The War That Killed Achilles

by Caroline Alexander

  “ ‘Dear brother, it was your death I sealed in the oaths of friendship, / setting you alone before the Achaeans to fight with the Trojans,’ ” groans Agamemnon, unmanned at the sight of his brother’s blood. In his loving solicitude, he makes here, perhaps, his most sympathetic appearance in the epic. Vacillating between self-recrimination and anger, Agamemnon calls for the Trojan people to pay a great penalty for this outrage “ ‘with their own heads, and with their women, and with their children.’ ” The war machinery starts to grind again; as the Trojans approach, Agamemnon rallies and positions his troops: “The Achaeans again put on their armour, and remembered their warcraft.”41 Shortly afterward, the first man in the epic is killed, a Trojan named Echepolos, who falls at the hands of Antilochos. And so the truce, with all the promise it held, is shattered, and the war is on. There will be a few future acts of friendship between individual warriors, and one more solemn attempt to end the war, made by an assembly of Trojans desperate to save their city, but this also will be futile.

  The proud drumroll represented by the Catalogue of Ships’ magnificent display of men and nations dies away here—specifically, it dies with the deal cut between Zeus and Hera. Zeus will sacrifice the Trojans, whom he loves beyond all other peoples, and Hera will sacrifice the Achaean cities she holds most dear in order to glut her hatred. Both gods have agreed to an understanding that will break their own hearts. The unwitting, unwilling victims of this pact are all that grand host, the thousands of lives paraded in such pomp and magnificence by both Catalogues. “ ‘O son of Atreus, blessed, child of fortune and favour / many are these beneath your sway, these sons of the Achaeans,’ ” Priam had exclaimed in wondering admiration, viewing from the battlement of his doomed city the glittering Achaean host.

  For Homer’s audience, the exchange on Olympos would have held particular, devastating import. The cities named by Hera as those she held most dear—“ ‘Argos and Sparta and Mycenae of the wide ways’ ”—had been their own.42 As Greek populations descended from the refugees of these lost cities would have recognized, the self-defeating pact between the gods represented a bitter parable—the price of the war against Troy was their own defeat. Later traditions would spell out this conviction in more detail, but never with more devastating eloquence.

  “ ‘Father Zeus, watching over us from Ida, most high, most honoured, . . . Let the friendship and the sworn faith be true for the rest of us’ ”; “. . . the Trojans and Achaeans were joyful, / hoping now to be rid of all the sorrow of warfare.” With deliberate, extended scenes, the Iliad establishes the hatred with which the war is held by both sides. Lugrós, polúdakrus, dusēlegēs, ainós—“baleful,” “bringing many tears,” “bringing much woe,” “dread”—these are the epithets the Iliad uses of war. 43 Earlier, in vivid, dramatic detail, it established that the Achaeans are ready to flee for their homes. No one wants to be here; everyone regrets that the war ever started. Everyone wants a way out. The war seems to have gathered autonomous momentum, which, as the epic emphasizes, will end in mutual destruction.

  . . . on that day many men of the Achaeans and Trojans lay sprawled in the dust face downward beside one another.

  These are the last, pointed words of Iliad, Book Four, summing up the renewal of fighting on the day that could have ended in peace. To echo Helen’s uncomprehending despair: “ ‘Did this ever happen?’ ”

  Enemy Lines

  There the screaming and the shouts of triumph rose up together of men killing and men killed, and the ground ran blood.

  —Iliad 4.450-51

  An epic of war, the greater part of the Iliad is concerned with killing and dying, and the deaths of some 250 warriors are recorded, the majority in relentlessly inventive detail: “This man Meriones pursued and overtaking him / struck in the right buttock, and the spearhead drove straight / on and passing under the bone went into the bladder. . . . He dropped, screaming, to his knees, and death was a mist about him.” “Next he killed Astynoös and Hypeiron, shepherd of the people, / striking one with the bronze-heeled spear above the nipple, / and cutting the other beside the shoulder through the collar-bone / with the great sword, so that neck and back were hewn free of the shoulder.” “He spoke, and threw; and Pallas Athene guided the weapon / to the nose next to the eye, and it cut on through the white teeth / and the bronze weariless shore all the way through the tongue’s base / so that the spearhead came out underneath the jawbone.”

