The War That Killed Achilles

by Caroline Alexander

  The goddess’s words, the speaking of Menelaos’ name, stir Helen:Speaking so the goddess left in her heart sweet longing after her husband of time before, and her city and parents. And at once, wrapping herself about in shimmering garments, she went forth from the chamber, letting fall a light tear.

  Going out onto the roof above the Skaian Gates, one of two named entrances to the city and of all features of Troy the most fated, Helen passes Priam and the Trojan elders, men too old to fight, who remain now inside the gates with the women and children:. . . these, as they saw Helen along the tower approaching,

  murmuring softly to each other uttered their winged words:

  “Surely there is no blame on Trojans and strong-greaved Achaeans

  if for long time they suffer hardship for a woman like this one.

  Terrible is the likeness of her face to immortal goddesses.

  Still, though she be such, let her go away in the ships, lest

  she be left behind, a grief to us and our children.”

  Helen’s timeless beauty is evoked with not a single physical attribute—her hair, her features, her eyes—but by the reaction of those who should hate her most. “Terrible”—ainōs—“is the likeness of her face to immortal goddesses”; the word ainōs carries the same double edge as its literal English counterpart—“in an extreme degree,” “strongly,” but also “to such a degree as to cause apprehension,” “dreadfully.”28 This charged word and the men’s conclusion—“ ‘Still . . . let her go away in the ships’ ”—eloquently establishes Helen’s precarious existence in the city of her people’s enemy.

  The only man to turn to her with wholehearted warmth is Priam himself, who calls her to join him in watching her “ ‘husband of time past’ ” and inquiring as to the identity of one of the Achaean warriors, who given his splendid, lordly appearance “ ‘might well be royal.’ ” Helen’s response, the first words she utters in the epic, is roundabout, and tellingly begins with a devastating self-characterization:Helen, the shining among women, answered and spoke to him:

  “Always to me, beloved father, you are feared and respected;

  and I wish bitter death had been what I wanted, when I came hither

  following your son, forsaking my chamber, my kinsmen,

  my grown child, and the loveliness of girls my own age.

  It did not happen that way: and now I am worn with weeping.

  This now I will tell you in answer to the question you asked me.

  That man is Atreus’ son Agamemnon, widely powerful,

  at the same time a good king and a strong spearfighter,29

  once my kinsman, slut that I am. Did this ever happen?”

  The fate Hektor wishes on Paris is the fate Helen calls down upon herself: “ ‘I wish bitter death had been what I wanted.’ ” Other traditions characterized Helen’s elopement with Paris as a rape and an abduction; it was in this vein that Nestor called for the Achaeans to put aside all thoughts of home and to “avenge Helen’s longing to escape and her lamentations.” 30 Yet another tradition held that Helen never came to Troy but spent the war in Egypt, while men unwittingly fought over a ghostly cloud of her image.31 Nestor’s wishful thinking apart, the Iliad consistently, if sympathetically, portrays Helen as the remorseful agent of her own disastrous decision. “ ‘Did this ever happen?’ ” are her wondering words.

  Priam’s query as to the identity of the unknown regal warrior who turns out to be Agamemnon marks the beginning of an extended scene conventionally referred to as the Teichoskopia, or “Viewing from the Walls.” From the battlements of his city, with fair Helen beside him, the old king looks over the array of warriors gathered below and, pointing out one hero after another, asks who each is. His query and Helen’s response afford the opportunity for a series of vivid character sketches. That Priam in this tenth year of the war could be ignorant of the identity of Atreus’ son Agamemnon, lord of men and commander in chief of the Achaeans, is obviously implausible. Like the Catalogue of Ships, the entire sequence has been relocated from an earlier account of the beginning of the war, to serve as a theatrical prelude to the first scene of actual fighting:Next again the old man asked her, seeing Odysseus:

  “Tell me of this one also, dear child; what man can he be,

  shorter in truth by a head than Atreus’ son Agamemnon,

  but broader, it would seem, in the chest and across the shoulders.”

