The War That Killed Achilles

by Caroline Alexander

  The creation of Patroklos established one of the memorable figures in epic and also forged a moral link between two ancient themes: a story of heroic wrath, in which the angered hero is propitiated to return to his community, and a story of retribution, in which the death of the hero’s companion is avenged. Homer’s innovation was to inexorably relate the one to the other. Achilles’ wrath will never be appeased; rather it will be effaced by survivor’s guilt.32

  Phílos; hetaros—“comrade,” “buddy,” “mate”—“my own,” “my best,” “my beloved companion.” The terms that define the relationship between Patroklos and Achilles have no true counterparts in the civilian world but belong to the enduring terminology of war. “It’s a closeness you never had before,” as a veteran of the Vietnam War described his friend-in-arms. “It’s closer than your mother and father, closest [sic] than your brother or your sister.”33 Today the “loss of a buddy,” along with “fear of death,” is recognized as one of the standard primary causes of war trauma. At the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a grieving soldier returned from Iraq “walks the hospital campus in the bloodied combat boots of a friend he watched bleed to death.”34

  Magic armor and horses that carry the hero out of danger—Homer understood that this was pale stuff. The creation of Achilles’ alter ego, his sacrificial second self, allowed Homer to unleash the emotions that will always most authentically memorialize war. In the concluding lines of his magisterial account of the Great War, John Keegan offers a summation that is true of all: Men whom the trenches cast into intimacy entered into bonds of mutual dependency and sacrifice of self stronger than any of the friendships made in peace and better times. That is the ultimate mystery of the First World War. If we could understand its loves, as well as its hates, we would be nearer understanding the mystery of human life.35

  No Hostages

  “Now I shall go, to overtake that killer of a dear life, Hektor; then I will accept my own death, at whatever time Zeus wishes to bring it about, and the other immortals.”

  —Iliad 18.114-16

  Achilles’ stern resolve is declared to Thetis, and his grieving mother both accepts his decision and determines to make one last attempt to outmaneuver fate. Just as all the traditions outside the Iliad characterize her as being obsessed with protecting her son—attempting to render him invulnerable or immortal, disguising him as a woman among women—so she now embarks upon a last desperate strategy to forestall the death she well knows he is destined to die. New armor, divine armor, armor made by Hephaistos, the very smith of the gods—in this Thetis lays her faith of last resort. Achilles’ own armor—the divine gift to Peleus—is now worn on Hektor’s shoulders, and Achilles has no armor of his own.1 “ ‘Do not yet go into the grind of the war god, / not before with your own eyes you see me come back to you,’ ” Thetis implores her son. “ ‘For I am coming to you at dawn and as the sun rises / bringing splendid armour to you from the lord Hephaistos.’ ”

  Achilles consents, and Thetis speeds her way to Olympos. During the lengthy interlude before she is seen again, Achilles remains in the Achaean camp. Meanwhile, despite the valiant efforts of Aias and Menelaos, the battle for Patroklos’ corpse still rages on the Trojan plain. Hektor is on the verge of breaking the impasse, dragging at Patroklos’ body, when Hera suddenly takes matters into her own hands and, “secretly / from Zeus and the other gods,” dispatches Iris with instructions for Achilles.

  “ ‘Rise up, son of Peleus, most terrifying of all men,’ ” Iris greets Achilles, and brings him a fearful bulletin from the field of battle: the Trojans are trying to drag Patroklos into their city, and Hektor “ ‘is urgent / to cut the head from the soft neck and set it on sharp stakes.’ ”

  “ ‘Divine Iris, what god sent you to me with a message?’ ” Achilles replies coolly. His reaction is a small but potent touch; no other mortal would address Zeus’ messenger in so challenging a manner. On learning that Iris comes from Hera, Achilles becomes practical; the Trojans have his armor, and there is little he can do. “ ‘Yes, we also know well how they hold your glorious armour,’ ” Iris replies. “ ‘But go to the ditch, and show yourself as you are to the Trojans.’ ”

  So speaking Iris of the swift feet went away from him; but Achilles, the beloved of Zeus, rose up, and Athene swept about his powerful shoulders the fluttering aegis; and she, the divine among goddesses, about his head circled a golden cloud, and kindled from it a flame far-shining. As when a flare goes up into the high air from a city from an island far away, with enemies fighting about it who all day long are in the hateful division of Ares fighting from their own city, but as the sun goes down signal fires blaze out one after another, so that the glare goes pulsing high for men of the neighbouring islands to see it, in case they might come over in ships to beat off the enemy; so from the head of Achilles the blaze shot into the bright air.

