The War That Killed Achilles

by Caroline Alexander

  “ ‘And I wish that I could hide him away from death and its sorrow’ ”: from Hephaistos’ inspired hammer emerge all those things that he knows he cannot give Achilles. Achilles’ new shield, like his other divine gifts—the armor, the spear, and the horses he inherited from his father—once again serves less to protect him than to highlight his mortality. The new shield Achilles will bear before him into war underscores the enormity of all he is to lose—which is all of life.

  Thetis delivers the armor to her son at dawn, setting it, clattering, on the ground before him, where its terrifying brilliance causes the Myrmidons to look away: “Only Achilles / looked, and as he looked the anger came harder upon him / and his eyes glittered terribly under his lids, like sunflare.”

  Running his hands over Hephaistos’ immortal handiwork, Achilles “satisfie[s] his heart with looking” and then strides forth to make official his return to his army, and to the war. Proceeding along the shore, he calls his great cry, and from the ships and shelters Achaeans of every rank stream forth to meet him, stewards and helmsmen as well as warriors, some wounded and leaning on their spears; “and last of them came in the lord of men Agamemnon.”

  The epic action has returned to where it began, in an assembly in the Achaean camp, at a time of crisis that has taken many lives, and with Achilles assuming de facto command of the listening army. His “unsaying” of his anger is eloquent, unsqueamish, and succinct:“Son of Atreus, was this after all the better way for

  both, for you and me, that we, for all our hearts’ sorrow,

  quarrelled together for the sake of a girl in soul-perishing hatred?

  I wish Artemis had killed her beside the ships with an arrow

  on that day when I destroyed Lyrnessos and took her.

  For thus not all these too many Achaeans would have bitten

  the dust, by enemy hands, when I was away in my anger.

  This way was better for the Trojans and Hektor; yet I think

  the Achaeans will too long remember this quarrel between us.

  Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, though it hurts us,

  and beat down by constraint the anger that rises inside us.

  Now I am making an end of my anger. It does not become me

  unrelentingly to rage on. Come, then! The more quickly

  drive on the flowing-haired Achaeans into the fighting,

  so that I may go up against the Trojans, and find out

  if they still wish to sleep out beside the ships. I think rather

  they will be glad to rest where they are, whoever among them

  gets away with his life from the fury of our spears’ onset.”

  He spoke, and the strong-greaved Achaeans were pleasured to

  hear him

  and how the great-hearted son of Peleus unsaid his anger.

  Achilles’ return, the unsaying of his wrath or anger, is one of the most dramatic moments of the Iliad, the culmination of the theme of wrath with which the epic had begun; it is also the fulfillment of a pattern common to many myths—the withdrawal of the hero from his community, the ensuing devastation, and his return. Phoinix’s paradigmatic tale of Meleager is one obvious example of this pattern, as to some extent is the Odyssey, which is dedicated to the story of a lonely hero enduring devastating hardships to win his return home.18

  Of more significance to Achilles, however, are those myths and stories describing the anger and withdrawal not of a hero but of a god. The Homeric “Hymn to Demeter” tells the story of the goddess Demeter’s grief and wrath at the loss of her daughter, Persephone, who was abducted and carried to the Underworld. In bitterness and grief, Demeter retreats from the world; as she is the goddess of corn and of the harvest, her departure deprives mankind of her gifts, and a dreadful winter of devastation spreads over the earth. Eventually Persephone is retrieved by the worried gods, Demeter is appeased, and she returns to earth, bringing spring and the harvest with her.19

  The word used to describe Demeter’s baneful, cosmic wrath is mēnis, which is also the first word of the Iliad: “Wrath, sing goddess, of Peleus’ son Achilles,” runs the Greek text. Close studies of the use of this word, in Homer and elsewhere, have yielded tantalizing conclusions. Mēnis can be summarized as “enduring anger, justified by a desire for rightful vengeance, said especially of gods, of dead heroes, but also of humans, parents or supplicants, and particularly of Achilles in the Iliad.”20

  Mēnis, then, is a charged word, more solemn and potent than its more mundane counterparts, chólos, or kótos—“anger,” “rancor.”21 Mēnis “is a dangerous notion, which one must fear; a sacral, ‘numinous’ notion.”22 In the Iliad, it is used only of gods and of Achilles. Like Demeter, Achilles makes his wrath felt by the withdrawal of his considerable abilities. “Wrath, sing goddess, of Peleus’ son Achilles, / and its devastation.” The devastation comes not from what he does do but from what he does not.

