The War That Killed Achilles

by Caroline Alexander

  The adventures of paired or inseparable heroes are a favorite theme of myth and legend. In Greek mythology, to choose one example, we find Theseus, slayer of the Minotaur, closely paired in a number of exploits with Peirithoös of Thessaly.7 A more ancient and striking parallel, long noted, is found in the Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh, dating to at least 1700 B.C. The emotional heart of this saga of the deeds of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk (now in Iraq), is his close friendship with the wild man Enkidu, whose death drives the grieving Gilgamesh to the limits of mortal existence.8

  Achilles and Patroklos perform no heroic deeds together. In fact, Achilles’ therápōn has no life at all outside his death, and he performs no deed except the grand, last mission that will kill him. Homer worked hard to ensure that this outline of a figure whose single, simple role is so transparent be invested with as much humanity as his poetic art could muster in short compass: the death of Patroklos simply must be pathetic, must stir emotion, or the whole grand scheme of the Iliad fails. Consequently, man and god give rare tribute to the character of Achilles’ doomed therápōn; Patroklos “ ‘was gentle, and understood how to be kindly toward all men,’ ” according to a companion. Zeus himself knows Patroklos as “ ‘strong and gentle.’ ”

  Meanwhile Patroklos came to the shepherd of the people, Achilles,

  and stood by him and wept warm tears, like a spring dark-running

  that down the face of a rock impassable drips its dim water;

  and swift-footed brilliant Achilles looked on him in pity,

  and spoke to him aloud and addressed him in winged words:

  “Why then

  are you crying like some poor little girl, Patroklos,

  who runs after her mother and begs to be picked up and carried,

  and clings to her dress, and holds her back when she tries to hurry,

  and gazes tearfully into her face, until she is picked up?

  You are like such a one, Patroklos, dropping these soft tears.

  Could you have some news to tell, for me or the Myrmidons?

  Have you, and nobody else, received some message from Phthia?

  Yet they tell me Aktor’s son Menoitios lives still

  and Aiakos’ son Peleus lives still among the Myrmidons.

  If either of these died we should take it hard. Or is it

  the Argives you are mourning over, and how they are dying

  against the hollow ships by reason of their own arrogance?

  Tell me, do not hide it in your mind, and so we shall both know.”

  “Groaning heavily,” Patroklos replies by listing the heroes who have been wounded; then, cursing Achilles as pitiless, he makes the request that Nestor urged—to send him out with Achilles’ men, disguised in Achilles’ armor:So he spoke supplicating in his great innocence; this was his own death and evil destruction he was entreating.

  Patroklos, for all his good intentions, has bungled his mission. Faithfully, he echoed the latter part of Nestor’s speech—but he forgot its major point: Nestor intended for Patroklos to persuade Achilles to return to battle, and only if this entreaty failed was he to request that he, Patroklos, return in Achilles’ armor. This blunder represents Patroklos’ second missed cue. Previously, in the Embassy, Phoinix’s obscure parable of Meleager offered one clear lesson: an entreaty by the person closest to the angry hero—spelled out for emphasis as Kleo-patra—could induce him back to battle. Achilles stormed past the parable without consideration; but so, too, more fatefully, did Patroklos, who, as the Iliad took pains to point out, was standing by, watching and listening. In the Embassy, Patroklos did not hear the hint; now he registers Nestor’s hints but embraces the wrong one.

  “Deeply troubled,” Achilles answers Patroklos, briefly defending his anger against Agamemnon. Nonetheless, swiftly and without altercation, he accedes to Patroklos’ request. Directing him to draw his “ ‘glorious armour’ ” about his shoulders, Achilles gives Patroklos command of the Myrmidons, and last stern injunctions:“When you have driven [the Trojans] from the ships, come back;

  although later

  the thunderous lord of Hera might grant you the winning of glory,

  you must not set your mind on fighting the Trojans, whose delight

  is in battle, without me. So you will diminish my honour.

