defend each other to

  the death.

  The characters on the Trojan side are distinct and individual. Helen, the cause of the war, has few moments in this drama, but they are unforgettable. We find that she spends her time creating an autobiographical work of art on the implications of her abduction, a sort of “My Life and Times”:

  weaving a growing web, a dark red

  folding robe,

  working into the weft the endless bloody struggles

  stallion-breaking Trojans and Argives armed in bronze

  had suffered all for her at the god of battle’s hands.

  Hearing that Paris and Menelaus, “her husband long ago,” are to fight it out in single combat, while the two sides look on, her heart is filled “with yearning warm and deep/for her husband long ago, her city and her parents.” Helen is a sincere woman, and the robe she works is not a form of egotistical self-praise but an expression of her condition as a woven figure who cannot undo her thread, a pawn in the game of gods and men.

  “Quickly cloaking herself in shimmering linen,” “live tears welling,” Helen rushes to the walls of Troy, where she is observed by “the old men of the realm,” whom Homer compares to grasshoppers or, in Fagles’s translation, “cicadas”—

  settled on treetops, lifting their voices through the forest,

  rising softly, falling, dying away … So they waited,

  the old chiefs of Troy, as they sat aloft the tower.

  And catching sight of Helen moving along the ramparts,

  they murmured one to another, gentle, winged words:

  “Who on earth could blame them? Ah, no wonder

  the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered

  years of agony all for her, for such a woman.”

  Thus, as we are at last allowed to glimpse the fabled Helen through the old men’s eyes, does Homer heighten our appreciation of her beauty.

  While the old men murmur on, hoping that Helen, despite her resemblance to “a deathless goddess,” will “go home in the long ships,” for she has been “down the years an irresistible sorrow,” King Priam receives her with exquisite kindness:

  “Come over here, dear child. Sit in front of me,

  so you can see your husband of long ago,

  your kinsmen and your people.

  I don’t blame you. I hold the gods to blame.…

  Here, come closer,

  tell me the name of that tremendous fighter.”

  And Helen spea
ks, revealing her conflicted state of mind:

  “I revere you so, dear father, dread you too—

  if only death had pleased me then, grim death,

  that day I followed your son to Troy, forsaking

  my marriage bed, my kinsmen and my child,

  my favorite, now full-grown,

  and the lovely comradeship of women my own age.

  Death never came, so now I can only waste away in tears.

  But about your question—yes, I have the answer.

  That man is Atreus’ son Agamemnon, lord of empires,

  both a mighty king and a strong spearman too,

  and he used to be my kinsman, whore that I am!

  There was a world … or was it all a dream?”

  In a later speech, she will ring a change on her self-description—“bitch that I am”—then once again “whore that I am,” a woman whipped by conscience, if enslaved by passion.

  Meanwhile, down on the field of battle, Paris, her abductor, a sort of matinee idol with little staying power, is about to lose his life in the hand-to-hand combat with Menelaus, who is by far the better fighter. But Paris’s great patron Aphrodite intervenes, wraps her protégé in “swirls of mist,” and snatches him away, setting him down “in his bedroom filled with scent.” Then the goddess lures Helen to the bed where Paris lies, “glistening in all his beauty.” Though Helen at first protests with spirit, she in the end succumbs to the goddess and to Paris’s invitation to “lose ourselves in love,” while Homer shows us Menelaus stalking “like a wild beast, up and down the lines,” trying to discover where Paris has hidden himself.

  After nine years of interminable war, both sides are battle-weary. Homer lets us overhear their exhausted attempts to find an ending: the Greeks hold a kind of soldierly town meeting and consider sailing home, their objective unachieved, while not a few Trojans are ready to surrender Helen—only Paris will not have it, and Paris, prince of Troy, can have his way. The hand-to-hand combat between Paris and Menelaus seemed for a moment to portend a solution—whoever won, it was agreed by both sides, would win the woman and end the war—but Paris’s magical disappearance means that the wholesale butchery must continue:

  At last the armies clashed at one strategic point,

  they slammed their shields together, pike scraped pike

  with the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze

  and their round shields pounded, boss on wielded boss,

  and the sound of struggle roared and rocked the earth.

  Screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath,

  fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood.

  As we come to know more and more of the warriors on each side, their families and rearing, their present fears and future hopes, Homer’s unblinking descriptions of battle wear us down and, like the fighters themselves, we begin to dread the coming of day, which can lead only to more gore, as in the sequence in which Greek Diomedes, under the protection of Athena, brings down Trojan Pandarus:

  With that he hurled and Athena drove the shaft

  and it split the archer’s nose between the eyes—

  it cracked his glistening teeth, the tough bronze

  cut off his tongue at the roots, smashed his jaw

  and the point came ripping out beneath his chin.

  The Iliad contains hundreds of similar descriptions: the body of a man we have come to know is ripped open, his entrails spilling out, as he goes down, clawing the dust in “black waves of pain,” “and the dark comes swirling thick across his eyes.” But though Homer may intend these passages to impress on us the cost of war, he never means merely to disgust. War may be hell, but it is glorious hell, the height of human suffering, the pith of human virtue, the acme of human achievement, combining the ultimate tragedy of death with the lasting grace of the great deed—the greatest of all deeds, courage in combat. Because of this, Homer can admire Menelaus “crazed for sweet human blood,” an example of what the dauntless Ajax, second in valor only to Achilles on the Greek side, calls “the joy of war.”