  As often with Achilles, the distant thunder of the fate he almost had and the god he almost was rumbles behind his words and actions. It is this word—this mēnis—that Achilles “unsays” before the assembly, and the renouncement of such anger—divine anger, cosmic anger—is clearly a momentous event. If sacrificial elements can be discerned in the death of Patroklos, it can now be seen that the sacrifice was effective; the death of Patroklos broke the baneful spell of wrath and has reunited the hero with his community.

  Against this profound and consequential background, Agamemnon makes his now almost irrelevant appearance. He speaks to the assembly “from the place where he was sitting, and did not stand up among them,” and in his confused first words it seems he has to shout for attention over the noise of an indifferent crowd: “ ‘it is well to listen to the speaker, it is not becoming / to break in on him. This will be hard for him, though he be able. / How among the great murmur of people shall anyone listen / or speak either?’ ”

  Unlike Achilles’ forthright declaration of a mutual mistake, Agamemnon must obfuscate; he knows that his own people have faulted him for his treatment of Achilles—this much he allows—but his actions were not his own doing: “ ‘yet I am not responsible / but Zeus is, and Destiny. . . . Yet what could I do? It is the god who accomplishes all things. / Delusion is the elder daughter of Zeus.’ ”

  A long story ensues, illustrating that even Zeus is prey to Átē, or Delusion. 23 Then abruptly, comically, Agamemnon wraps up:“So I in my time . . . could not forget Delusion, the way I was first

  deluded.

  But since I was deluded and Zeus took my wits away from me,

  I am willing to make all good and give back gifts in abundance.”

  “ ‘Son of Atreus,’ ” says Achilles, and Agamemnon’s string of stately epithets has never sounded more ironic, “ ‘most lordly and king of men, Agamemnon, / the gifts are yours to give if you wish, and as it is proper, / or to keep with yourself. But now let us remember our joy in warcraft, / immediately.’ ”

  So much for the riches by which Agamemnon defines his authority. Agamemnon’s offer also gives the lie to Phoinix’s cautionary paradigm in the Embassy; there, it will be recalled, by way of moral example to Achilles, Phoinix had outlined the fate of Meleager, a hero of old, who, having earlier rejected all offers of reconciliation, was eventually compelled to return to fighting without gifts and without honor.24 Dismissive as Achilles is of the gifts, or any talk of gifts, Agamemnon is insistent upon this transaction, and so the tired parade of wealth, cataloged twice before in the Embassy, is now carried forth and duly deposited in the assembly. Coming on the heels of Achilles’ divine armor, the many cauldrons and talents of gold do not bedazzle as they once might. Now Agamemnon does arise and before the entire army swears the solemn oath, sanctified by sacrifice, that he “ ‘never laid a hand on the girl Briseis / on pretext to go to bed with her, or for any other / reason, but she remained, not singled out, in my shelter’ ”; and so Agamemnon’s unmanning before his army is perfected.

  Briseis
, who was last seen when led unwillingly from Achilles’ shelter, now makes a startling reappearance. Confronted with Patroklos’ torn body, she cries aloud and tears her face in mourning:“Patroklos, far most pleasing to my heart in its sorrows,

  I left you here alive when I went away from the shelter,

  but now I come back, lord of the people, to find you have

  fallen.

  So evil in my life takes over from evil forever.

  The husband on whom my father and honoured mother

  bestowed me

  I saw before my city lying torn with the sharp bronze,

  and my three brothers, whom a single mother bore with me

  and who were close to me, all went on one day to destruction.