  As the fire plays around his head, Achilles cries aloud, and Athene cries with him in a voice like that “screamed out by a trumpet / by murderous attackers who beleaguer a city.” Terrified, the Trojans retreat, and the Achaeans are at last able to retrieve Patroklos’ torn body. Fire and the destruction of cities—the images accompanying Achilles’ return signal the war’s fateful new threshold. The end is now in sight—of Achilles’ absence, and of Achilles himself, of Hektor and, with his death, the end of Ilion.2 The toll the war has so far taken on Troy, its fragile state, is unexpectedly disclosed as the shaken Trojans debate among themselves how to contend with the catastrophic development represented by Achilles’ return. Should they remain on the plain? Or retreat to “ ‘the great walls / and the gateways’ ” of their city, as careful Poulydamas suggests? To this last suggestion, Hektor, however, is contemptuous:“Have you not all had your glut of being fenced in our outworks? There was a time when mortal men would speak of the city of Priam as a place with much gold and much bronze. But now the lovely treasures that lay away in our houses have vanished, and many possessions have been sold.”

  When Troy falls, then, the Achaean victors will gain little for their ten years of effort. Meanwhile, Hektor, made dangerously confident, perhaps, by the fact that he wears Achilles’ divine, unaccustomed armor, is intolerant of any strategy for safety. Rather, at his direction the Trojans will spend another night on the plain, by their encampment, and will arm at dawn. He then continues with words that will come to haunt him:“If it is true that brilliant Achilles is risen beside their ships, then the worse for him if he tries it, since I for my part will not run from him out of the sorrowful battle, but rather stand fast, to see if he wins the great glory, or if I can win it.”

  While the Trojans prepare for the night, Achilles oversees the reception of Patroklos’ body, which is gently washed in warm water and anointed with olive oil and its gashes filled with unguents; a thin, shroudlike sheet is then laid over it.3 “ ‘I will not bury you till I bring to this place the armour / and the head of Hektor,’ ” Achilles vows to his dead companion. “ ‘Before your burning pyre I shall behead twelve glorious / children of the Trojans, for my anger over your slaying.’ ”

  All through the night of this longest, disastrous day, the Myrmidons mourn over Patroklos. And while they are mourning, Thetis reaches Olympos and Hephaistos’ home, “imperishable, starry,” and built of shining bronze. The god himself is at his forge, working on twenty tripods, each set on golden wheels “so that of their own motion they could wheel into the immortal gathering.” Wheeled tripods from Cyprus are known from the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.;4 perhaps, in their day, such cutting-edge innovation inspired bemused speculation about divine technology and handiwork.

  Thetis is greeted by the lame smith and his wife, Charis, one of the beautiful Graces, with exceptional warmth: “ ‘She saved me,’ ” Hephaistos recalls of Thetis to his wife, “ ‘when I suffered much at the time of my great fall / through the will of my own brazen-faced mother, who wanted / to hide me, for being lame.’”5 Cast from Olympos by Hera, his mother, who was ashamed o
f his lameness, Hephaistos had fallen into the sea where Eurynome, the daughter of Okeanos, and Thetis had caught him. “ ‘With them I worked nine years as a smith, and wrought many intricate / things,’ ” Hephaistos says, and recalls the necklaces and cups and brooches and other trinkets he devised for them, “ ‘working / there in the hollow of the cave, and the stream of Ocean around us / went on forever with its foam and its murmur.’ ”6

