“for fear the gods, however many Olympus holds,
are powerless to protect you when I come
to throttle you with my irresistible hands. ” (1.681-83)
The other gods do not argue with Zeus, though they may try to trick him, as Hera does successfully (14.187-421), and he does not explain his will to them, he threatens and enforces. There are no moral questions involved, only the clash of wills, intent on manifesting their existence—whether by bringing Troy to destruction or by driving Helen back into bed with Paris, as in the strange scene where Aphrodite, in the shape of an old woman, acts the procuress. “Quickly—Paris is calling for you, come back home! / There he is in the bedroom, the bed with inlaid rings ... ” (3.450-51). Helen recognizes the goddess and resists her temptation: “Maddening one, my Goddess, oh what now? / Lusting to lure me to my ruin yet again?” (3.460-61). “Lusting” is not too strong a word; the mating of male and female is Aphrodite’s very existence; that is why she is so stubborn to procure it. And she flares up in anger:
“Don’t provoke me-wretched, headstrong girl!
Or in my immortal rage I may just toss you over,
hate you as I adore you now—with a vengeance ...”
So she threatened
and Helen the daughter of mighty Zeus was terrified. (3.480-86)
And well she might be. Helen has nothing but her beauty and the charm it casts on all men; without Aphrodite she would be nothing. And Aphrodite plays the same role on Olympus as on earth. She gives Hera, who wants to divert Zeus’s attention from the battle so Poseidon can help the Achaeans,
the breastband,
pierced and alluring, with every kind of enchantment
woven through it ... There is the heat of Love,
the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper,
irresistible—madness to make the sanest man go mad. (14.257-61)
Zeus in his sphere of power, Aphrodite in hers, are irresistible. To be a god is to be totally absorbed in the exercise of one’s own power, the fulfillment of one’s own nature, unchecked by any thought of others except as obstacles to be overcome; it is to be incapable of self-questioning or self-criticism. But there are human beings who are like this. Preeminent in their particular sphere of power, they impose their will on others with the confidence, the unquestioning certainty of their own right and worth that is characteristic of gods. Such people the Greeks called “heroes”; they recognized the fact that they transcended the norms of humanity by according them worship at their tombs after death. Heroes might be, usually were, violent, antisocial, destructive, but they offered an assurance that in some chosen vessels humanity is capable of superhuman greatness, that there are some human beings who can deny the imperatives which others obey in order to live.
The heroes are godlike in their passionate self-esteem. But they are not gods, not immortal. They are subject, like the rest of us, to failure, above all to the irremediable failure of death. And sooner or later, in suffering, in disaster, they come to realize their limits, accept mortality and establish (or reestablish) a human relationship with their fellowmen. This pattern, recurrent in the myths of the Greeks and later to be the model for some of the greatest Athenian tragedies, is first given artistic form in the Iliad.
ACHILLES
There are in the poem two human beings who are godlike, Achilles and Helen. One of them, Helen, the cause of the war, is so preeminent in her sphere, so far beyond competition in her beauty, her power to enchant men, that she is a sort of human Aphrodite. In her own element she is irresistible. Every king in Greece was ready to fight for her hand in marriage, but she chose Menelaus, king of Sparta. When Paris, the prince of Troy, came to visit, she ran off with him, leaving husband and daughter, without a thought of the consequences for others. Her willful action is the cause of all the deaths at Troy, those past and those to come. When she left with Paris she acted like a god, with no thought of anything but the fulfillment of her own desire, the exercise of her own nature. But when the Iliad opens she has already come to realize the meaning for others of her actions, to recognize that she is a human being. She criticizes herself harshly as she speaks to Priam:
“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 . . .” (3.209-11)
She feels responsible for the human misery she sees all around her, something the gods never do. When Zeus and Hera settle their quarrel about the fate of Troy (4.28-79), Zeus gives way but claims her acquiescence whenever he in his turn may wish to destroy a city. Not only does she accept, she actually offers him three cities, those she loves best: Argos, Sparta and Mycenae. That is how the fate of nations is decided. Human suffering counts for nothing in the settlement of divine differences. The gods feel no responsibility for the human victims of their private wars. But Helen has come at last to a full realization of the suffering she has caused; too late to undo it, but at least she can see herself in the context of humankind and shudder at her own responsibility. “My dear brother,” she says to Hector,
“dear to me, bitch that I am, vicious, scheming—
horror to freeze the heart! Oh how I wish
that first day my mother brought me into the light
some black whirlwind had rushed me out to the mountains
or into the surf where the roaring breakers crash and drag
and the waves had swept me off before all this had happened!” (6.408-13)
This acceptance of responsibility accounts for her resistance when the goddess Aphrodite urged her to go to bed with Paris; in that scene she fell below the level of divine indifference—as from the human point of view she rose above it. She has ceased to be a mere existence, an unchanging blind self. She has become human and can feel the sorrow, the regret, that no human being escapes.