  Helen’s identification of Odysseus, son of Laertes, a man raised “ ‘to know every manner of shiftiness and crafty counsels,’ ” is unexpectedly supplemented by Priam’s counselor, Antenor, who stands nearby:In his turn Antenor of the good counsel answered her:

  “Surely this word you have spoken, my lady, can be no falsehood.

  Once in the days before now brilliant Odysseus came here

  with warlike Menelaos, and their embassy was for your sake.

  To both of these I gave in my halls kind entertainment

  and I learned the natural way of both, and their close counsels.

  Now when these were set before the Trojans assembled

  and stood up, Menelaos was bigger by his broad shoulders

  but Odysseus was the more lordly when both were seated.

  Now before all when both of them spun their speech and their

  counsels,

  Menelaos indeed spoke rapidly, in few words

  but exceedingly lucid, since he was no long speaker

  nor one who wasted his words though he was only a young man.

  But when that other drove to his feet, resourceful Odysseus,

  he would just stand and stare down, eyes fixed on the ground

  beneath him,

  nor would he gesture with the staff backward and forward, but

  hold it

  clutched hard in front of him, like any man who knows nothing.

  Yes, you would call him a sullen man, and a fool likewise.

  But when he let the great voice go from his chest, and the words

  came

  drifting down like the winter snows, then no other mortal

  man beside could stand up against Odysseus. Then we

  wondered less beholding Odysseus’ outward appearance.”

  Amid much else, Antenor’s justly famous characterization of one of the most enduring heroes in all mythology drops a casual reference to what had evidently been an attempt by both parties to avoid the war. “ ‘Their embassy was for your sake,’ ” he says in passing to Helen. That Odysseus is spoken of by the Trojans with open admiration, and even Menelaos with approbation, suggests the possibility of an optimistic outcome; what, one wonders, went wrong?32

  This civilized interlude is interrupted by the appearance of the herald Idaios summoning Priam to seal the oaths so that the duel for Helen can begin. Priam, “shuddering,” sets out and makes a striking arrival, striding between the two armies. The oath taken by both parties to abide by the duel’s outcome is performed in a solemn ceremony, with prayers, libations, and sacrifice. Agamemnon, cutting the hairs from the heads of the lambs of sacrifice, himself offers a prayer to Zeus: “If it should be that Alexandros slays Menelaos,

  let him keep Helen for himself, and all her possessions,

  and we in our seafaring ships shall take our way homeward.

  But if the fair-haired Menelaos kills Alexandros,

  then let the Trojans give back Helen and all her possessions,

  and pay also a price to the Argives which will be fitting,

  which among people yet to come shall be as a standard.

  Then if Priam and the sons of Priam are yet unwilling

  after Alexandros has fallen to pay me the penalty,

  I myself shall fight hereafter for the sake of the ransom,

  here remaining, until I have won to the end of my quarrel.”33

  The oaths cut, Priam hastily remounts his chariot and heads back to Troy, because, as he says, he “ ‘cannot look with these eyes on the sight of my dear son / fighting.’
” As the leaders and princes make the last preparations for the duel, the rank and file murmur a startling, ambiguous prayer of their own:“Father Zeus, watching over us from Ida, most high, most

  honoured,

  whichever man has made what has happened happen to both sides,

  grant that he be killed and go down to the house of Hades.

  Let the friendship and the sworn faith be true for the rest of us.”

  Strikingly, no man at Troy prays for his own side to win. Achaean and Trojan are indifferent to the outcome—so long as it brings the war to an end.