  Narrated, as it were, in the heat of battle, the swift, graphic descriptions of wounding and killing are endowed with just sufficiently realistic detail to render even the more far-fetched scenes believable; Homer “knew where the major organs were,” as one medical authority has stated. “He did not know what their function was.”1 For a civilian audience, however, they suffice to evoke convincingly the carnage of the battlefield. More to the point, notwithstanding the anatomical improbabilities, these deaths are clearly intended to be realistic.

  More important, the deaths are also clearly intended to be pathetic, and on this point the Iliad parts company with conventional heroic saga. Fighting, battling, wounding, inflicting death are not merely the central tropes of heroic narrative, they are by and large what heroic narrative is about, as can be illustrated by the following fairly typical, fairly random examples: The forty warriors rushed to the fight,

  Began the fight against the heathen.

  They came in a flood then,

  They were covered in blood.

  They scattered cries here.

  They brandished their pikes here.

  The face of the earth was covered with blood. . . .

  —Epic of Manas

  Or: Each strained at the other from the saddle

  Till the eight hoofs of their horses were mingled.

  But neither was victorious.

  They unsheathed their glittering swords from their covers,

  Seven and eight times they dealt each other blows

  Over their bladders,

  But neither was victorious.

  They made haste, they struck each other on their belts,

  They dealt each other blows behind and before. . . .

  —Dzhangariada2

  In distinct contrast to these impersonal slugging matches, the Iliad’s “poetry of combat,” as it has been called, takes pains to personalize its heroic deaths. The slain warriors of the Iliad are mostly obscure fellows who have received no previous mention in the epic, but who are evoked—brought to life—at the moment they are killed by some small personalizing detail: “Meriones in turn killed Phereklos, son of Harmonides, / the smith, who understood how to make with his hand all intricate / things. . . .” “Meges in turn killed Pedaios, the son of Antenor, / who, bastard though he was, was nursed by lovely Theano / with close care, as for her own children, to pleasure her husband. . . .” “Diomedes of the great war cry cut down Axylos, / Teuthras’ son, who had been a dweller in strong-founded Arisbe, / a man rich in substance and a friend to all humanity / since in his house by the wayside he entertained all comers.”

  The vanquishing warrior may carry the action, but the audience’s emotional attention is diverted to the fallen foe. This personalizing quality ensures that most of the Iliad ’s deaths are perceived—perhaps only fleetingly—to be regrettable. Although the winning of glory in combat is the aim of the conventional hero of combat poetry, in the Iliad glory is usurped by sympathy for the human being, possessed of a family and life story, who has been extinguished. Fully three times as many Trojans die as Achaeans in this Greek epic, so the Iliad is dense with the descriptions of enemy warriors who die pathetically. This remarkable point is worth emphasizing: subtly, but with unflagging consistency, the Iliad ensures that the enemy is humanized and that the deaths of enemy Trojans are depicted as lamentable. The Iliad is insistent on keeping to the fore the price of glory.

  The Iliad’s wounded warriors also tend to die. There are no instances in which a mortally wounded hero fights on to prevail over the weakn
ess of his flesh; no god reattaches a hero’s severed limb or miraculously restores a shattered skull. Nor are we ever shown the enduring wounds of war, the maimed soldiers who somehow survived a heroic onslaught at the cost of a limb, or an eye, or other diminishment. This may simply be a reflection of the medical realities of Homer’s Dark Age, when, undoubtedly, wounded soldiers did in fact tend to die. The inevitability of death after wounding may, then, be a historical, not a poetic, truth, but in any event the mortality of the Homeric warrior is never compromised.3

  In a few exceptional cases, chosen warriors receive magical deliverance from certain death by divine intervention, as, for example, Paris was plucked out of combat with Menelaos by his patron goddess, Aphrodite. The most striking instances of such deliverance involve the Trojan Aineias, who, for example, is also rescued, in Book Five, by Aphrodite, his divine mother, from the hands of Diomedes, the son of Tydeus and one of the most important Achaean heroes:Tydeus’ son in his hand caught

  up a stone, a huge thing which no two men could carry

  such as men are now, but by himself he lightly hefted it.