At the beginning of the Iliad Helen has already broken out of the prison of self-absorption, but this is the point at which Achilles enters it. The Iliad shows us the origin, course and consequences of his rage, his imprisonment in a godlike, lonely, heroic fury from which all the rest of the world is excluded, and also his return to human stature. The road to this final release is long and grim, strewn with the corpses of many a Greek and Trojan, and it leads finally to his own death.
There are, of course, objections that may be made to such a view of Achilles as a tragic hero, a fully created character whose motives and action form an intelligible unity. Prominent among them are the contradictions and inconsistencies in Achilles’ reactions to events that many critics claim to detect in the text of the poem. These are telltale signs, according to one school, of oral improvisation under the pressure of performance; the result, according to another, of later editorial activity. It may be, however, that the critics have underestimated the elegance and sophistication of Homer’s narrative technique (a constant danger for those who persist in thinking of him purely in terms of oral composition). In his creation of character Homer spares us the rich, sometimes superfluous, detail we have come to associate with that word in modern fiction; he gives us only what is necessary to his purpose. Similarly, in his presentation of motivation, he is economical in the extreme. In those sections of the poem where personal relationships and motives are important—the debate in Book 1, the embassy in Book 9, the meeting of Achilles and Priam in Book 24—Homer’s method is dramatic rather than epic. The proportion of direct speech to narrative is such that these scenes, the embassy in particular, could be performed by actors, and as is clear from Plato’s dialogue lon, the later rhapsodes who gave Homeric recitations exploited the dramatic potential of Homer’s text to the full. Like a dramatist, Homer shows us character and motivation not by editorial explanation but through speech and action. And he also invokes the response of an audience familiar with heroic poetry and formulaic diction, counting on their capacity to recognize significant omissions, contrasts, variations and juxtapositions. We are not told
what is going on in the mind of his characters; we are shown. Homer, like the god Apollo at Delphi in Heraclitus’ famous phrase, does not say, nor does he conceal—he indicates.
Achilles plays no part in the events described in Books 2 through 8; he sits by his ships on the shore, waiting for the fulfillment of his mother’s promise. And by the end of Book 8, the supplication of Thetis and the will of Zeus have begun to produce results. The Greeks are in retreat, penned up in their hastily fortified camp at nightfall, awaiting the Trojan assault, which will come with daybreak. And Agamemnon yields to Nestor’s advice to send an embassy to Achilles, urging him to return to the battle line. He admits that he was wrong and proposes to make amends:
“Mad, blind I was!
Not even I would deny it ...
But since I was blinded, lost in my own inhuman rage,
now, at last, I am bent on setting things to rights:
I’ll give a priceless ransom paid for friendship. ” (9.138-45)
In a bravura passage, he details the priceless ransom. Not only will he return Briseis and swear an oath that he has never touched her, he will give Achilles lavish gifts—gold, horses and women among them. He will also offer him the hand of one of his three daughters, with seven cities as her dowry.
It is a magnificent offer, but there is one thing missing: Agamemnon offers no apology to Achilles, no admission that he was in the wrong. Quite the contrary. His initial confession that he was mad is effectively canceled out by the way he ends:
“Let him submit to me! ...
Let him bow down to me! I am the greater king,
I am the elder-born, I claim—the greater man. ” (9.189-93)
This is a harsh summons to obedience. The word translated “submit” is a passive form, dmêthêto, of the verb damadzô, which means “tame,” “subdue.” It is a word the Homeric poems use of the taming of wild asses, the taming of a bride by a man, of the subjection of a people to a ruler, of a beaten warrior to the victor. Agamemnon will still not recognize Achilles’ claim to honor as predominant in battle; in fact these words reveal that the splendid gifts reflect honor on Agamemnon rather than Achilles. They are the enormous bounty a ruler can, if he wishes, bestow on a subject, and will do so only if the subject recognizes his place.
Once the ambassadors arrive, Odysseus describes the plight of the Achaeans, begs Achilles to relent and then launches into the recital of the magnificent gifts Agamemnon offers in recompense. The whole of the long recital, rich in detail and rising in intensity throughout, is repeated almost verbatim from Agamemnon’s speech; the audience relished a repeat of such a virtuoso passage—this is one of the pleasures of oral poetry in performance. But this is no mere oral poet repeating mechanically, no mere servant of the tradition. We are suddenly reminded that Odysseus’ speech is not just a welcome reprise of Agamemnon’s brilliant catalogue of gifts—it is a speech of a wily ambassador in a delicate situation. Odysseus cuts short the repetition of Agamemnon’s speech with the line “All this—/ I would extend to him if he will end his anger” (9.187-88). And we remember what came next, what Odysseus has suppressed: “Let him submit to me!” (189).
Achilles’ reply is a long, passionate outburst; he pours out all the resentment stored up so long in his heart. He rejects out of hand this embassy and any other that may be sent; he wants to hear no more speeches. Not for Agamemnon nor for the Achaeans either will he fight again. He is going home, with all his men and ships. As for Agamemnon’s gifts,
“I loathe his gifts ...
