The War That Killed Achilles

by Caroline Alexander

  The Iliad ’s depiction of both Achilles and Patroklos is nonchalantly heterosexual. At the conclusion of the Embassy, when Agamemnon’s ambassadors have departed, “Achilles slept in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and a woman lay beside him, one he had taken from Lesbos, / Phorbas’ daughter, Diomede of the fair colouring. / In the other corner Patroklos went to bed; with him also / was a girl, Iphis the fair-girdled, whom brilliant Achilles / gave him, when he took sheer Skyros” (9.663ff.).

  The nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos played an unlikely role in a lawsuit of the mid-fourth century B.C., brought by the orator Aeschines against one Timarchus, a prominent politician in Athens who had charged him with treason. Hoping to discredit Timarchus prior to the treason trial, Aeschines attacked Timarchus’ morality, charging him with pederasty. Since the same charge could have been brought against Aeschines, the orator takes pains to differentiate between his impulses and those of the plaintiff: “The distinction which I draw is this—to be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste is the experience of a kind-hearted and generous soul”; Aeschines, Contra Timarchus 137, in C. D. Adams, trans., The Speeches of Aeschines (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 111. For proof of such love, Aeschines cited the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos; his citation is of great interest for representing the longest extant quotation of Homer by an ancient author.

  32 The argument that Achilles’ unexpected compromise of the loan of his armor “is the linchpin holding the poem’s two halves together” is made by Janko, 310; see also Erbse, “Ilias und ‘Patroklie,’ ” 1-15.

  33 Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York, 1995), 40.

  34 The incident at Walter Reed is described by Esther Schrader, “These Unseen Wounds Cut Deep,” Los Angeles Times, November 14, 2004.

  35 John Keegan, The First World War (New York, 2000), 426f.

  No Hostages

  1 A knotty question of concern to more literal-minded scholars is why if Patroklos could wear the armor of Achilles, could Achilles not now wear the armor of Patroklos? Perhaps Patroklos had no armor and was not after all a “companion-in-arms,” but a “retainer”? See John Scott, “Achilles and the Armour of Patroklos,” Classical Journal 13 (1917-18), 682-86. For the view of a mid-twentieth-century man-at-arms, that the preoccupation with stripping fallen warriors of their armor reflects the modern tactic of “recovery battles” to obtain valuable weaponry, see General Sir John Hackett, “Reflections upon Epic Warfare,” Proceedings of the Classical Association 68 (1971), 13-37.

  2 The flame around Achilles’ head and his murderous cry have counterparts in other Indo-European myths. See Julian Baldick, Homer and the Indo-Europeans: Comparing Mythologies (London, 1994), 84f.

  3 The poignancy of this bathing scene is enhanced by its play upon standard epic scenes of hospitality and feasting: “Then when the maids had bathed them and anointed them with oil, / and put cloaks of thick fleece and tunics on them . . . ” (Odyssey 4.49f.). On such bathing, see Alfred Heubeck, Steph anie West, and J. B. Hainsworth, A Commentary on Homer’s “Odyssey,” vol. 1 (Oxford, 1990), sub. vv. 3.464ff, 189.

  4 H. L. Lorimer, Homer and the Monuments (London, 1950), 73.

  5 Readers will be entertained to learn that the modern medical opinion is that Hephaistos’ condition is due to “bilateral club foot,” a “congenital anomaly”; Christos S. Bartsocas, “Hephaestus and Clubfoot,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 27 (1972), 450-51.

  6 This is Hephaistos’ second catastrophic plunge to earth recalled in the Iliad, the first being that described in Book One, when the smith reminds Hera of how Zeus flung him from Olympos when he tried to rescue her from Zeus’ punishment (1.586ff.). Possibly, these two falls are “doublets” of each other, one being an early “genuine” tradition and the other a late innovation inspired by the first. Of the two, the second seems most likely to be genuine, in great part because of the very ancient mythic pairing of fire and nurturing water, and because Hera’s disgust at her son’s lameness is related elsewhere: “My son has turned out a weakling among the gods, Hephaestus of the withered legs, whom I myself bore. I picked him up and threw him in the broad sea.” “Hymn to Apollo,” vv. 316ff., in M. L. West, ed. and trans., Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives of Homer (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 95.