  And yet you would not let me, when swift Achilles had cut down

  my husband, and sacked the city of godlike Mynes, you would not

  let me sorrow, but said you would make me godlike Achilles’

  wedded lawful wife, that you would take me back in the ships

  to Phthia, and formalize my marriage among the Myrmidons.

  Therefore I weep your death without ceasing. You were kind

  always.”

  This is the last that will be seen of Briseis, the innocent cause of so much destruction. The devastation unleashed by her abduction is also of a pattern, like the plague instigated by the abduction of Chryseis at the opening of the Iliad, and the Trojan War itself, instigated by the abduction of Helen. In its recitation of the loss of all her protective kin, Briseis’ speech recalls that of Andromache to Hektor. Now the fate of Briseis, bereft of her champions and among strange men, presages that of Hektor’s wife.

  From the moment of his speech of reconciliation, Achilles is intent only on war and urges immediate action. This prompts a fussy and much-criticized interlude, introduced by Odysseus, dedicated to the dangers of fighting on an empty stomach. Later, also at some length, Odysseus repeats his concern. Possibly there is some inside joke at play, concerning this ever-practical hero’s attention to his belly. Achilles’ own needs are met by Athene, who drops “delicate / ambrosia and the nectar” inside his breast, so that his strength will not fail. These belabored, anxious explanations about food and, to a lesser extent, earlier concerns about the state of Patroklos’ body, which Thetis has promised to preserve, evoke a tin-eared copy editor’s fretting over all the wrong details: How did the men keep their strength? Please explain. What about the flies on Patroklos’ body? Various dutiful explanations have been mounted over centuries to justify this rare stretch where Homer “nods,” but it is fair to say that most readers could do without it: “More than 180 lines have now passed since luncheon stole the limelight, and nothing has been achieved,” as one commentator remarked dryly.25

  At length, however, the moment for which Achilles has been agitating arrives, and as the newly invigorated Achaeans muster amid the gleam of bronze helmets and shields, Achilles, his heart filled with “sorrow beyond endurance” and “raging at the Trojans,” arms for war. This is the last and most magnificent of the Iliad’s four, thematically similar but psychologically distinct arming scenes; “Paris arms for shame, Agamemnon for security, Patroclus for loyalty and friendship, but Achilles arms in anger and grief,” as one commentator observed:26 “He . . . caught up the great shield, huge and heavy

  next, and from it the light glimmered far, as from the moon.

  And as when from across water a light shines to mariners

  from a blazing fire, when the fire is burning high in the mountains

  in a desolate steading, as the mariners are carried unwilling

  by storm winds over the fish-swarming sea, far away from their

  loved ones;

  so the light from the fair elaborate shield of Achilles

  shot into the high air. And lifting the helm he set it

  massive upon his head, and the helmet crested with horse-hair

  shone like a star, the golden fringes were shaken about it

  which Hephaistos had driven close along the horn of the helmet.

  And brilliant Achilles tried himself in his armour, to see

  if it fitted close, and how his glorious limbs ran within it,

  and the armour became as wings and upheld the shepherd of the

  people.

  Next he pulled out from its standing place the spear of his father,

  huge, heavy, thick, which no one else of all the Achaeans

  could handle, but Achilles alone knew how to wield it,

  the Pelian ash spear which Cheiron had brought to his father

  from high on Pelion, to be death for fighters in battle.

  * * *

  Mounting his chariot, beside his charioteer, Achilles cries out, scolding his immortal horses: “ ‘Take care to bring in another way your charioteer back,’ ” he says sarcastically, and “ ‘not leave him to lie fallen there, as you did to Patroklos.’ ” Achilles was not present to witness the impenetrable, silent grief of the horses at the death of Patroklos. As has been seen, Homer eschews the magical and fantastic elements known to other traditions, and never more scrupulously than in his presentation of Achilles. But now there appears one of the most nakedly outlandish events of the epic: Hera puts a voice in Xanthos, so that the horse can speak, and once again the divine gifts of Peleus to his son serve as a haunting reminder of the cost to him of this war:Then from beneath the yoke the gleam-footed horse

  answered him,

  Xanthos, and as he spoke bowed his head, so that all the mane

  fell away from the pad and swept the ground by the cross-yoke;

  the goddess of the white arms, Hera, had put a voice in him:

  “We shall still keep you safe for this time, o hard Achilles.