  Although Hephaistos’ name appears in the Linear B inscriptions, little can be gleaned of his origins or how he came into the Olympian pantheon. The story of his rescue and embrace by Thetis echoes a well-attested Indo-European association between a fire deity and nurturing spirits of the water, evocative perhaps of phosphorescence, the fiery light that seems to burn in the sea.7 The status of a metalworker in the ages we dub “Bronze” and “Iron” would obviously be very great, and there is evidence throughout the Eastern Mediterranean of cults and even kingships associated with the smith.8 Also intriguing are the many examples in myth in which a smith is the nurturer—the forger—of a young god or hero, and epic stories from Tibet to the Caucasus to Ireland tell of the smith who makes safe a young hero, fostering him and serving as his guardian. 9 And it is as protector of young heroes that Hephaistos is approached by Thetis, seeking divine armor that will safeguard her son.

  “ ‘So I must by all means / do everything to give recompense to lovely-haired Thetis / for my life,’ ” Hephaistos declares to his wife, and, taking his bellows off the fire, he makes touching efforts to prepare for his feminine guest: “with a sponge he wiped clean his forehead, and both hands, / and his massive neck and hairy chest, and put on a tunic, / and took up a heavy stick in his hand, and went to the doorway / limping.” “ ‘We honour you and love you,’ ” he tells Thetis, taking her hand, and listens kindly to her weeping plea:“Hephaistos, is there among all the goddesses on Olympos

  one who in her heart has endured so many grim sorrows

  as the griefs Zeus, son of Kronos, has given me beyond others?

  Of all the other sisters of the sea he gave me to a mortal,

  to Peleus, Aiakos’ son, and I had to endure mortal marriage

  though much against my will. And now he, broken by mournful

  old age, lies away in his halls. Yet I have other troubles.

  For since he has given me a son to bear and to raise up

  conspicuous among heroes, and he shot up like a young tree,

  I nurtured him, like a tree grown in the pride of the orchard.

  I sent him away in the curved ships to the land of Ilion

  to fight with the Trojans; but I shall never again receive him

  won home again to his country and into the house of Peleus. . . .

  Therefore now I come to your knees; so might you be willing

  to give me for my short-lived son a shield and a helmet

  and two beautiful greaves fitted with clasps for the ankles

  and a corselet. What he had was lost with his steadfast companion

  when the Trojans killed him. Now my son lies on the ground, heart

  sorrowing.”

  Thetis’ tearful plea represents the enduring prayer of all terrified mothers whose sons must go to war. Whether holding bake sales to raise money for ceramic-plated body armor for their sons in Iraq10 or pleading directly with the smith of the gods, the objective is the same—magic armor that will protect my son.

  Famously, Hephaistos has made armor for other heroes. In the Iliad, Diomedes wears a coveted “ ‘elaborate corselet that Hephaistos wrought with much toil,’ ” for example, and in the Aethiopis, Memnon, who mirrors Achilles in so many important respects, appears “wearing armour made by Hephaestus.”11 This is also not the first occasion in the Iliad on which one god has begged a favor of another. The most significant divine plea, of course, was also made by Thetis, when she beseeched Zeus to uphold the honor of her son; to win that favor, she had felt compelled to remind him, strenuously, of her past service to him and the debt he owed her. Hera also asked favors of fellow gods, by way of preparation for her seduction of Zeus; by lying she won from Aphrodite the loan of her seductive zone, and by bribery she won from Sleep the promise of his compliance in her scheme. But now Thetis’ request of Hephaistos is honored willingly and out of love. Thetis is greeted by the smith with great tenderness, and his spontaneous recollection of the aid she once gave him is sincere and even nostalgic. This brief flashback to the circumstances that bind the lame smith to Thetis is one of Homer’s mas terstrokes. The smith’s pitying, loving response to the nakedness of Thetis’ grief ensures that he will pour not merely his skill but his heart into his work. Achilles’ armor in the Iliad will be exceptional, surpassing all other examples, such as “ ‘men shall wonder at’ ”; it will represent not merely the workmanship of the divine smith but his supreme, sublime effort. Hearing her the renowned smith of the strong arms answered her:

  “Do not fear. Let not these things be a thought in your mind.