  7 Other Indo-European examples of the pairing of fire and water are given by M. L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford, 2007), 270ff.

  8 See, for example, Walter Burkert, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, John Raffan, trans. (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 167.

  9 The role of the smith as guardian is discussed by Dean A. Miller, The Epic Hero (Baltimore, 2000), 260ff., and especially 266f. Hephaistos, by most accounts, has no children of his own; see Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, vol. 1 (Baltimore, 1993), 77f. The smith of epic and legend is typically childless (Miller, 268), a fact that may have to do with the sacred, taboo nature of his art, which may have isolated him from marriage. In 1984, the author witnessed a traditional, highly ritualized iron smelting in Malawi, in Central East Africa, where the smelting site and all immediately surrounding area was strictly taboo to women; the author was excepted as a mazungu, or genderless “white person.”

  10 Of the many news stories reporting families’ purchase of body armor for their sons and husbands in Iraq, see, for example, Associated Press, “Soldiers in Iraq Still Buying Their Own Body Armor,” USA Today, March 26, 2004.

  11 Aethiopis, argument 2, in M. L. West, ed. and trans., Greek Epic Fragments: From the Seventh to the Fifth Century B.C. (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 111. Evidence from vase paintings from as early as the mid-sixth century B.C. and later poetry indicate that in some traditions the arms Achilles carried with him from Phthia to Troy were not gifts from his father but were another set of armor made by Hephaistos and given to him by Thetis. See, for example, Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, 1070ff. The different traditions are discussed in K. Friis Johansen, The “Iliad” in Early Greek Art (Copenhagen, 1967), 107ff.

  12 Modern attempts to reconstruct the shield of Achilles have foundered on practical details. The usual heroic shield was made of layers, or folds, of tough ox hide stretched over a frame. The “five folds composing the shield” of Achilles, however, were made of five layers of metal: “the god of the dragging feet had made five folds on it, / two of bronze on the outside and on the inside two of tin / and between them the single gold” (20.27off.). Since in reality only bronze is capable of withstanding the shock of a bronze-headed spear, which would tear through soft tin and gold, the shield’s construction appears to owe more to poetry than to fact. On the other hand, the detail and assurance with which the shield’s decorative scenes are described suggest that Homer had actual, as opposed to mythic, examples of metal craftmanship in mind. Both “ages of Homer”—the Mycenaean Bronze Age and the eighth century B.C. Age of Iron—provide examples of the decorative metalwork suggestive of the shield. Graves of Mycenae have yielded spectacular metal relics of the late Bronze Age, including diadems, breastplates, and ornamental boxes of beaten gold; bronze daggers with inlay of hunting scenes wrought in silver and gold set in blue-black niello; and intricate cloisonné. Photographs of these famous objects can be found in many books on Greek art; see, for example, Sp. Marinatos and M. Hirmer, Crete and Mycenae (New York, 1961), plates xxxv-xxxviii, 95-98. Bronze, however, is worked cold, not on a hot forge with hammer and tongs, and in this essential respect Hephaistos most resembles the ironworker. For possible Iron Age models, see note 17 below. Possibly relics—and memories of relics—of the Mycenaean Bronze Age inform Homer’s description of Hephaistos’ art, while the Bronze Age techniques that produced such art were unknown: D.H.F. Gray, “Metalworking in Homer,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 74 (1954), 1-15. For an overview of the techniques reflected in the description of the crafting of the shield, see Mark W. Edwards, The “Iliad”: A Commentary,
Volume V: Books 17-20 (Cambridge, 1991), 201ff.

  13 Certain features, such as the assembly in the marketplace and agricultural development, are particularly suggestive of the pre-polis communities of the eighth century B.C. See, for example, Dean C. Hammer, “ ‘Who Shall Readily Obey?’: Authority and Politics in the Iliad,” Phoenix 51, no. 1 (1997), 1-24, and especially 15; and Gregory Nagy, “The Shield of Achilles,” in Susan Langdon, ed., New Light on a Dark Age: Exploring the Culture of Geometric Greece (Columbia, MO, 1997), 194-208.

  14 For the dating of the Aspis, see Richard Janko, “The Shield of Heracles and the Legend of Cycnus,” Classical Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1986), 38-59.