  You must not, in the pride and fury of fighting, go on

  slaughtering the Trojans, and lead the way against Ilion,

  for fear some one of the everlasting gods on Olympos

  might crush you. Apollo who works from afar loves these people

  dearly. You must turn back once you bring the light of salvation

  to the ships, and let the others go on fighting in the flat land.

  Father Zeus, Athene and Apollo—if only

  not one of all the Trojans could escape destruction, not one

  of the Argives, but you and I could emerge from the slaughter

  so that we two alone could break Troy’s hallowed coronal.”

  No one speaks like Achilles. The astounding vision—the annihilation of enemy and ally alike, with the survival only of the two companions—reveals not only Achilles’ closeness to Patroklos but also how wholly disassociated he believes himself to be from anything to do with this war. Also manifest within his stern, thrice-repeated injunctions are his deepest fears—that he lose honor, that Patroklos not return to him alive. While they talk, the storm of battle has risen around Aias, who had been defending the ships with almost single-handed courage. Under a barrage of spears, this solitary and stalwart warrior at last retreats. The Trojans fling firebrands at Achilles’ ship and the flames stream over it:Achilles

  struck his hands against both his thighs, and called to Patroklos:

  “Rise up, illustrious Patroklos, rider of horses.

  I see how the ravening fire goes roaring over our vessels.

  They must not get our ships so we cannot run away in them.

  Get on your armour; faster; I will muster our people.”

  Events have taken a bewildering turn: Patroklos had come intending to arouse Achilles, but it is Achilles who now rouses Patroklos. It is he who will muster the Myrmidons. Achilles had pledged not to return “ ‘until that time came / when the fighting with all its clamour came up to my own ships.’ ” Now the fighting and the flames have surely arrived; if Patroklos had not offered himself, might it not be Achilles setting forth?

  As Achilles musters his men, the legendary Myrmidons, Patroklos arms himself in the borrowed armor. The scene is typical of the three other great arming scenes in the epic, belonging respectively to Paris, to Agamemnon, and, most magnificently, and yet to come, to Achilles. Together, the four scenes demonstrate how traditional set pieces such as arming can be adapted, and in this case personalized for each hero.9 First, Patroklos puts on his greaves with their silver fastenings, then the corselet, “starry and elaborate of swift-footed Aiakides,” then the sword and the great shield:Over his mighty head he set the well-fashioned helmet

  with the horse-hair crest, and the plumes nodded terribly above it.

  He took up two powerful spears that fitted his hand’s grip,

  only he did not take the spear of blameless Aiakides,

  huge, heavy, thick, which no one else of all the Achaeans

  could handle, but Achilles alone knew how to wield it;

  the Pelian ash spear which Cheiron had brought to his father

  from high on Pelion to be death for fighters.

  Patroklos may be clad, head to foot, in Achilles’ armor, but he cannot wield Achilles’ spear. Used here eloquently to signify how out of his depth Patroklos is, the spear is one of three remarkable gifts to Peleus that were in turn handed down to his son. The Cypria relates how “at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis the gods gathered on Pelion to feast, and brought gifts for Peleus, and Chiron cut down a fine ash and gave him it for a spear. They say that Athena planed it and Hephaestus fashioned it.”10 The other gifts were a pair of horses, Xanthos and
Balios, born of the mare Podarge and the West Wind, “swift and immortal / horses the gods had given as shining gifts to Peleus”; and the armor, described as ámbrota, or “armour of non-dying, invincible armour,”11 which “the gods gave Peleus, a glorious present, for that day they drove [Thetis] to the marriage bed of a mortal.”

  In folklore and saga, gifts from fairies or higher powers to a mortal prince are usually magical. A magic spear would return to its master when hurled; magic horses would convey him safely out of battle; and magic armor would make the hero invulnerable.12 Typically, Homer has suppressed all such outlandish protection; no hero fighting at Troy has any charm or power to escape death.13 Nonetheless, as will shortly be revealed, remnants of the original attributes of each of Peleus’ divine gifts are discernible in the Iliad, although transformed and turned by Homer to tragic effect.