  And I wish that I could hide him away from death and its sorrow

  at that time when his hard fate comes upon him, as surely

  as there shall be fine armour for him, such as another

  man out of many men shall wonder at, when he looks on it.”

  “ ‘I wish that I could hide him away from death’ ”—Hephaistos knows as well as Thetis does that this cannot be done. The smith of the gods can make tripods with magic wheels, a brazen house for every Olympian, gates of the sky “moving of themselves,” even golden attendants “in appearance like living young women,” capable of speech and intelligence—all such wonders he can work, but he cannot hide the son of Thetis from his fated death.

  Back at his forge, with twenty self-propelled bellows blowing on the crucibles, Hephaistos casts bronze, tin, gold, and silver and with hammer and anvil begins his work. The first piece of armament he turns to is Achilles’ shield. “Huge and heavy,” it is composed of five overlapping folds of metal and has a “triple rim” for additional strength:... and upon it

  he elaborated many things in his skill and craftsmanship.

  He made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea’s water,

  and the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness,

  and on it all the constellations that festoon the heavens. . . .

  On it he wrought in all their beauty two cities of mortal

  men. And there were marriages in one, and festivals.

  They were leading the brides along the city from their maiden

  chambers

  under the flaring torches, and the loud bride song was arising. . . .

  But around the other city were lying two forces of armed men

  shining in their war gear. For one side counsel was divided

  whether to storm and sack, or share between both sides the

  property

  and all the possessions the lovely citadel held hard within it. . . .

  He made upon it a soft field, the pride of the tilled land,

  wide and triple-ploughed, with many ploughmen upon it

  who wheeled their teams at the turn and drove them in either

  direction. . . .

  The earth darkened behind them and looked like earth that has

  been ploughed

  though it was gold. Such was the wonder of the shield’s forging.

  For the Iron Age audiences of Homer’s day, the description of the shield of Achilles may have been enjoyed as a bravura piece that conjured wonders of modern technology and art; Hephaistos’ technique is that of the ironworker after all, or blacksmith.12 For later audiences, however, the shield’s allure comes less from art than from life—rare glimpses of lives lived nearly three millennia ago. The elders sitting on benches of polished stone to adjudicate a dispute; those rich, thrice-turned fields; the herdsmen playing pipes as they watch their sheep and “shambling cattle”—all this parade of life has been preserved intact from the Iron Age.13

  Descriptions of e
laborate armor were evidently popular set pieces in epic. Hesiod’s Shield of Heracles, dating to around 600 B.C.,14 is a lengthy epic fragment dominated by the depiction of that hero’s shield: “In the middle was Fear, made of adamant, unspeakable, glaring backwards with eyes shining like fire . . . upon it burned Tumult and Murder and Slaughter . . . upon it deadly Fate was dragging men by the feet through the battle, holding one who was alive but freshly wounded, another who was unwounded, another who had died.”15 Monsters, gods, terrors personified are the predominant motifs, along with themes manifestly borrowed from Homer—a “servile dependence upon Homeric models,” according to one indignant editor of the work.16 The Homeric model in this case was not the shield of Achilles but the shield of Agamemnon, which, it will be recalled, was emblazoned with Fear and Terror and the “blank-eyed face of the Gorgon.”17

  The shield that Hephaistos makes for Achilles will be borne into war by the most formidable and man-slaughtering of all mortal heroes—“most terrifying of all men,” as Achilles is called even by the gods; moreover, it will be carried by Achilles into the most climactic and significant aristeía of the epic. Yet for all that, Hephaistos eschews the motifs most predictably associated with warfare and furnishes the Iliad with its most memorable images of peace. Reapers in the field followed by children picking up cut swaths; a vineyard, with dark-clustered grapes and young men and girls carrying the fruit in woven baskets; a youth who sings to the accompaniment of a lyre; cattle and farmyards; lions stalking the herds; and “a meadow / large and in a lovely valley for the glimmering sheepflocks”; men and maidens in light, long robes dancing—in sum, the shield Hephaistos forges for Achilles carries all of life.