  15 Hesiod, The Shield, 144ff., in Glenn W. Most, ed. and trans., Hesiod: The Shield. Catalogue of Women. Other Fragments (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 13ff.

  16 Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Cambridge, MA, 1982), xxiv.

  17 Significantly, Agamemnon’s corselet, with its cobalt serpents and other images of terror, had been given to him as a “guest present” from the king of Kypros (Cyprus) (11.33ff.), and shields and large circular bowls decorated with engravings and hammered relief have been found dating from the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., from Cyprus and Crete. Arranged in circular bands, the scenes of hunting, lion attacks on bulls, pastoral life, and even the siege of a city suggest a pictorial narrative as on Achilles’ shield. See Glenn Markoe, Phoenician Bronze and Silver Bowls from Cyprus and the Mediterranean (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), 51ff.; and Jan Paul Crielaard, “Homer, History and Archaeology: Some Remarks on the Date of the Homeric World,” in Jan Paul Crielaard, ed., Homeric Questions: Essays in Philology, Ancient History and Archaeology, Including the Papers of a Conference Organized by the Netherlands Institute at Athens (15 May 1993) (Amsterdam, 1995), 201-88, and especially 218ff.

  18 While the elements that constitute the archetypal heroic journey from withdrawal to return—a journey to a mysterious place, tests or trials that must be overcome, a symbolic death, and heroic return—are widely held to be manifest in the “journey” of Achilles, from withdrawal and isolation to reintegration with his community, it should be noted that imaginative rearrangement and special pleading are required to make Achilles fit the archetype—that Patroklos is the companion of his lonely journey, that his trial or test (doing battle with the river Skamandros) follows rather than precedes his return, and so forth. But see William R. Nethercut, “The Epic Journey of Achilles,” Ramus 5 (1976), 1-17.

  19 “To Demeter,” in West, Homeric Hymns, vv. 302ff., 57ff. For an examination of this pattern, see Mary Louise Lord, “Withdrawal and Return: An Epic Story Pattern in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and in the Homeric Poems,” Classical Journal 62 (1967), 241-48. Hittite texts preserve mythic stories of a “vanishing deity” that tell of the departure of a god—often on account of anger—and the disastrous consequences to mankind of his absence; Harry A. Hoffner Jr. and Gary M. Beckman, eds., Hittite Myths, 2nd ed. (Atlanta, 1998), 14ff.

  20 P. Chantraine, Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque, vol. 3 (Paris, 1974), 696f.

  21 P. Considine, “Some Homeric Terms for Anger,” Acta Classica 9 (1966), 15-25, argues that mēnis “is a solemn epic term for any wrath, divine or human,” 21, a weaker reading than Watkins, below.

  22 Calvert Watkins, “On μηνις,” Indo-European Studies 3 (1977), 686-722; the quote is from 694f.

  23 This digressive story tells how Hera tricked Zeus into swearing that a son “‘born of the blood of your generation’” that day would be “‘lord over all those dwelling about him’” (19.105ff). Hera then induced premature labor in one woman and stayed the birth of Herakles; thus the tyrannical and unworthy Eurystheus came to be lord over the hero Herakles. This digressive story enforces “the theme of a superior hero in the service of an inferior king,” so central to the Iliad. See Olga Merck Davidson, “Indo-European Dimensions of Herakles in Iliad 19.95-133,” Arethusa 13 (1980), 197-202, especially 200.

  24 Denys Page rightly sees that “the parable of Meleager loses all its colour and significance if it is addressed to a man to whom it does not apply—a man who is going to get the full compensation after all.” Denys L. Page, History and the Homeric “Iliad” (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959), 312f.; to Page, the disjunction between Phoinix’s paradigm and Achilles’ actual circumstances is, bizarrely, evidence of multiple authors at work in the Iliad, rather than an ironic highlighting of how little stories of men of old apply to godlike Achilles—and to his revelation at the time of the Embassy that life is more precious than all prizes.

  25 Ibid., 314.

  26 James I. Armstrong, “The Arming Motif in the Iliad,” American Journal of Philology 79, no. 4 (1958), 337-54; the quote appears on p. 350.