  He threw, and caught Aineias in the hip, in the place where the

  hip-bone

  turns inside the thigh, the place men call the cup-socket.

  It smashed the cup-socket and broke the tendons both sides of it,

  and the rugged stone tore the skin backward, so that the fighter

  dropping to one knee stayed leaning on the ground with his heavy

  hand, and a covering of black night came over both eyes.

  Now in this place Aineias lord of men might have perished

  had not Aphrodite, Zeus’ daughter, been quick to perceive him.

  The facts of Aineias’ parentage by Aphrodite and his mortal father, Anchises, is emphatically established by Aineias himself later in the epic, when he relates in exhaustive detail his genealogy to Achilles, as one demigod bragging to another. More important than Aineias’ half-divine birth, however, is the extraordinary prophecy he bears to “ ‘be the survivor’ ” of the house of Priam when Ilion eventually falls. His descendants, so the ancient prophecy runs, will inherit the Troad; it was in deference to this tradition that the Romans claimed Trojan Aineias as their founder—a tradition that has recently received new consideration in view of DNA findings that indicate that the Etruscans, the first rulers of Rome, originated from Anatolia .4

  Altogether, Aineias is rescued four times from certain death in the Iliad, twice in Book Five from Diomedes and twice in Book Twenty from Achilles5—far more than any other hero. If, as it seems, the tradition of his survival was already well established, these many close calls should perhaps be seen as the epic’s playful sparring with its audiences’ expectations: Aineias the legendary survivor appears to be doomed—“[Aineias] dropping to one knee stayed leaning on the ground with his heavy / hand, and a covering of black night came over both eyes”—the terrible darkening of vision is one of the Iliad’s most common descriptions of death. At the last moment, however, the epic relents and Aphrodite appears to protect her fated son, and the audience can smile with relief, and perhaps amusement. 6

  The few demigods, such as Aineias, who receive miraculous rescue are saved only by the direct intervention of a patron divinity, not by any special ingredient of their own semidivine nature. The flesh of the demigods is wholly vulnerable, the blood is the blood of mortals, the pain of injury that of ordinary mortal men, as is the inevitability of death. Nothing the men have inherited from their divine parents is itself protective; what saves them is the physical removal from the danger of the battlefield. The vividly evoked vulnerability of demigods such as Aineias will also have bearing upon the nature, and limitations, of the epic’s most outstanding demigod—Achilles.

  Diomedes’ rampage is the most important feature of the epic’s first major engagement, and it sweeps unflaggingly through Book Five: Book Five belongs to Diomedes. This is his aristeía, or display of prowess (from the verb aristeúein, “to be the best or the bravest”). The son of the hero Tydeus, one of the heroes of old from the generation before that at Troy and a member of the legendary seven who attacked Thebes, Diomedes is securely placed within the epic tradition’s inner circle of heroes. The exploits of his father, Tydeus, are often recalled in the Iliad, by both gods and men, and Athene’s aid to Diomedes is predicated on her affection for his father: “ ‘Such a helper was I who stood then beside him,’ ” says the goddess to her protégé; “ ‘Now beside you also I stand and ever watch over you, / and urge you to fight confidently with the Trojans.’ ” In earlier lore, Diomedes appears to have originally been a tribal hero, or even a god, associated with Aetolia, north of the Corinthian Gulf; in the Iliad, however, he is the king of Argos.7 Embedded in Diomedes’ family history are a number of telling incidents that suggest that the dramatic swath of slaughter he cuts through the enemy ranks in Book Five may be an extension of an inherited brutality. A great-uncle of his was “Agrios,” meaning “fierce” or “savage,” while his father almost won the gift of immortality from the gods but lost this opportunity by an act of peculiar savagery: “Tydeus the son of Oineus in the Theban war was wounded by Melanippus the son of Astacus,” relates an ancient scholiast, or commentator, on the Iliad: “Amphiaraus killed Melanippus and brought back his head, which Tydeus split open and gobbled his brain in a passion. When Athena, who was bringing Tydeus immortality, saw the horror, she turned away from him.”8

  Cults honoring Diomedes throughout the Greek world are inevitably associated with horses, an association upheld in the Iliad, and in at least one instance with human sacrifice.9 Out of these old, disturbing traditions, the Iliad’s Diomedes has been considerably refined, and while a courageous and effective warrior, he is also gracious and well spoken, both on the field and off. He is integral to the larger story of the siege and capture of Troy that takes place beyond the parameters of the Iliad.

