Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  “Zeus, all you immortals! Grant this boy, my son,

  may be like me, first in glory among the Trojans,

  strong and brave like me, and rule all Troy in power

  and one day let them say, ‘He is a better man than his father!’—

  when he comes home from battle bearing the bloody gear

  of the mortal enemy he has killed in war—

  a joy to his mother’s heart.”

  So Hector prayed

  and placed his son in the arms of his loving wife.

  Andromache pressed the child to her scented breast,

  smiling through her tears. Her husband noticed,

  and filled with pity now, Hector stroked her gently,

  trying to reassure her, repeating her name: “Andromache,

  dear one, why so desperate? Why so much grief for me?

  No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate.

  And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it,

  neither brave man nor coward, I tell you—

  it’s born with us the day that we are born.”

  A few more words, and they are parted—as we know, forever—Hector “aflash in arms,” Andromache “weeping live warm tears,” turning to face the separate fates Hector has foreseen for them.

  This scene is unique in the Iliad, an oasis of familial tenderness amid the gore of war. But it is also unique in world literature, the first time an ancient author (whether Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hebrew, or Greek) attempts to portray the unbreakable bond of affection between a married couple, the first time a family is shown as a loving unit.2 Andromache is bound to Hector not merely by the dutiful bond one might expect in a time of arranged marriages. There is more than duty here, so much so that it is not too extravagant to call it romantic love, a phenomenon commonly thought to have entered human relationships only with the arrival nineteen centuries later of the Courtly Love tradition.

  Similarly, the couple’s affectionate laughter at the infant’s needless fear and Hector’s easy willingness to doff his terrifying helmet to assuage the child suggest that both parents understand that childhood is a time apart, with special claims and needs that adults must bend to—a consciousness usually thought to have found expression no earlier than Rousseau’s Émile, which would trace its beginnings to the eighteenth century of our era. More striking even than the couple’s understanding of childhood is Hector’s touching humility in the face of a new generation, expressed in his prayer that his son will prove an even “better man than his father.” Not a few fathers, even of supposedly more enlightened societies, have proved incapable of such selflessness.

  This singular scene of Hector and his family on the walls of Troy gives us assurance that at least some people were “human” in our way of looking at things—that is, tenderly familial—long, long before scholars have been comfortable acknowledging.3 And it is just this depth of feeling among these three that renders the events to come so irremediably tragic.

  Achilles continues to brood in his tent even as Hector’s forces push the Greeks back against their ships, almost to the sea, and proceed to set the ships on fire. In response to the alarming proximity of a final Greek defeat, Achilles allows his inseparable boon companion, Patroclus, to take the field in his stead, even wearing Achilles’s armor and borne onto the plain in Achilles’s chariot, drawn by his own immortal steeds. Hector kills Patroclus, provoking in Achilles an unquenchable grief and impelling his return to the field (once he has been given back his concubine—untouched, as that desperate “dog-face” Agamemnon assures him). Achilles, unstoppable as a tyrannosaur, rages forth and—in the saddest scene in all of ancient literature4—cuts down Hector, whose soul “wing[s] down to the House of Death.” But Achilles is not done. Shouting “Die, die!” over the dead Trojan prince, he strips the body of its armor and invites the other Greeks to dishonor the corpse,

  all of them gazing wonder-struck

  at the build and marvelous, lithe beauty

  of Hector.

  And not a man came forward who did

  not stab his body,

  glancing toward a comrade, laughing: “Ah, look here—

  how much softer he is to handle now, this Hector,

  than when he gutted our ships with roaring fire!”

  Though Achilles holds funeral games in honor of Patroclus, builds a funeral pyre to incinerate his body, and buries the remains in a specially constructed tomb, he can no longer sleep and spends his days and nights driving around the tomb, Hector’s lashed corpse dragging behind his chariot. At length, another mourner, Hector’s father, Priam, who can bear this dishonoring no longer, comes to Achilles by night as a suppliant and begs the return of his son’s body. Priam’s inconsolable ancient visage, fouled by days and nights of mourning, and his desperate courage in crossing the battle lines at last reach Achilles’s spirit and he responds with human sympathy to the old king’s cry:

  “Revere the gods, Achilles! Pity me in my own right,

  remember your own father! I deserve more pity …

  I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before—

  I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.”

  Those words stirred within Achilles a deep desire

  to grieve for his own father. Taking the old man’s hand

  he gently moved him back.5 And over-

  powered by memory

  both men gave way to grief. Priam wept

  freely

  for man-killing Hector, throbbing,

  crouching

  before Achilles’ feet as Achilles wept

  himself,

  now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,

  and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.

  Zeus’s detached exclamation a little earlier in the story, after the death of Patroclus, can serve as epitaph for this scene, too:

  “There is nothing alive more agonized than man

  of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.”

  But the last line of Homer’s long poem belongs not to a god, nor to a king, nor to a living champion, but to Hector. His body, now reclaimed, is burned upon a pyre, his white bones collected in a golden chest, shrouded “round and round with soft purple cloths,” and buried beneath a barrow of “huge stones” on the storied, soon to be uninhabited, plain of Troy.

  And once they’d heaped the mound

  they turned back home to Troy, and gathering once again

  they shared a splendid funeral feast in Hector’s honor,

  held in the house of Priam, king by will of Zeus.

  And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses.

  IN HOMER’S EPIC every age since his has found relevance to its own time. For us, Achilles may resemble nothing so much as a pouting adolescent whose extraordinary physical maturity has far outstripped his judgment. The contemporary military historian Victor Davis Hanson has even compared Homer’s descriptions of his heroes’ exploits to rap lyrics that “glorify rival gangs who shoot and maim each other for prestige, women, booty, and turf.” Surely the audiences for both forms of entertainment have much in common, especially a need to be flattered about their aggressive attitudes. Homer’s patrons, after all, were down on their luck and had been for many generations: they were eighth-century aristocrats living in a transitional time—at the end of the Dark Age but revering memories of heroic ancestors who had lived in a better age, the heroic age of Agamemnon, Menelaus, and the other chieftains who had won everlasting glory in legendary battle.

  Because Homer’s subject is a siege five centuries old, his battlefield is full of military incongruities. He and his audience remembered, for instance, that the chieftains fought in chariots; but because men of the late eighth century had no idea how such warfare might have been conducted, Homer has his charioteers drop the heroes off on the battlefield where they dismount and then fight, often in close formation. The chariots, dimly recalled as essential equipage for aristocratic w
arfare, have little use in Homer beyond the aura of antiquity they lend to the proceedings. Once the heroes have dismounted, they appear to be much closer in technique and dress to the hoplite infantrymen of Homer’s own day, who wore heavy armor—helmet, shield, breastplate, greaves, sword, spear, and other bodily defenses that may have come to seventy pounds—fought in tight formation, and engaged the enemy at close quarters. They did not fling javelins from chariots as their ancestors had once done in a less populous world where warfare more closely resembled a game of chicken or a gang rumble than the massing of two trained armies on a field.

  This peculiar combination of the experienced and the imagined distances the action, setting it off from us (and from all its previous audiences) and giving it a slow-motion timelessness that is also part of its universal appeal. We know, for instance, that warriors have never had the opportunity to deliver elegantly wrought speeches to one another before fighting to the death—as happens repeatedly in the Iliad. But neither could Shakespeare’s Macbeth have taken the time, just before his last duel, to inform his challenger, Macduff, of his assurance by witches that he cannot be slain by “one of woman born,” nor could Macduff have taken the time to respond in four carved lines of iambic pentameter that he “was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d.” Both Homer and Shakespeare lift their warriors to the level of tableau and urn, where we can see them as their essential selves, caught for all time in characteristic poses.

  But we should not let the balletic and the anachronistic elements of Homer’s narrative conceal from us his basic realism: here is war as it was fought in Homer’s day, not in the time of Agamemnon. In legend, Homer was thought to have been a wandering blind bard (who sees more deeply because of his blindness), but this is almost certainly due to Homer’s description of a blind bard who performs in the Odyssey, later taken to be a self-description of the poet. Whatever the case, he must have been sighted, at least earlier in life, for there is too much in the Iliad of gritty reportage for us to think that the poet never saw battle. It would, in fact, be most unlikely if Homer did not serve as a soldier. The early tragedian Aeschylus fought at Marathon; his younger contemporary Sophocles was a general in the Athenian conquest of Samos; the philosophic gadfly Socrates was lauded for his heroism in three separate battles—Potidaea, Amphipolis, and Delium; the historian Thucydides was the admiral who failed the Athenians at Amphipolis; Xenophon’s military history, the Anabasis, was an account of his own wartime experience, the March of the Ten Thousand; the orator Demosthenes fought at Chaeronea and then organized Athens’s last defenses against Alexander the Great. There is scarcely a Greek figure of any consequence who did not serve in the military as a young man or did not afterwards take a keen interest in warfare. “War,” said the early philosopher Heraclitus, “is the father of all, the king of all.” And for Plato, greatest of all philosophers, war remains a necessity, “always existing by nature.”

  As we inspect more closely the battlefield that the poet presents to us, we can discern most of the elements of subsequent Western warfare, all of them innovative departures from the antiquated techniques of the Mycenaean chieftains. Despite the many descriptions of confrontations between two opponents, warfare is largely conducted as an affair of massed charges of armored infantry, moving slowly in their serried ranks, row upon row, attired not in aristocratic capes that sweep dramatically behind them as the wind streams over their dashing chariots but caparisoned like beetles, protected cap-à-pie in heavy bronze, chinking and clunking forward on foot like an unwieldy but inexorable machine:

  tight as a mason packs a good stone wall,

  blocks on granite blocks for a storied house

  that fights the ripping winds—crammed so close

  the crested helmets, the war-shields bulging, jutting,

  buckler-to-buckler, helm-to-helm, man-to-man massed tight

  and the horsehair crests on glittering helmet horns brushed

  as they tossed their heads, the battalions bulked so dense.

  Within three centuries, such terrifying displays as this inventive phalanx (a Greek word) will be supplemented by siege engines, counterfortifications, cranes, levers, and artillery, and military organization and division by rank will continue to evolve—but already in Homer’s day warfare had been essentially transformed.

  The Greek audience was moved by the personal valor of Homer’s soldiers. The world wept at Hector’s bravery, as it would weep so many centuries later over the words of the tragic cavalier poet Richard Lovelace when he left Lucasta’s “chaste breast” to fly “to war and arms”: “I could not love thee, dear, so much, / Loved I not honor more.” Such heroic sentiments must be voiced emphatically, memorably, repeatedly if the home front is to lend unstinting support to the men dying in the field. But the historic Greek army can be spotted—amid all the expressions of heroism—as the brutal innovation it actually was: a mass of men no longer individuals but subject to an iron discipline, technologically superior to their opponents, their generals having learned that wars must be managed artfully, each battle planned and played out in the mind before the armies are engaged, and that, insofar as possible, the time, the place, and the conditions of battle are to be chosen beforehand to enhance one’s own position and put the enemy at a disadvantage. From this moment in the late eighth century, the Western war machine is operational, its objective to field a force so lethal as to inspire abject terror in all opponents; and Western soldiers march through history no longer exemplars of aristocratic valor but as the component parts they actually are.

  “Western warfare,” writes Hanson, “is terrifying—both relatively and absolutely. The march of European armies has been both reckless and murderous, ultimately smashing anything that has raised its head over two millennia of organized military opposition. Other belligerent traditions in China, the Americas, India, and the Pacific islands also boast a continuous military culture of great duration. But they cannot claim a practice of similar effectiveness and flexibility, or a warring capability so accomplished in its devastation, as Alexander’s decade-long swath to the Ganges, Caesar’s ‘pacification’ of Gaul, the six-year spoliation of Europe in the Second World War, or the single-day atomization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki attest.”

  Hanson’s interpretations of ancient military history are much in favor among those, such as Dick Cheney, who are influential with George W. Bush. These advisers have signed on to the Greek view of war as “terrible but innate to civilization—and not always unjust or amoral if it is waged for good causes to destroy evil and save the innocent,” as Hanson puts it in An Autumn of War. Robert D. Kaplan, another contemporary commentator lionized by American militarists, has even urged in Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos that American foreign policy not allow itself to be constrained by Judeo-Christian morality and that “progress often comes from hurting others.” If we are to maintain our global preeminence, we must, in Kaplan’s view, return wholeheartedly and unashamedly to our pagan Greek roots.

  So much of our current military approach—and often even our vocabulary—can be traced back to the transformations that were taking place on the Greek battlefields of Homer’s time in the late eighth and early seventh centuries. Overwhelming military force, for instance, the doctrine put forward most notably in recent years by General Colin Powell at the outset of the First Gulf War, has proven far more decisive in diverse confrontations throughout Western history than the bravery of individual soldiers. Cold calculation and rational planning, not heroic rhetoric or mystical faith, have served as the principal weapons of the Western military machine. Through these means, the conquistadors, for instance, were able to subdue the populations of Mexico and the Caribbean and their haughty but brittle traditions within three decades. Whereas the Spaniards quickly took the measure of Aztec society, its strengths and weaknesses, by a combination of cool observation and inductive logic, the Aztecs, as Hanson puts it, “for weeks after the entry of the Castilians were still baffled
as to whether they were up against men or demigods, centaurs or horses, ships or floating mountains, foreign or domestic deities, thunder or guns, emissaries or enemies.”

  Of course, we occasionally overshoot. From Thermopylae to Little Big Horn to Vietnam, there stand out those historical exceptions that managed, at least for the moment, to overturn the machine of Western military dominance. And it has yet to be seen what the final outcome will be in the unending global “war” against terrorism, a war in which the enemy has no territory to defend and cannot be met on any known battlefield, a war in which all initiative lies with the enemy and every shadow may conceal a hideous surprise. Is it possible that international terrorism in the age of technological globalization represents an innovation for which we have yet to find an adequate military antidote (and is it possible that a military antidote is not what is needed)? Or is it more likely that our current arsenal of techniques will suffice to preserve our hegemony? Certainly, it is worth asking if the Western tradition of militarism, which can now boast nearly three millennia of success, is reaching the end of its usefulness, even if any attempt to answer this question definitively would be premature.

  Such a question, however distasteful to closed minds, is very Greek in spirit. Thinking the unthinkable, posing the impossible, considering all options: such habits of discourse can flourish only in free discussion among unfettered minds. A component of Greek militarism that we have yet to consider is that it was rooted in nascent notions of citizenship and popular participation. Homer understood that the societies of Agamemnon and Priam were tribal agglomerations, where all decisions of peace and war were made by powerful chieftains who could lead their followers into whatever dangers their whims might prompt them to. Thus are two societies brought to the brink of destruction by what should have been an ephemeral love affair. But Homer also tucked into his narrative examples of freewheeling discussion conducted by the Greek troops on everything from Agamemnon’s personal limitations to alternative tactics for tomorrow’s clashes. These level-headed, wide-ranging, open-ended discussions belong to the military culture of Homer’s day and later, not to twelfth-century Mycenae, and they seem in their specificity to spring from Homer’s own experience of a sort of campground town hall in which Greek troops took an intense interest in the enterprise they were engaged in and made lively contributions to the logistics of battle. It was the general invitation to discuss strategy beforehand—strategy being another Greek word, formed from stratos, Greek for “army,” stratēgos for “general”—coupled with a commitment to subsequent group discipline, that helped create the unrivaled killing machine of Greek warfare.