The Greek Myths

by Robin Waterfield

  Diomedes, however, was as determined as ever. He wanted nothing more than to slay Aeneas and take his suit of armor as booty. Three times he made a killing stroke, and three times Apollo warded it off. But just as Diomedes raised his arm for the fourth time, the golden god yelled at him: “Fool! Do you dare to challenge the gods? Give it up: there is an unbridgeable chasm set between us and mortal men!” Diomedes backed away in terror at the god’s wrath, and Apollo bore Aeneas safely back to Troy, where he was tended by immortal nurses, Leto and Artemis. But Apollo made a double of Aeneas, and let the Greeks and Trojans fight it out around the unconscious body.

  Still furious, Apollo sought out Ares and encouraged him to re-enter the fray. Disguised as swift-footed Acamas, prince of Lycia, Ares sought out the nobles of Troy and urged them not to abandon Aeneas. And Acamas’ friend, Sarpedon of Lycia, son of Zeus and grandson of Bellerophon, lashed out at Hector: “Are you going to let the Greeks drive us back to the city gates? You Trojans aren’t pulling your weight; you’re leaving us allies to do all the fighting, while you stand like sheep. Come on!” And now the battle began to turn in the Trojans’ favor, with Ares moving among them and stirring them to ever greater exploits. This was unacceptable to Hera and Athena, and while Hebe prepared Hera’s chariot, Athena armed herself for war. Hera cracked her whip, the gates of Olympus opened, and the two goddesses rode in glory down to the battlefield of Troy. And they went with Zeus’ blessing, for Ares’ lust for blood sickened him.

  While Hera rallied the Greeks, Athena found Diomedes resting. “Shame on you!” she cried. “You are not the man your father was!” But Diomedes replied, “I’m only obeying your command, my lady. You told me not to fight any of the gods except Aphrodite—and now Ares is fighting for the Trojans.”

  “I release you from your promise,” Athena said. “Go! Seek out Ares and do battle with him!” And she herself took the place of Diomedes’ charioteer, and rode to war with him. But she wore Hades’ cap of invisibility, so that Ares saw only Diomedes approaching.

  The god of war hurled his spear, and the god of war never misses—unless another deity engages him. Athena deflected the wicked missile, which ricocheted harmlessly from the side of the chariot. Now it was Diomedes’ turn, and he shoved his spear at the war-god’s belly, and Athena put all her power behind the thrust as well, and then pulled the spear out again, dripping ichor.

  Bellowing with pain and rage, Ares flew upward to heaven. His screams terrified friend and foe alike, for none had ever heard anything like it. Bitterly he complained to Zeus at the impudence of Athena, but Zeus dismissed him with angry words to find Asclepius and be healed. And he welcomed Hera and Athena when they returned from the fray, for they had forced Ares off the field of battle. Now it was man against man, Trojan against Greek, with no gods involved, and gradually, thanks to the prowess of Diomedes and others, the Trojans were being pushed back. The Trojan seer Helenus, son of Priam, took matters in hand. He commanded Aeneas, now fully restored, to rally the troops right by the city walls and make a stand. “And you, Hector,” he shouted above the din, “go back into the city and get our mother Hecuba to gather the women of Troy. They are to offer Athena a magnificent robe now, with the promise of a munificent sacrifice in the future of twelve unblemished cows, if she will keep Diomedes out of the city. The man is proving himself the equal of Achilles.”

  Aeneas and Hector did as the gifted Helenus ordered; for when he was a baby, snakes had licked his ears. He knew the languages of all creatures of air, earth, and water, and animals make more reliable harbingers of the future than men. Once within the city walls, Hector speedily carried out his errand. But before returning to the battlefield, he sought a few moments with his wife Andromache. He found her on the battlements with Astyanax, their son, watching in dread as the fighting raged ever closer to the city gates and walls. As soon as she saw him she ran up to him in joy; and the nurse followed behind, bearing the baby boy, the light of Hector’s life and Troy’s hope for the future.

  Andromache rested her head on the hero’s chest and begged him to be careful. “You’re too brave for your own good,” she said. “Think of me! I have no one in the world but you. Think of your son! You fight so well that all the Greeks want to see you dead. What comfort will be left for your sorrowing family after you have met your doom? The future holds only torment.”