  “The skin of the coward changes all the time,” avers the immensely self-possessed Cretan captain Idomeneus, who will live to return home (and become the subject of Mozart’s pageant-like early opera Idomeneo):

  “he can’t get a grip on himself, he can’t sit still,

  he squats and rocks, shifting his weight from foot to foot,

  his heart racing, pounding inside the fellow’s ribs,

  his teeth chattering—he dreads some grisly death.

  But the skin of the brave soldier never blanches.

  He’s all control. Tense but no great fear.

  The moment he joins his comrades packed in ambush

  he prays to wade in carnage, cut-and-thrust at once.”

  On seeing such a warrior as charging Idomeneus “fierce as fire,” comments Homer with admiration,

  Only a veteran steeled at heart could watch that struggle

  and still thrill with joy and never feel the terror.

  Or as George C. Scott, in his unforgettable portrayal of the battle-hardened General George S. Patton, admits as he surveys a battlefield littered with the wounded and the dead, “I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life.”

  ACHILLES MAY BE the incomparable Greek champion, but because he spends most of the poem offstage nursing a grudge in his tent, he is not the ultimate hero of the Iliad (which, after all, means a work about Ilium, the ancient name for Troy). That position is reserved for the Trojan champion Hector “breaker of horses,” son of King Priam and and Queen Hecuba, Paris’s brother, the man who almost singlehandedly animates the Trojan troops with fighting spirit while never doubting that his fate is to die on the plain of Troy, leaving his beloved wife Andromache and their son Astyanax to the mercies of the Greeks. We have no trouble finding Achilles in his massive strength simple and credible, as well as so many of the other heroes that Homer describes for us. But Homer’s Hector, though “a stallion full-fed at the manager” and a lion “claw-mad for battle,” is a far more complicated cat than any of his principal adversaries, beneath his bellicose facade a man “of gentle temper,” as Helen calls him, and, in the end, no match for Achilles.

  Like the other heroes, he is wedded to what he calls “the lovely give-and-take of war.” But he is also wedded to Andromache in a male-female soul friendship. He takes time out from battle to have what he senses may be his last meeting with “my own dear wife and my baby son.” Homer, though he comments little on the action of his characters, allows himself in this meeting a verbal tenderness seldom found in his poem, calling Andromache Hector’s “warm, generous wife” and the daughter of a “gallant-hearted” father, naming Astyanax “the darling of [Hector’s] eyes and radiant as a star,” and showing Hector “the great man of war breaking into a broad smile, his gaze fixed on his son, in silence.” The silence is important, for Hector is not an effusive man.

  Andromache begs him to withdraw from the battle, for she has already lost her entire family—“the great godlike runner Achilles butchered them all.” “You, Hector,” she pleads,

  “you are my father now, my noble mother,

  a brother too, and you are my husband, young and warm and

  strong!

  Pity me, please! Take your stand on the rampart here,

  before you orphan your son and make your wife a widow.”

  But Hector cannot remain safe within the unassailable walls of Troy. His reply is considered and sad:

  “All this weighs on my mind too, dear woman.

  But I would die of shame to face the men of Troy

  and the Trojan women trailing their long robes

  if I would shrink from battle now, a coward.

  Nor does the spirit urge me on that way.

  I’ve learned it all too well. To stand up bravely,

  always to fight in the front ranks of Trojan soldiers,

  winning my father gr
eat glory, glory for myself.

  For in my heart and soul I also know this well:

  the day will come when sacred Troy must die,

  Priam must die and all his people with him,

  Priam who hurls the strong ash spear …

  Even so,

  it is less the pain of the Trojans still to come

  that weighs me down, not even of Hecuba herself

  or King Priam, or the thought that my own brothers

  in all their numbers, all their gallant courage,

  may tumble in the dust, crushed by enemies—

  That is nothing, nothing beside your agony

  when some brazen Argive hales you off in tears,

  wrenching away your day of light and freedom!

  Then far off in the land of Argos you must live,

  laboring at a loom, at another woman’s beck and call,

  fetching water at some spring, Messeis or Hyperia,

  resisting it all the way—

  the rough yoke of necessity at your neck.

  And a man may say, who sees you streaming tears,

  ‘There is the wife of Hector, the bravest fighter

  they could field, those stallion-breaking Trojans,

  long ago when the men fought for Troy.’ So he will say

  and the fresh grief will swell your heart once more,

  widowed, robbed of the one man strong enough

  to fight off your day of slavery.”

  Then, Homer tells us, Hector “in the same breath” reaches down for his son, but the child screams out “at the sight of his own father,”

  terrified by the flashing bronze, the horsehair crest,

  the great ridge of the helmet nodding, bristling terror—

  so it struck his eyes. And his loving father laughed,

  and his mother laughed as well, and glorious Hector,

  quickly lifting the helmet from his head,

  set it down on the ground, fiery in the sunlight,

  and raising his son he kissed him, tossed him in his arms,

  lifting a prayer to Zeus and the other deathless gods: