The War That Killed Achilles

by Caroline Alexander

  And many times you soaked the shirt that was on my body

  with wine you would spit up in the troublesomeness of your

  childhood.

  So I have suffered much through you, and have had much trouble,

  thinking always how the gods would not bring to birth any children

  of my own; so that it was you, godlike Achilles, I made

  my own child, so that some day you might keep hard affliction

  from me.

  Then, Achilles, beat down your great anger.”

  Phoinix’s long reminiscence of Achilles’ childhood is in itself strikingly antiheroic. Epic as a genre has “difficulty in dealing with the infancy and youth patterns” of its heroes, since this material is inherently unsuitable to heroic tales.40 The usual remedy is to attribute to the young hero precocious feats in his childhood; the infant Herakles, for instance, strangled snakes in his crib. The deeds of the young Achilles while under Cheiron’s tutelage in the mountains, where he reportedly slew wild beasts and outran deer, could surely have furnished the necessary material.41 Instead Homer deliberately supplanted tales of daring for a baby-sitter’s recollection of young Achilles’ spewing up his wine.

  Phoinix appears to have been invented by Homer for this scene.42 Broadly, he serves as a paternal figure in the place of the ever-absent Peleus, possessed of the kind of reminiscences expected from a father. Thus Phoinix—and Homer who has determinedly created him—humanizes Achilles at the precise moment the great warrior appears most pitiless; the young demigod was once a wholly human child, and not even Thetis, whose preoccupation with Achilles’ death seems to preclude all other aspects of her maternal relationship, provides such memorable, touching details of Achilles as he was before he came to Troy.

  This naturalistic prelude contrasts jarringly with the long, discursive tale that Phoinix next relates, a parable regarding a hero of old who, like Achilles, was angry with his people and who, like Achilles, rejected gifts of appeasement. It is a story from “the old days, the deeds that we hear of / from the great men, when the swelling anger descended upon them. / The heroes would take gifts; they would listen, and be persuaded.”

  In Phoinix’s parable, the hero Meleager kills his maternal uncle, incurring his mother’s curse. Angered by his mother’s act, Meleager remains resolutely inside his city, Kalydon, when it is besieged by an enemy people. A series of delegations arrive to beg him to come to his city’s defense—chiefs, priests, his parents, including the offending mother, and his comrades, all to no avail. Finally his wife, Kleopatra, successfully intervenes, and Meleager enters the fray and succeeds in turning the tide of battle. By returning so late in the day, however, he does not get the gifts the delegations had first offered:“Listen, then; do not have such a thought in your mind; let not

  the spirit within you turn you that way, dear friend. It would be

  worse

  to defend the ships after they are burning. No, with gifts promised

  go forth. The Achaeans will honour you as they would an immortal.

  But if without gifts you go into the fighting where men perish,

  your honour will no longer be as great, though you drive back the

  battle.”

  For all its great length and vividness, Phoinix’s long parable is a clumsy effort. Its climactic warning against the potential loss of gifts would seem to be pointless given Achilles’ own emphatic, adamantine rejection of any consideration of them. In fact, the parable is wholly pointless, for later in the epic Achilles will be swamped with gifts of honor, presented to him in the most public and gratifying manner possible. Indeed, the meaning of this interlude with Phoinix and his long speech seems to be precisely that he and it are inappropriate to Achilles’ circumstances: Achilles is not, for all Phoinix’s emotion, his “ ‘own child’ ” who will “ ‘some day . . . keep hard affliction from me.’ ” Peleus is Achilles’ father, not Phoinix, and the filial duty of caring for his real father in old age, as will be seen, hangs very heavy on Achilles’ heart. In all respects, in fact, Phoinix’s tender memories and extended plea relentlessly mangle the most defining touchstones of Achilles’ tragic life. Having fled from his own hated father, Phoinix came to Peleus, who “ ‘gave me his love, even as a father loves his own son / who is a single child brought up among many possessions’ ”; but it is Achilles who is the single child and who has just declared he would like to return to his father to enjoy these many possessions. Peleus was one of the heroes at the Kalydonian Boar Hunt—it is one of his best-known feats—yet in Phoinix’s rendition of the story of Meleager and the hunt, he never mentions Peleus—so much for heroic deeds’ winning everlasting glory.43

  In his long-winded discursiveness, in his insistence on “ ‘the old days also, the deeds that we hear of / from the great men,’ ” Phoinix is like no one else so much as Nestor. Stuck in his time warp, faithfully invoking the old traditions, Phoinix does not, for all his passion and tears, address a single syllable to Achilles’ most striking assertion—that the war is not worth the value of his life. The speech that no warrior before has uttered—a speech that indeed negates the warrior’s heroic code—receives in exchange only a conventional appeal to heroes of old. Perhaps for another hero, perhaps in another epic, such a time-honored tactic would have been persuasive, but this is Achilles, and this is the Iliad, and this is perhaps Homer’s declaration that the old heroic values enshrouded in their formless prolixity are no longer relevant. With his outright rejection of conventional gifts, conventional appeals, and, above all, the conventional heroic code, Achilles has crossed into new territory, where stories of what moved the men of old—kléa andrōn—have no force.

  Among the many idiosyncratic features of Achilles’ language are his unique words, his use of striking similes, of violent words and invective, and his “tendency to invoke distant places”:44 “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.”

  “Tomorrow, when I have sacrificed to Zeus and to all gods,

  and loaded well my ships, and rowed out on to the salt water,

  you will see, if you have a mind to it and if it concerns you,

  my ships in the dawn at sea on the Hellespont where the fish

  swarm

  and my men manning them with good will to row. If the glorious

  shaker of the earth should grant us a favouring passage

  on the third day thereafter we might raise generous Phthia.”

  The distant place Achilles most consistently evokes is his own home, Phthia; Phthia, related to phthíō, “waste away, decay, wane dwindle”;45 Phthia, where the soil is rich and men grow great, is also the Waste Land, and it is here that his heroic father is languishing, his kléos, or glory, if one is to judge by its absence in the Iliad, already dwindled. Phthia is where Achilles now chooses to bury himself for the rest of what he hopes will be a long and undistinguished life.46

  The choice of two destinies—to die at Troy and win everlasting glory or to return to live a long life in the Waste Land, where glory withers away—is, as far as can be judged from the material that has survived, also unique to the Embassy. Elsewhere, even in the Iliad, Achilles shows no awareness of this prophecy, and it would seem to be another feature that was invented by Homer for this remarkable scene. The prophecy serves to ensure that Homer’s audience—if not Phoinix and the Embassy delegates—do not overlook the considered, passionate decision of this now-reluctant warrior. While Achilles is still enraged with Agamemnon, it is no longer wrath that drives him homeward, but the determination to live.

  “ ‘Phoinix my father, aged, illustrious, such honour is a thing /
I need not. I think I am honoured already in Zeus’ ordinance’ ” is Achilles’ response to Phoinix’s shrill urging that he accept gifts:“These men will carry back the message; you stay here and sleep

  here

  in a soft bed, and we shall decide tomorrow, as dawn shows,

  whether to go back home again or else to remain here.”

  He spoke, and, saying nothing, nodded with his brows to Patroklos

  to make up a neat bed for Phoinix, so the others might presently

  think of going home from his shelter.

  Odysseus and Aias take the hint, and it remains for Aias, the least eloquent of the delegation, to speak in parting with a soldier’s blunt words. “ ‘He is hard, and does not remember that friends’ affection / wherein we honoured him by the ships, far beyond all others,’ ” Aias says, ostensibly addressing himself to Odysseus. “ ‘Pitiless.’ ”

  And it is Achilles the companion-in-arms, the comrade, whom Aias’ straight-talking words now fatally touch; more to the point, while Homer can challenge and interpret his tradition innovatively, he cannot credibly thwart its entire story—his legendary hero cannot simply exit Troy. “ ‘Son of Telamon, seed of Zeus, Aias, lord of the people: / all that you have said seems spoken after my own mind,’ ” Achilles begins, and with no thought for the high words that he just expressed about life and mortality, he reverts to the traditional theme, his wrath toward Agamemnon. Now he offers a vaguely stated compromise:“Do you then go back to him, and take him this message:

  that I shall not think again of the bloody fighting

  until such time as the son of wise Priam, Hektor the brilliant,

  comes all the way to the ships of the Myrmidons, and their

  shelters.”

  Significantly, when the defeated delegation returns to the Achaean camp, Odysseus, in debriefing Agamemnon and his anxious comrades, makes no mention at all of Achilles’ final position, reporting instead only that Achilles has said he is going home; it is as if Homer were determined to emphasize, unambiguously and unforgettably, that this was Achilles’ first choice: “ ‘And he himself has threatened that tomorrow as dawn shows / he will drag down his strong-benched, oarswept ships to the water. / He said it would be his counsel to others also, to sail back / home again.’ ”

  For centuries, scholars have debated the Embassy scene and what exactly it was that Achilles really wanted. Should he have accepted the gifts, or was he right to reject them? Since Achilles’ refusal to be appeased marks the beginning of his tragedy, the usual conclusion is that he made the wrong decision and he will learn his lesson. But the point of the Embassy scene was to establish that Achilles had three options, not two, and it is the third that will break his heart. Achilles’ tragic error did not lie in his acceptance or rejection of Agamemnon’s gifts; his tragic error was that he did not follow where his thoughts always seem to tend—to Phthia beyond the sea; to Peleus, his father; to home.

  In God We Trust

  From a peak on Mount Ida overlooking the plain of Troy, Zeus, the father of gods and men, sits in splendid isolation, “rejoicing in the pride of his strength . . . , watching the flash of the bronze, and men killing and men killed.” Hitherto the gods have been busily embroiled in the activities of the field, but now the epic pulls back to unfold a more chilling divine perspective, which is war as pure spectacle.

  Dawn has broken on the twenty-fifth day of the Iliad, and the longest day in the epic. Night does not come until well into Book Eighteen, and the intervening narrative encompasses the epic’s bloodiest, most unrelieved, and ultimately most momentous fighting.1 The harsh injunction that Zeus laid upon the other gods in Book Eight to keep clear of the battle is still in force: “ ‘And any one I perceive against the gods’ will attempting / to go among the Trojans and help them, or among the Danaans, / he shall go whipped against his dignity back to Olympos.’ ” Absent divine interference—and Achilles, who remains in his shelter, where the Embassy left him—the momentum of the war continues in favor of the Trojans, as Zeus intends.

  A cascade of similes drawn from the broadest sweep of life conveys the extent of slaughter in the now all-encompassing universe of battle. The Achaeans and Trojans square off “like two lines of reapers who, facing each other, / drive their course all down the field of wheat or of barley / for a man blessed in substance.” Although hard-pressed, the Achaean lines stand firm, “held evenly as the scales which a careful widow / holds, taking it by the balance beam, and weighs her wool evenly / at either end, working to win a pitiful wage for her children.” The infinite ways of wounding and of dying are paraded in pitiless detail. Pierced by a spear, a warrior’s “heart was panting still and beating to shake the butt end / of the spear.” An arrow driven into his bladder, a fallen warrior, in the hands of his companions, “gasped out his life, then lay like a worm extended / along the ground.”

  Outstanding performances by the most important Achaean heroes punctuate the long sweep of battle narrative and provide dramatic tension by delaying the inevitable arrival of Hektor and the Trojans at the Achaean ships, in accordance with Zeus’ earlier prediction. The most startling aristeía belongs to Agamemnon, in his most warrior-like moment in the epic. Having donned his armor, he takes up his splendid shield with its ten circles of bronze, studded with pale tin and dark cobalt, in the middle of which is “the blank-eyed face of the Gorgon / with her stare of horror, and Fear was inscribed upon it, and Terror.”

  The arming of Agamemnon, one of four elaborate arming scenes in the epic, is the prelude to what is one of the most unsavory series of slaughters in the war: “Agamemnon stabbed straight at his face as he came on in fury / with the sharp spear, nor did the helm’s bronze-heavy edge hold it, / but the spearhead passed through this and the bone, and the inward / brain was all spattered forth”; “as a lion seizes the innocent young of the running / deer, and easily crunches and breaks them caught in the strong teeth / when he has invaded their lair, and rips out the soft heart from them, . . . so there was no one of the Trojans who could save these two / from death”; “Hippolochos sprang away, but Atreides killed him dismounted, / cutting away his arms with a sword-stroke, free of the shoulder, / and sent him spinning like a log down the battle.”

  Briefly, the Trojans are routed and flee toward their city while Agamemnon “followed them always, screaming, / Atreus’ son, his invincible hands spattered with bloody filth.” This is less a portrait, in the grand manner, of a warrior gripped by battle fury than of a man unhinged. At length, Agamemnon’s bloody rant is ended by a wound to his arm, the effects of which are described in pointedly unheroic terms: pain breaks upon the son of Atreus, as when “the sharp sorrow of pain descends on a woman in labour, / the bitterness that the hard spirits of childbirth bring on.”

  One by one, the Achaeans’ best warriors limp off the field, and it is now the Trojan warriors who shine. The dramatic, thrilling climax of this long sequence is the triumphant arrival of the Trojans at the very gates of the Achaean camp. Beneath the high walls of the palisade that shelters the beached Achaean ships, Hektor, at the head of a pack of Trojans, heaves up a massive stone and hurls it at the gates. Groaning and splintering, the gates give way under the impact, and Hektor bursts in, “with dark face like sudden night,” shining “with the ghastly / glitter of bronze . . . ; and his eyes flashed fire.”

  Zeus is not the only god watching this spectacle. From his own lookout on a forested summit on the island of Samothrace, Poseidon regards the plight of the Achaeans with pity. Poseidon—Zeus’ younger brother, lord of the sea and shaker of the earth—is an implacable enemy of the Trojans, and along with the other immortals he bristles under his brother’s injunction to keep out of the fray. But Samothrace is in sight of Mount Ida, where Zeus is ensconced, and from this convenient vantage Poseidon is able to see not only the whole of the Trojan plain but also the strategic moment when Zeus turns his attention elsewhere.

  Seizing this moment in impulsive defiance, Poseidon descends t
he mountain in three long strides; the fourth brings him to his golden, glittering house in the depths of the sea, where he harnesses “his bronze-shod horses, / flying-footed, with long manes streaming of gold.” Driving these across the waves, “about him the sea beasts came up / from their deep places and played in his path, and acknowledged their master, / and the sea stood apart before him, rejoicing. The horses winged on / delicately, and the bronze axle beneath was not wetted.” Reaching the field of battle, Poseidon, in disguise, whirls through the demoralized Achaeans, inspiring them. The action of Book Thirteen is largely devoted to the brief respite the Achaeans win with Poseidon at their side.

  Soaring above the many memorable images—of the god of the sea in all his sweeping, glittering, exuberant glory, of the Achaeans weeping with weariness, of the mutilated and the dying—is the single transfixing moment when Zeus looks away from the plain of Troy, andturned his eyes shining

  far away, looking out over the land of the Thracian riders

  and the Mysians who fight at close quarters, and the proud

  Hippomolgoi,

  drinkers of milk, and the Abioi, most righteous of all men.

  He did not at all now turn his shining eyes upon Troy land . . .

  Zeus is bored with events on the Trojan plain. His attention has drifted; there are other mortals to watch, the Mysians, for example, who, it seems, are also fighters, or the Hippomolgoi, nomadic Scythian “Mare milkers.”2 His initial interest had been held by his vigilant concern that other gods stay out of the fray and that Hektor reach the ships; but with these events past, as he believes, his attention simply wanders.

  As an epic, the Iliad, by definition, narrates “the deeds of heroic or legendary figures”—in other words, the actions and events of men, and the emotional weight of the poem is borne by its mortal heroes and its few, but potent, heroines. Yet there is no action in the Iliad that does not have divine prompting. The epic opens with the “plan of Zeus,” pitting Achilles against Agamemnon, and other divine initiatives follow quickly: the plague sent by Apollo, the delusive dream sent by Zeus to Agamemnon, and the crisis to which the Achaeans have now arrived, with Hektor and the Trojans at their gates, in accordance with Zeus’ strategy to honor his pledge to Thetis. In this manner, it is possible to reduce the entire story of the Iliad to a series of divine actions.3