  As Diomedes blazes through the enemy forces, he twice—remarkably—transgresses into the divine realm. When Aphrodite, “the lady of Kypros,” rescues her son Aineias, Diomedes’ response displays a dangerous lack of awe; swinging his sword at her, he catches the goddess on her hand, causing ichōr, “that which runs in the veins of the blessed divinities” instead of blood, to flow. Shrieking, Aphrodite retreats to Olympos, as Diomedes shouts a warning after her:“Give way, daughter of Zeus, from the fighting and the terror. It is not then enough that you lead astray women without warcraft? Yet, if still you must haunt the fighting, I think that now you will shiver even when you hear some other talking of battles.”

  Diomedes’ dim view of the goddess of love and desire is humorously shared by the more warrior-like goddesses, Athene and Hera, who scornfully mock the Kyprian’s tearful return to Olympos. Smiling indulgently at Athene, Zeus gently scolds Aphrodite for straying beyond the bedroom into the battlefield. It is left to her mother, Dione, to comfort the shaken goddess and to treat her wound. Taking her daughter’s arm, she “stroked away . . . the ichor, / so that the arm was made whole again and the strong pains rested.”

  Athene herself plays a direct role in Diomedes’ second assault on a god. Having obtained permission from Zeus to interfere in the fray, she and Hera, letting forth a shrieking war cry, swoop from Olympos to earth in their divine chariot. Parking horses and chariot on the Trojan plain, the two set forth “in little steps like shivering / doves, in their eagerness to stand by the men of Argos”—this image of the bloodthirsty divinities shivering in excitement as they mince toward their prey is inexpressibly sinister. On arrival, Athene immediately accosts Diomedes and directs him to charge straight for Ares, the very god of war, who, fighting for the Trojans, is hewing his own havoc on the field. Shoving Diomedes’ henchman out of the way, Athene climbs beside him in his chariot, causing it to groan under her Olympian weight, and, taking up the whip and the reins, drives straight for Ares. The war god’s response is to stab at Diomedes with his spear, but, easily, Athene brushes him aside, and it
is Diomedes who “drove forward / with the bronze spear; and Pallas Athene, leaning in on it, / drove it into the depth of the belly where the war belt girt him.” Bellowing with pain and dripping immortal ichor, Ares, like Aphrodite before him, makes his way speedily to Olympos to complain loudly to Zeus, but here he is met with blistering contempt. “ ‘Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar,’ ” says Zeus. “ ‘To me you are most hateful of all gods who hold Olympos.’ ” Nonetheless, it is not fitting that Ares, immortal as he is, remain wounded, and at Zeus’ behest Paiëon, the god of healing (whose traits were later assumed by Apollo), administers medicinal herbs, and the god of war is healed.10

  The remarkable accumulation of the variety of woundings and rescues in this first of the Iliad’s extended scenes of battle helps establish the parameters of mortal conflict on the heroic field of war. There are the minor characters who live to die at a greater hero’s hands; there are those whom the gods choose to rescue, at least for the day, from certain death; there are the demigods who are rescued and healed by divine intervention. And then there are the gods themselves, who, like the mortals who so entertain them, throw themselves energetically into the fray, inflict and suffer wounds, bleed, feel pain and even fear. The remarkable aristeia of Diomedes shows that not only gods but men can cause divine ichor to flow; conversely, a divine touch can heal mortal and immortal wounds alike. This occasional blurring of boundaries between human and divine spheres serves to harden rather than obscure the essential, unassailable differences between god and man. Notwithstanding all the varieties of wounds and wounding, a single, salient fact remains, as Apollo reminds Diomedes: “never the same is / the breed of gods, who are immortal, and men who walk on the ground.” The gods can play at war, but mortal heroes—healed or wounded, rescued or abandoned—must eventually die.