  “Don’t ask me to stay away from the battle,” Hector replied in sorrow. “I cannot; I know no other way. I do as my fathers have always done; I live and die by honor and shame. Troy will fall—this I know—and so honor is all that is left. I shall be dead, but the worst of it is that you will pass into bitter slavery.”

  Hector reached out his arms for Astyanax, but the baby burst into tears and clung to his nurse. He was terrified by his father’s helmet with its nodding horsehair plume and gleaming bronze. Both Hector and Andromache laughed, and forgot the horror for a moment. Hector took off his helmet and swung his child high into the air, and the boy squealed in delight. Hector kissed him, and Andromache’s tears were mingled with smiles.

  The fighting continued until dark brought rest to the weary combatants, though all night long Zeus’ thunder rumbled in the heavens. In the morning a truce was made so that both sides could bury their dead. The Greeks also seized the opportunity to dig a trench and raise a rampart of earth and boulders to replace the palisade that had been sufficient protection for their camps and their beached ships while the Trojans were pinned inside their city. Too broad to be crossed at a leap by a chariot, the trench bristled with sharpened stakes; and the rampart was fitted with towers and well-built gates. And the Greeks indignantly refused the offer relayed by the Trojan herald: though Paris would not return Helen, he was prepared to return the treasure they had stolen from Menelaus, with interest. As Diomedes put it: “Victory is within our grasp! We have no need of lesser offers from our enemies!”

  Hector Triumphant

  At dawn, the working parties of both sides assembled on the plain to gather their dead and prepare them for burial. If the corpse was that of a nobleman, it was carefully washed, dressed in a shroud, and laid out on a couch. After a suitable interval, the body was carried to the place of burial, accompanied by friends and dependents, and by women weeping and wailing the ritual lament. It was then reverently laid in the ground, to ensure safe passage across the River Styx and into the halls of Hades.

  Meanwhile, on cloud-girt Olympus, Zeus called a meeting of all the gods. He chided them, and used the full weight of his authority, and the threat of eternal imprisonment in Tartarus, to force through his will. No god or goddess, he thundered, was to sneak away from Olympus and help either the Trojans or the Greeks—not by fighting for them, nor even by giving them advice. He would attend to this battle of mice himself.

  The day after the mass burials, Zeus himself, father of men and gods, called for his chariot and team of divine horses, and sailed down to Mount Ida, from where he could survey the city of Troy and the Greek encampment and see that his will was done. The morning passed in inconclusive fighting—though conclusive enough for those who fell and died. At midday Zeus held up his golden scales and carefully placed in each of the pans the doom of the Trojans and the doom of the Greeks. The doom of the Greeks was heavier.

  Zeus burst from Ida with lightning and thunder, and hurled them against the Greek forces. No one could withstand the onslaught: Idomeneus, Agamemnon, Ajax, Odysseus—all fell back. Only Nestor stayed on the field, because one of his horses had been wounded by an arrow fired by Paris. And now Hector was bearing down on him, and Nestor would surely have perished, if Diomedes had not raced up and taken the old man on his chariot. Together they charged at Hector, and Diomedes’ spear soon found the breast of Hector’s charioteer. Hector himself might well have been next, had not Zeus sent a blazing thunderbolt crashing into the ground in a ball of flame before Diomedes’ chariot.

  Seeing that Zeus himself was against them, Nestor cautioned Diomedes to turn back. The Argive
hero was reluctant: it seemed like cowardice to turn and run. But he heeded his sage companion, and they wheeled around and joined the general rout back to the safety of their camp, with Hector’s taunts ringing in their ears. Three times Diomedes was poised to turn back and fight it out with the Trojan, but every time Zeus emitted a warning rumble of thunder.

  Hector was rampant. Shouting out encouragement to his men, he urged his team forward, calling on the horses by name. He felt powerful enough to take the Greeks’ new trench at a single bound and challenge the new rampart; he could scent victory, close at hand. He could almost taste the smoke that would fill the air from the Greek ships he would burn. He blazed like Ares, fearsome to behold and deadly to his enemies.