  At Patroklos’ bidding, Automedon, Achilles’ charioteer, harnesses the immortal horses, Xanthos and Balios, who tore with the winds’ speed,

  horses stormy Podarge once conceived of the west wind

  and bore, as she grazed in the meadow beside the swirl of the

  Ocean.

  In the traces beside these he put unfaulted Pedasos

  whom Achilles brought back once when he stormed Eëtion’s city.

  He, mortal as he was, ran beside the immortal horses.

  But Achilles went meanwhile to the Myrmidons, and

  arrayed them

  all in their war gear along the shelters. And they, as wolves

  who tear flesh raw, in whose hearts the battle fury is tireless,

  who have brought down a great horned stag in the mountains, and

  then feed

  on him, till the jowls of every wolf run blood, and then go

  all in a pack to drink from a spring of dark-running water,

  lapping with their lean tongues along the black edge of the surface

  and belching up the clotted blood; in the heart of each one

  is a spirit untremulous, but their bellies are full and groaning;

  as such the lords of the Myrmidons and their men of counsel

  around the brave henchman of swift-footed Aiakides

  swarmed, and among them was standing warlike Achilles

  and urged on the fighting men with their shields, and the horses.

  Many images have been used to convey the mayhem and bloodshed of war, but for sheer chilling glamour, few can match this mustering of the Myrmidons, wolf-hungry for battle, with the immortal horses straining at their traces. “Fifty were the fast-running ships wherein Achilles / beloved of Zeus had led his men to Troy, and in each one / were fifty men.” The origins of the Myrmidons are obscure and the usual explanation of their name is highly unsatisfactory. According to Hesiod, Aiakos, Achilles’ grandfather and a mortal son of Zeus, found himself to be the only human on the desolate island of Aigina; lonely, he prayed to his father for companions, and Zeus transformed the island’s ants—múrmēkes—into humans, who became the Myrmidons.14 Later writers theorized they were so called for their antlike habits, such as living in caves and digging up soil.15 Attempts to correlate either explanation with the warrior tribe of Achilles remain mostly unconvincing—ants are industrious and have exemplary social organization; they are fierce and ravenous and fight in a “pack”; Aigina’s defining central mountain is conical and looks like an anthill, and so forth.16 It is difficult not to view these explanations as a whimsical folk etymology confronted with an old and mysterious name. In the apocryphal Acts of Andrew (dating to the third century A.D.), there is a “city of the cannibals,” which is identified as Myrmidon; it is possible that this account taps into some more ancient, and savage, lost tradition.17

  In the Iliad, the Myrmidons are simply the twenty-five hundred men from Phthia under the command of Achilles. That they are distinct from Phthians per se is made clear: during Achilles’ absence, one finds “the Phthians” fighting alongside Lokrians and Epeians, trying to hold Hektor from the ships, and somewhat later a “Medon” is named as their leader. The boundaries of the kingdom of Peleus and Achilles are never securely delineated; Phthia is evidently a large area, possibly encompassing several tribes.18 This telling vagueness suggests that the Myrmidons are defined less by geography—a small region inside Phthia, for instance—than by status and function. They are an elite guard, a Delta Force. The comparison to wolves is also suggestive; well attested in Indo-European culture is the war band—a fraternity of “foot-loose young men,” unmarried and unsettled, who “live on the margins of society and follow their leader wherever he takes them, generally on raiding and looting expeditions” and who “consciously adopted a wolfish identity.”19 The Myrmidons are banded around Achilles; they are loyal to no other agent or cause, certainly not to Agamemnon, as is clear from Patroklos’ address to them before they charge to battle: “Myrmidons, companions of Peleus’ son, Achilles,

  be men now, dear friends, remember your furious valour;

  we must bring honour to Peleus’ son, far the greatest of the Argives

  by the ships, we, even the henchmen who fight beside him,

  so Atreus’ son wide-ruling Agamemnon may recognize

  his madness, that he did no honour to the best of the Achaeans.”