  And yet the day of your death is near, but it is not we

  who are to blame, but a great god and powerful Destiny.

  For it was not because we were slow, because we were careless,

  that the Trojans have taken the armour from the shoulders of

  Patroklos,

  but it was that high god, the child of lovely-haired Leto,

  who killed him among the champions and gave the glory to Hektor.

  But for us, we two could run with the blast of the west wind

  who they say is the lightest of all things; yet still for you

  there is destiny to be killed in force by a god and a mortal.”27

  On Olympos, Zeus summons his own assembly to address the pivotal developments on the Trojan plain, developments that represent the fulfillment of his own plans. “ ‘I think of these men though they are dying,’ ” he allows to the other immortals. Achilles, if left to his own devices and powers, will make short work of the Trojans; therefore, Zeus announces, he is revoking his command that the gods keep out of the war. “ ‘Go down, wherever you may go among the Achaeans and Trojans / and give help to either side,’ ” he urges, and then characterizes Achilles’ prowess in the most dangerous of all possible terms: “ ‘I fear against destiny he may storm their fortress.’ ”

  Zeus’ remarkable pronouncement gives promise of a thrilling turn of events; surely it marks the commencement of the much-anticipated aristeía of Achilles, “a man like the murderous war god.” Instead Homer nods again, and Zeus’ order for the gods to mingle among the armies becomes the pretext for divine buffoonery. Aidoneus, lord of the dead, jumps from his throne and screams aloud in fear that all hell will, literally, break loose. Poseidon and Apollo square off against Athene and the war god Enyalios, as does Hera against Artemis. Less bellicose gods make uncomfortable appearances, such as Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis; “generous Hermes,” the god of boundaries and messenger of the gods; and crippled Hephaistos.

  Nor does the first action of Achilles himself satisfy the dramatic expectations raised by the extended, momentous prelude. To be sure, the son of Peleus approaches like an open-jawed, foaming-mouthed, furious, glaring lion against Aineias, one of Troy’s elite heroes. But
this first encounter of Achilles’ return—his first martial performance in the epic—threatens to be merely a battle of words. Achilles hails his enemy with cheerful, taunting words, at odds with the dark anger and grief he bears: “ ‘Does the desire in your heart drive you to combat / in hope you will be lord of the Trojans, breakers of horses, / and of Priam’s honour. And yet even if you were to kill me / Priam would not because of that rest such honour on your hand. / He has sons.’ ” The two heroes embark upon a kind of slanging match—flyting,28 playing the dozens—referencing each other’s genealogy and ability to use words of insult; possibly this awkwardly placed encounter makes knowing reference to a tradition dedicated to the exploits of Aineias and his anger with his king.29 At last the two heroes close to exchange actual blows. Cowering under his shield, as the long Pelian ash spear whistles over his head, Aineias is at length rescued, and spirited away to safety, by Poseidon.30

  Many lines pass, therefore, before Achilles embarks upon the kind of standard slaughter that characterizes the epic way of war. Cutting a swath through the Trojans, he kills a brother of Hektor, Polydoros, and suddenly finds himself in sight of Hektor himself, “ ‘the man who beyond all others has troubled my anger.’ ” But the ensuing, greatly anticipated encounter between the epic’s two contending heroes is also disconcertingly anticlimactic. “ ‘Son of Peleus, never hope by words to frighten me / as if I were a baby,’ ” Hektor retorts to Achilles’ challenge. “ ‘I myself understand well enough / how to speak in vituperation and how to make insults.’ ” For a bewildering moment, there hovers the possibility of a repeat of the kind of war of words Achilles waged with Aineias. Achilles hurls his spear, however, and a brief exchange follows, and once again the gods intervene to whisk his enemy to safety; on this occasion, it is Apollo who sweeps Hektor away in a thick mist.