I wouldn’t give you a splinter for that man!
Not if he gave me ten times as much, twenty times over, all
he possesses now, and all that could pour in from the world’s end—
not all the wealth that’s freighted into Orchomenos, even into Thebes,
Egyptian Thebes where the houses overflow with the greatest troves
of treasure
no, not if his gifts outnumbered all the grains of sand
and dust in the earth—no, not even then could Agamemnon
bring my fighting spirit round until he pays me back,
pays full measure for all his heartbreaking outrage!” (9.462-73)
“Pays full measure for all his heartbreaking outrage”—this is the point. Achilles is a killer, the personification of martial violence, but there is one area in which his sensibilities are more finely tuned than the antennae of a radar scanner—that of honor among men. And he senses the truth. Odysseus did not report Agamemnon’s insulting demand for submission, but Achilles is not deceived. In all Odysseus did say there was no hint that Agamemnon regretted his action, no semblance of an apology, nothing that “pays full measure for all his heartbreaking outrage.” Seen in this context, the gifts are no gifts, they are an insult. Gold, horses, women—he has no need of such bribes. And the offer of Agamemnon’s daughter is that of an overlord to a subject; without an apology, an admission of equal status, it is one more symbol of subordination. His father will find him a bride at home; he will live there in peace, live out his life, choose the other destiny his goddess mother told him he carried toward the day of his death:
“If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,
my pride, my glory dies . . .
true, but the life that’s left me will be long ...” (9.502-4)
This speech of Achilles is sometimes seen as a repudiation of the heroic ideal, a realization that the life and death dedicated to glory is a game not worth the candle.
“Cattle and fat sheep can all be had for the raiding,
tripods all for the trading, and tawny-headed stallions.
But a man’s life breath cannot come back again—
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth. ” (9.493-97)
These are indeed strange words for Achilles, but in the context of the speech as a whole they are not inconsistent with his devotion to honor. It is the loss of that honor, of recognition as the supreme arbiter of the war, which has driven him to these formulations and reflections. He would still be ready to choose the other destiny, a short life with glory, if that glory had not been taken away from him by Agamemnon, and were not even now, in the absence of an apology, withheld.
In the face of this passionate rejection there is nothing Odysseus can say. It is Phoenix, Achilles’ tutor and guardian from the days of his boyhood, who now takes up the burden. In the name of that relationship he asks Achilles to relent. Even the gods, he says, can be moved, by prayer and supplication. He goes on to describe the spirits of Prayer, “daughters of mighty Zeus.” Litai is the Greek word, and “prayer” is not an exact translation, for the English word has lost some of its original sense of “supplication”—the root sense of the Greek. These “Prayers for forgiveness” are humble and embarrassed—“they limp and halt, / ... can’t look you in the eyes” (9.609-12). Their attitude represents the embarrassment of the man who must apologize for his former insolence: it is hard for him to humble himself; it affects even his outward semblance. But he makes the effort, and the Prayers, the entreaties, come to repair the damage done by Atê, the madness of self-delusion and the ruin it produces—they must not be refused.
But this appeal, too, will fall on deaf ears. And with some justice. Apollo relented in Book I, but only after full restitution was made and a handsome apology—“Prayers for forgiveness.” And where are the prayers, the embarrassed pleas of Agamemnon? The madness of Agamemnon is all too plain, but Achilles has seen no prayers from him—only from Odysseus, and then from Phoenix. Who now tries again, with an example of another hero, Meleager, who relented, but too late: a prophetic paradigm in the framework of the poem. He, too, withdrew from the fighting in anger, endangered his city, refused entreaties of his fellow citizens and even of his father, refused the gifts they offered him, and finally, when the enemy had set fire to the city, yielded to the entreaties of his wife and returned to the battle. But the gifts he had spu
rned were not offered again. You in your turn, Phoenix is saying, will someday relent, if Hector drives the Achaeans back on their ships, but if so, you will fight without the gifts that are the visible symbols of honor, the concrete expression of the army’s appreciation of valor. Phoenix is talking Achilles’ language now, and it has its effect: Achilles admits that he finds Phoenix’ appeal disturbing—“Stop confusing / my fixed resolve with this, this weeping and wailing” (9.745-46). And he speaks now not of leaving the next day but of remaining by the ships and ends by announcing that the decision, to stay or to leave, will be taken on the morrow.
Ajax, the last to speak, does not mention Agamemnon but dwells on the army’s respect and affection for Achilles. It is the plea of a great, if simple, man and again Achilles is moved. Though he still feels nothing but hate for Agamemnon, he now decides that he will stay at Troy. But he will not fight until
“ . . . the son of wise King Priam, dazzling Hector
batters all the way to the Myrmidon ships and shelters,
slaughtering Argives, gutting the hulls with fire. ” (9.796-98)
The Iliad Page 8