  The duel itself comes and goes in a relative flash of a mere forty lines. Paris hurls a spear and strikes Menelaos’ shield; Menelaos strikes the shield of Paris. Menelaos then strikes at Paris’ helmet with his silver nail-studded sword, causing it to shatter into pieces and drop from his hand. In desperation, he also drops his warrior’s posture and starts to brawl, grabbing Paris’ helmet and dragging him toward the Achaeans, causing the chinstrap to throttle Paris’ soft throat. Here Menelaos would have “won glory forever” had Aphrodite, Paris’ patron goddess, not intervened. Invisible to the mortal onlookers, she breaks his chinstrap to free him, then whisks Paris away, shrouded in thick mist, and drops him in his own bedchamber.34 Next setting out to look for Helen, she finds her on the tower with other women. Disguising herself as an old wool dresser whom Helen had known in Sparta, the goddess tugs at her robe and addresses her:“Come with me: Alexandros sends for you to come home to him.

  He is in his chamber now, in the bed with its circled pattern,

  shining in his raiment and his own beauty; you would not think

  that he came from fighting against a man; you would think he was

  going

  rather to a dance, or rested and had been dancing lately.”

  Looking closely at her, Helen recognizes “the round, sweet throat of the goddess” and in a flash of anger offers the goddess an astonishing challenge:“Go yourself and sit beside him, abandon the gods’ way,

  turn your feet back never again to the path of Olympos

  but stay with him forever, and suffer for him, and look after him

  until he makes you his wedded wife, or makes you his slave girl.

  Not I. I am not going to him. It would be too shameful.

  I will not serve his bed, since the Trojan women hereafter

  would laugh at me, all, and my heart even now is confused with

  sorrows.”

  No other of the Iliad’s characters so directly confronts any of the deities who toy with their lives. With her woman’s instinct, Helen sees through everything, not only Aphrodite’s feeble disguise but her most secret motives. The goddess’s description of Paris, with its jarring emphasis on his beauty and his bed, is transparent to Helen: the goddess of desire herself desires Paris and is pimping Helen to him as her surrogate.

  In Greek mythology, Helen’s origins are bizarre. The best-known story tells of the rape of her mother, Leda, by Zeus in the guise of a swan, the fruit of this coupling being an egg, from which was hatched Helen; in other versions her mother, suggestively, is Nemesis, also united with Zeus “under harsh compulsion.”35 The Iliad frequently acknowledges Helen as being “descended from Zeus” but ignores the exact role he plays in her parentage. An Indo-European reconstruction of her name, *Swelénā, from a word stem associated with burning and sun glare, suggests that she was the shining Daughter of the Sun.36 In later Greek mythology and cult, she has intriguing associations with trees, birds, and eggs, suggestive of a fertility goddess who lost her divinity over time, while retaining her essential attributes. 37 Aphrodite’s origins are found in Ishtar-Astarte, the Phoenician queen of heaven and divine prostitute, whose cult was brought to Greece by way of the island of Cyprus (or Kypros); “Kypris” is one of Aphrodite’s Iliadic epithets.38 Helen’s thralldom to lust and desire, whether taken metaphorically or as a literal servitude forced upon her by Aphrodite’s spell, is used in the Iliad to render one of the most complex and convincing of all its many characters.39

  Aphrodite’s response to Helen’s challenge is to lash out in anger:“Wretched girl, do not tease me lest in anger I forsake you and grow to hate you as much as now I terribly love you, lest I encompass you in hard hate, caught between both sides, Danaans and Trojans alike, and you wretchedly perish.”

  Bereft of desirability, as Helen herself knows, she would not stand a chance within Troy’s walls, or without. Submitting in anger and humiliation to Aphrodite, Helen follows her to Paris’ chamber, where the goddess herself, with menacing solicitude, pulls up a chair for her by Paris’ bed. “ ‘So you came back from fighting,’ ” says Helen to her lord “in derision.” “ ‘Oh, how I wish you had died there / beaten down by the stronger man, who was once my husband.’ ” “ ‘Lady, censure my heart no more in bitter reprovals,’ ” Paris responds unconcernedly, and, distracted by his desire, he draws Helen to his bed. Aphrodite’s bestowal of Helen on Paris is undoubtedly inspired by the story of the first fateful seduction, when Paris came to Sparta—yet another scene belonging to the early phase of the war but restated here for dramatic effect.40

  Back on the plain of Troy, Menelaos still rages, searching for Paris, whom he last saw in his very hands.