  As the Myrmidons muster, Achilles retreats to his shelter and from an elaborately decorated chest draws forth a goblet, “nor did any other / man drink the shining wine from it nor did Achilles / pour from it to any other god, but only Zeus father.” This ritual goblet is tucked away beside the clothes his anxious mother had packed for him when he left on campaign, his “tunics / and mantles to hold the wind from a man.” Standing in the compound outside his shelter, Achilles lifts the filled goblet and prays to Zeus:“As one time before when I prayed to you, you listened

  and did me honour, and smote strongly the host of the Achaeans,

  so one more time bring to pass the wish that I pray for.

  For see, I myself am staying where the ships are assembled,

  but I send out my companion and many Myrmidons with him

  to fight. Let glory, Zeus of the wide brows, go forth with him.

  Make brave the heart inside his breast, so that even Hektor

  will find out whether our henchman knows how to fight his battles

  by himself, or whether his hands rage invincible only

  those times when I myself go into the grind of the war god.

  But when he has beaten back from the ships their clamorous onset,

  then let him come back to me and the running ships, unwounded,

  with all his armour and with the companions who fight close beside

  him.”

  So he spoke in prayer, and Zeus of the counsels heard him.

  The father granted him one prayer, and denied him the other.

  That Patroklos should beat back the fighting assault on the vessels

  he allowed, but refused to let him come back safe out of the

  fighting.

  The appearance of Patroklos at the head of the Myrmidons, as “they fell upon the Trojans in a pack,” has the desired effect; immediately the Trojans are shaken and “each man looked about him for a way to escape the sheer death.” As they flee, Patroklos and his men quench the fire around the ships. Book Sixteen is Patroklos’ aristeía. Not only do he and the Myrmidons wreak havoc on the terrified Trojans, but their very appearance, as Nestor had hoped, inspires the exhausted and embattled Achaeans, and, rallying, they fall upon the Trojans “as wolves make havoc among lambs.” At some point that the epic does not disclose, Patroklos is recognized for himself, despite the borrowed armor; for a brief period, then, Achilles is not missed. Patroklos will kill a total of fifty-four Trojans, a casualty list that compares impressively with, for example, the twenty of Diomedes’ dazzling aristeía.20 Soon Patroklos catches up with what will be his most illustrious victim, Sarpedon, son of Zeus—and his own destiny presses closer.

  “ ‘Ah me,’ ” sighs Zeus, watching,
“ ‘that it is destined that the dearest of men, Sarpedon, / must go down under the hands of Menoitios’ son Patroklos’ ”; and (as quoted in the previous chapter) he debates whether to spare his son against destiny, snatching him out of battle and setting him down in his native land—the desperate fantasy of many a fighting man—or allow him to die. “ ‘What sort of thing have you spoken? ’ ” is Hera’s unfeeling response. “ ‘Think how then some other one of the gods might also / wish to carry his own son out of the strong encounter; / since around the great city of Priam are fighting many / sons of the immortals.’ ” Hera’s retort and Zeus’ submission terminate any hope of rescue for Sarpedon and also, by extension, for Achilles, the most prominent of all the sons of the immortals by Priam’s city. Hera continues: “No, but if he is dear to you, and your heart mourns for him,

  then let him be, and let him go down in the strong encounter

  underneath the hands of Patroklos, the son of Menoitios;

  but after the soul and the years of his life have left him, then send

  Death to carry him away, and Sleep, who is painless,

  until they come with him to the countryside of broad Lykia

  where his brothers and countrymen shall give him due burial

  with tomb and gravestone. Such is the privilege of those who have

  perished.”

  She spoke, nor did the father of gods and men disobey her;

  yet he wept tears of blood that fell to the ground, for the sake

  of his beloved son, whom now Patroklos was presently

  to kill, by generous Troy and far from the land of his fathers.

  As the two advance, Patroklos throws his spear and hits Sarpedon’s therápōn; in his turn, Sarpedon casts at Patroklos and misses, “but the spear fixed in the right shoulder of Pedasos / the horse, who screamed as he blew his life away, and went down”—Pedasos, who, mortal as he was, ran beside the immortal horses. Every action now presages Patroklos’ own fate.