  27 Xanthos’ voice is stopped by the Erinyes, “the Furies,” and this otherwise obscure detail suggests the conflation of different traditions pertaining to Hera and horses, and a prophetic son of Erinys; see Sarah Iles Johnston, “Xanthus, Hera and the Erinyes (Iliad 19.400-418),” Transactions of the American Philological Association 122 (1992), 85-98.

  28 Flyting or “fliting,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “poetical invective; originally a kind of contest practiced by the Scottish poets of the 16th c., in which two persons assailed each other alternately with tirades of abusive verse”; a good epic example is found in Beowulf (499-606).

  29 On the meeting of the two traditions, see Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore, 1979), 265ff.

  30 A popular theory holds that the prominence given to Aineias at this key moment in the epic (as also in the “Hymn to Aphrodite”) is evidence that Book Twenty and the “Hymn” “were composed for a court of barbarian princes in the Troad who believed themselves descended from Aineias”; Peter M. Smith, “Aineiadai as Patrons of Iliad XX and the Homeric ‘Hymn to Aphrodite,’” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 85 (1981), 17-58. Smith counters this theory with a close review of the ancient sources relating the story of Aineias after the fall of Troy. This review, however, does not explain Poseidon’s statement in the Iliad that “ ‘it is destined that he [Aineias] shall be the survivor’” (Iliad 20.302).

  31 Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York, 1995), 78f. In more recent conflicts, the rampage by U.S. Marines in the town of Haditha, on the Euphrates River, in which twenty-four Iraqi civilians were killed, was triggered by the death of a lance corporal in the unit; see, for example, Ellen Knickmeyer, “In Haditha, Memories of a Massacre,” Washington Post, May 27, 2006.

  32 That everything, including Achilles, has changed since Patroklos’ death is underscored by a simple refrain that runs through Achilles’ speeches from the time of his knowledge of Patroklos’ death until the funeral: nún dé—“but now”—i.e., in contrast to all previous time; Samuel Eliot Basset, “Achilles’ Treatment of Hektor’s Body,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 64 (1933), 41-65, especially 58f.

  33 “When human foes are lacking, heroic man fights against powers of nature or monsters”; C. M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (London, 1961), 49, cites examples of such battles, from Gilgamesh to Beowulf. For Near Eastern archetypes, see Trevor Bryce, Life and Society in the Hittite World (Oxford, 2004), 216f.

  34 All evidence indicates that Apollo’s origins lie in the Near East and that he was a late arrival among the Greek Olympians; his name (like Aphrodite’s) does not appear in the Linear B tablets. The suggestive name -appaliuna (the text is broken), which some scholars read as a reference to Apollo, appears at the end of a long list of divine witnesses invoked to solemnize a late-fourteenth-century-B.C. treaty between the Hittite king and Alaksandu of Wilusa; see “Treaty 13, Between Muwattalli II of Hatti and Alaksandu of Wilusa,” in Gary Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, 2nd ed. (Atlanta, 1999), 92. The treaty’s possible reference to “Apollo” is discussed in Trevor Bryce, The Trojans and Their Neighbours (Abingdon
, Oxon, 2006), 119. Manfred Hutter, “Aspects of Luwian Religion,” in H. Craig Melchert, ed., The Luwians (Leiden, 2003), 267, is more cautious: “Whether the fragmentary name of the god ]appaliunas is identical with Apollo known from Greek sources remains to be seen. It is possible, but there is presently neither a real argument to prove this point nor to make this god a Luwian one.” If the association between the names is sound, however, it would be evidence that an Anatolian Apollo was among the guardians of historical Troy, and could account in some part for his malice toward Achilles in the Iliad.

  35 General discussions of Apollo’s origins and character are found in Burkert, Greek Religion, 51f. and 143ff.

  36 The earliest reference to the Hyperboreans is in a prose outline of a lost poem by Alcaeus (c. 600) by the fourth-century-A.D. rhetorician Himerius, which describes Apollo’s journey to the north in a chariot pulled by swans; Himerius, Orations 48.10-11, in David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric I: Sappho. Alcaeus (Cambridge, MA, 1982), Alcaeus 307(c), 355. For Apollo’s withdrawn nature, see Walter F. Otto, The Homeric Gods, Moses Hadas, trans. (Boston, 1954), 62ff.