  Teucer, the Greeks’ best bowman, tried again and again to topple Hector from his chariot, but failed. It was as though the Trojan hero were under the protection of a god. Back the Greeks were pushed, across the moat, where they made easy targets and many perished. Back they were driven, until they barely made it inside the new rampart.

  As night began to fall and the fighting died down, Zeus returned to Olympus. Hera dared to chide him for stopping the rest of the gods interfering, but Zeus was adamant. “Hector will never be checked,” he said, “until or unless Achilles rejoins the fighting. And Achilles will rejoin the fighting only to defend the corpse of his bosom friend Patroclus. So it is; that is my will.” And the gods trembled, for they saw his plan: to place Achilles on a high pedestal of honor, as Thetis had requested, and to punish the Trojans for their sins.

  Envoys and Spies

  Fear stalked the Greek camp. With the Trojans encamped for the first time close by on the plain, everyone expected death and defeat the following day. Strong pickets were posted to keep watch through the night. At a gloomy meeting of the Greek staff officers, Agamemnon, a changed man in the face of defeat, agreed to swallow his pride and try to placate Achilles. “I shall do as you say,” he said. “I shall send envoys to Achilles, bearing great gifts: tripods, gold, women, horses, cauldrons. And I shall return Briseis to him as well, who was the cause of our quarrel. She is exactly as he left her: I have not taken her to bed. And if, with his help, we succeed in taking Troy, he will have his pick of the spoils and plunder, until his ship is filled with riches. Then, when we get back home, he shall take one of my daughters as his wife, and I shall make him a baron of my kingdom, with extensive estates of fertile land.”

  Everyone agreed that this was a generous offer, and envoys were detailed to take the proposal to Achilles. The delegation, headed by friends of Achilles—old Phoenix, Odysseus, and Ajax—made its way along the shore and found the leader of the Myrmidons playing the lyre by his tent, with Patroclus as ever by his side.

  Achilles greeted them warmly and made them welcome with meat and wine. Then they got down to business. Odysseus explained the situation: they faced defeat unless Achilles would take up arms again and fight for them. Agamemnon repented his rash actions, and would not only return Briseis untouched, but would give him great wealth and honor. “This is no time for anger,” he concluded. “Let generosity calm your wrath. Even if you still hate Agamemnon, think of the rest of us.”

  But Achilles’ heart remained unmoved and unmelted by Odysseus’ words. Phoenix tried next, and then Ajax, but to all of them Achilles made the same reply: he would never forgive Agamemnon. The only thing that could possibly make him fight would be if Hector stormed the Myrmidon encampment and directly threatened himself and his men. Otherwise, he said, he would embark his men the next day and sail for home. The envoys chastised him for his heartlessness in condemning hundreds of Greeks to certain death, but in his terrible pride Achilles remained implacable.

  Odysseus and Ajax departed in frustration, but Phoenix remained. He had been Achilles’ mentor since the hero’s childhood, and felt it his duty to stay by his side, and even to sail back home with him, at the cost of abandoning the rest of the Greeks. When the returning envoys reported back to Agamemnon and the war council, there was stunned silence, but Diomedes brought their attention back to the present. They badly needed information about the enemy’s intentions, and Diomedes and Odysseus volunteered to sneak into the enemy camp and see what they could find out. They awoke before dawn and set out across the plain, keeping cover behind walls and trees.

  But the same idea had occurred to the Trojans, and Dolon, attracted by the generous reward Hector promised, put himself forward. When Diomedes and Odysseus were about halfway across the no-man’s land between the two camps, they heard Dolon coming and threw themselves to the ground. They let him pass a short distance, so that his escape route back to the Trojan camp was cut off, and then raced after him. The cowardly Dolon offered no resistance. Quaking in his boots, he told them everything they wanted to know. But once they had all the information they needed, they cut his throat even as he begged for his life, stripped him of his fine armor, and hung it in a tree to collect on their way back. Traitors could expect no less.