  Yet could none of the Trojans nor any renowned companion

  show Alexandros then to warlike Menelaos.

  These would not have hidden him for love, if any had seen him,

  since he was hated among them all as dark death is hated.

  Who won the duel? Although neither man was killed in accordance with the terms the solemn oath had projected, the advantage, as Agamemnon declares before the assembly, is clearly to Menelaos. But the unorthodox situation causes a quandary, not only on earth but on Olympos, where the gods are sitting in council and Zeus ponders what to do next:“Let us consider then how these things shall be accomplished,

  whether again to stir up grim warfare and the terrible

  fighting, or cast down love and make them friends with each other.

  If somehow this way could be sweet and pleasing to all of us,

  the city of lord Priam might still be a place men dwell in,

  and Menelaos could take away with him Helen of Argos.”

  At this moment, Zeus’ pledge to Thetis and Achilles seems to have slipped his mind; there is no question but that the war must be resumed if Achilles is to be missed, and therefore honored, by his Achaean companions. Such lapses in the Iliad ’s memory are most usually attributed to the hazards of a long, traditional oral composition. It may also be that such lapses were forgiven by their ancient audiences and that dramatic value counted more than consistency. At any rate, here and now, Achaeans and Trojans stand at a crossroad; the possibility looms that they can all go home.

  But Zeus’ suggestion that the whole business be wrapped up bloodlessly is viciously struck down by Hera, whose appetite for this war never, ever flags. Angrily, she evokes “ ‘the sweat that I have sweated in toil, and my horses worn out / gathering my people, and bringing evil to Priam and his children.’ ” Zeus’ response is that of a very weary husband: reluctantly, against his own inclination, he gives in. His speech to Hera and hers again to him bear some of the most tragic import in the epic:Deeply troubled, Zeus who gathers the clouds answered her:

  “Dear lady, what can be all the great evils done to you

  by Priam and the sons of Priam, that you are thus furious

  forever to bring down the strong-founded city of Ilion?

  If you could walk through the gates and through the towering

  ramparts

  and eat Priam and the children of Priam raw, and the other

  Trojans, then, then only might you glut at last your anger.

  Do as you please then. Never let this quarrel hereafter

  be between you and me a bitterness for both of us.

  And put away in your thoughts this other thing that I tell you:

  whenever I in turn am ea
ger to lay waste some city,

  as I please, one in which are dwelling men who are dear to you,

  you shall not stand in the way of my anger, but let me do it,

  since I was willing to grant you this with my heart unwilling.

  For of all the cities beneath the sun and the starry heaven

  dwelt in by men who live upon earth, there has never been one

  honoured nearer to my heart than sacred Ilion

  and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear.

  Never yet has my altar gone without fair sacrifice,

  the libation and the savour, since this is our portion of honour.”

  Then the goddess the ox-eyed lady Hera answered:

  “Of all cities there are three that are dearest to my own heart:

  Argos and Sparta and Mycenae of the wide ways. All these,

  whenever they become hateful to your heart, sack utterly.

  I will not stand up for these against you, nor yet begrudge you.”

  Once this agreement has been reached, events unfold swiftly: Athene is given orders “ ‘to visit horrible war again on Achaeans and Trojans,’ ” and to do so in a way that makes the Trojans the offenders. Like a falling star, she flashes to earth in a blaze of light and then, in the likeness of a man, insinuates herself among the Trojans. Her patsy is the Trojan Pandaros, son of Lykaon. Sidling up to him, she speaks “winged words” describing the glory and gratitude he will win from the Trojans, the gifts he will receive from Paris, if he lets fly an arrow at Menelaos: “So spoke Athene, and persuaded the fool’s heart in him.” The arrow Pandaros shoots flies true but is deflected from its intended mark by Athene herself, true to her role as a double agent. Driven into Menelaos’ belt buckle, the arrow harmlessly grazes his skin, while drawing blood.