  Dolon had carefully described for them the precise layout of the Trojan encampment, and had told them especially that a newly arrived contingent of Thracians had bivouacked at a little distance from the rest. It was foretold that if the white horses of Rhesus, the Thracian king, ate and drank at Troy, the city would never be taken. Odysseus and Diomedes just had time. They crept silently up to the Thracians as they slept, slaughtered a number of them as they lay dreaming on the ground, including Rhesus, and stole the king’s horses. Diomedes was tempted to stay for more plunder—Rhesus had a fabulous chariot, decorated with gold and silver—but Athena whispered a warning to him. Just then a cry arose: someone had discovered the bodies of the men they had killed. They raced back to the Greek lines, pausing only for Dolon’s bloody armor. Their material gains were slight—but the news imbued all the Greeks with new courage, and that was worth more than a hundred horses.

  The Assault on the Ships

  At daybreak, Zeus sent Strife down to the Greek camp. The dread goddess perched in the middle of the Greek encampment and let out a frightful wail, to stir all the Greeks to action. The two sides advanced once more into the plain, disturbing the kites from their horrid meal. Strife looked on with joy, anticipating slaughter, while Zeus gazed down unconcerned from high Olympus, for to the gods the activities of mortals are just sport. One generation dies and is replaced by another; the gods play with all alike, as careless boys sport with flies.

  The battle was closely contested, but at noon the Trojan lines began to waver. Agamemnon went on the rampage, sowing death left and right. And now Antimachus paid dearly for his impious attempt to kill the envoys the Greeks sent at the very beginning of the war to present their ultimatum. For Agamemnon confronted his two sons in their chariot, and though they begged for their lives, he held no pity for them, but slew them where they stood. As a forest fire leaps forward, destroying everything in its path, so Agamemnon carried all before him, and he and his men harried the Trojans back to the city wall.

  But now dark-bearded Zeus came down from Olympus to his vantage point on Ida, with his messenger Iris by his side. “Deliver this as a message to Hector,” he commanded. “As long as Agamemnon remains unhurt, the Greeks will dominate the battle; but once he retires wounded, I shall grant Hector the power of slaughtering the Greeks all the way back to their ships until nightfall.”

  Iris, the rainbow messenger of the gods, flies from Olympus at Zeus’ command.[67]

  Beautiful Iris delivered the message entrusted to her by Zeus, and Priam’s son heard it in his heart like an inspiration. He rallied his troops, putting fresh courage into his men all over the battlefield, but still Agamemnon seemed unstoppable. One after another he slew two sons of Antenor, leaving their mother to mourn in her chamber. But at the moment of death one of the two young men struck and gashed Agamemnon on the forearm. The Greek leader tried to fight on, but was forced to leave the battlefield to seek medical help. With a cry of encouragement to the other Greeks, he was gone.

  Hecto
r’s chance had come. He urged his men to greater efforts, ordering them forward from the city gates, while he himself fell on the foe like a savage storm at sea. Ten Greek champions fell before his spear and his flashing sword. Back fell the Greeks, back and further back. They maintained good order, but all too soon they found themselves once more hard by the rampart and their camp. Diomedes and Odysseus were wounded and had to withdraw from the battlefield. Even mighty Ajax found himself slowly being driven back, and the same was happening all over the field.

  Now, Achilles had been watching the action from afar, standing on the stern of his beached ship, and he saw Nestor returning from the battle with a wounded man in his chariot. He was disturbed, for it looked as though it was his friend Machaon, the son of Asclepius, and he sent his tent-mate Patroclus to find out. When the young son of Menoetius reached Nestor’s tent, the old king of Pylos made him welcome, but Patroclus explained that he had only come to see whether it was Machaon who had been hurt. Now that he saw it wasn’t, he would leave. His carelessness provoked Nestor to anger against Achilles, for the Greeks now needed him more than ever.

  “Achilles’ father Peleus sent him here to perform noble deeds,” he said, “not to sulk and skulk in his tent. If he truly will not fight, ask him to lend you his armor, so that you may lead the fearsome Myrmidons into battle. The enemy will think that you are him and their courage will fail. Otherwise, I fear, all will soon be lost.”

  Nestor was acting, all unwitting, as an agent of the will of Zeus. But Patroclus liked the idea. He was moved to pity by the plight of the Greeks, and could see how dire the situation was. He set out back to the Myrmidons’ encampment to see if Achilles would agree. But on the way he met his friend Eurypylus, grievously wounded in the thigh by one of Paris’s barbs, and he stopped to tend to him.