The War That Killed Achilles

by Caroline Alexander

  Like Achilles, Priam is now indifferent to his own fate: “ ‘for myself, before my eyes look / upon this city as it is destroyed and its people are slaughtered, / my wish is to go sooner down to the house of the death god.’ ” In anger, he lashes out at the Trojans around him, and most of all at his surviving sons, whom an indecent fate has allowed to live, while the best of his sons has died: “ ‘Make haste, wicked children, my disgraces. I wish all of you / had been killed beside the running ships in the place of Hektor.’ ” Beside him Hekabe, his wife, crazed with grief, cries out against Achilles, “ ‘I wish I could set my teeth / in the middle of his liver and eat it. That would be vengeance / for what he did to my son.’ ”

  Until this point, the epic has been riveted on the spectacle of Achilles’ cosmic, unquenchable grief—and, indeed, on the undying divine grief of Thetis—with which, it appeared, there was no equal to be had on earth. But here at Troy, in the courtyard of the doomed city, the grief of ordinary people—the old, beaten king and his aged wife—is a match for the heroic and outsize grief of Achilles. Heroic in his grief, Priam is also heroic in his pathetic mission. Patroklos’ body was retrieved from the field by the bitter fighting of the entire Achaean army; Priam will attempt to win the body of his son by abject diplomacy and, save for one companion, the herald Idaios, alone.

  Trusting to the word and portent of Zeus, and against the shrill wishes of his wife, Priam sets out in his chariot, ahead of a wagon driven by Idaios and pulled by mules. In the wagon, carefully chosen from the storeroom, “fragrant / and of cedar” that safeguards his dwindling wealth, is the ransom of “twelve robes surpassingly lovely / and twelve mantles to be worn single, as many blankets, / as many great white cloaks, also the same number of tunics,” along with tripods, cauldrons, and talents of gold. Historic Troy VI was a center for textiles, as evidenced by the thousands of spindle whorls discovered on the site by archaeologists, and it is possible that some memory of this fact is reflected in the prominence of clothing and fabrics in the ransom.21

  It is night when Priam leaves the city, “and all his kinsmen were following / much lamenting, as if he went to his death.” Once through the city, on “the flat land,” the others turn back and Priam and Idaios set out across the plain.

  And Zeus of the wide brows failed not to notice

  the two as they showed in the plain. He saw the old man and

  took pity

  upon him, and spoke directly to his beloved son, Hermes:

  “Hermes, for to you beyond all other gods it is dearest

  to be man’s companion, and you listen to whom you will, go now

  on your way, and so guide Priam inside the hollow ships

  of the Achaeans, that no man shall see him, none be aware of him,

  of the other Danaans, till he has come to the son of Peleus.”

  Hermes, son of Zeus and the shy nymph Maia, is a god “resourceful and cunning, a robber, a rustler of cattle, a bringer of dreams, a night watcher, a gate-lurker,” as the hymn in his name sings.22 In the Iliad, his most common epithet is argeiphóntēs, an obscure term usually translated as “slayer of Argos,” the herdsman commissioned to watch over poor Io, one of Zeus’ many loves, whom Hera had in fury changed into a cow.23 Hermes is the god of luck—the Greek word for “windfall” is hérmaion—and the god of “ jolly and unscrupulous profit,” as one scholar puts it;24 jolly luck for the thief who escapes detection, bad luck for the man whose house is robbed in the night.

  But Hermes’ oldest identification is with boundaries. A hérma is the heap of stones or cairn that might lie beside a byway, to which passersby add, marking, as it were, their passage. Stone plinths with an upright phallus projecting from the stone, the whole surmounted by the head of the god, were known throughout the classical era simply as hermes, potent boundary markers whose symbolism can be traced back to non-human territorial phallic display. “As god of boundaries and of the transgression of boundaries, Hermes is therefore the patron of herdsmen, thieves, graves,” and of heralds like Idaios.25 The most momentous boundary that can be crossed is, of course, the divide between the living and the dead, and it is as a psychopompós, “guide of the souls,” that Hermes appears memorably in the Odyssey, conducting the souls of dead men down to Hades:

  . . . and Hermes

  the kindly healer led them along down moldering pathways.

  They went along, and passed the Ocean stream, and the White

  Rock,

  and passed the gates of Helios the Sun, and the country

  of dreams, and presently arrived in the meadow of asphodel.

  This is the dwelling place of souls, images of dead men.

  —Odyssey, 24.9-14

  Strangely, for centuries after this striking appearance in the Odyssey, Hermes is only infrequently depicted as a conductor of souls, in art as well as literature. It may be that the role of psychopompós was not an “authentic” attribute but was invented by Homer for the Odyssey, inspired by the god’s well-established roles of night adventurer and messenger. In any case, the outline of the inspiration can be discerned in the Iliad, in the mystical, otherworldly journey of old Priam. Much lamented by his kinsmen “as if he went to his death,” Priam travels through the night to retrieve the dead body of his son; and it is by the river, just past the “great tomb of Ilos,” that Hermes, the guide to Hades, looms out of the darkness. 26

  Both men are terrified, and Idaios urges flight. But Hermes, in “the likeness of a young man, a noble, / with beard new grown, which is the most graceful time of young manhood,” takes Priam by the hand and addresses him. Pretending to be one of the Myrmidons and a henchman of Achilles, he reassures Priam on one point—that Hektor’s body lies intact and unspoiled.

  “ ‘You seem to me like a beloved father,’ ” says Hermes, and in his respectful, kindly treatment of the frightened old man he appears as the most humane of all the gods in the Iliad. Taking the reins, Hermes mounts beside Priam in his chariot, and as the wagon lumbers behind them, he guides the little delegation across the plain to the Achaean fortifications, where, drifting sleep over the sentries as they prepare for dinner, he crosses the defensive ditch, arriving at the “towering / shelter the Myrmidons had built for their king.” Constructed of great pine timbers and thatched with meadow grass, the shelter is guarded by a heavy gate; a single bar secures the door to the inner courtyard, “and three Achaeans could ram it home in its socket / and three could pull back and open the huge door-bar; three other / Achaeans, that is, but Achilles all by himself could close it.” This Hermes opens for Priam, and when the old man and his wagon are safely inside, he reveals himself as a god, bestows last advice, and vanishes.

  The Iliad ’s great scenes are carefully anticipated and subtly prepared for—but once upon their threshold, there is no dawdling. Suddenly Priam stands before Achilles.

  [Priam] found him

  inside, and his companions were sitting apart, as two only,

  Automedon the hero and Alkimos, scion of Ares,

  were busy beside him. He had just now got through with his dinner,

  with eating and drinking, and the table still stood by.

  “ ‘No longer shall you and I, alive, sit apart from our other / beloved companions and make our plans,’ ” Patroklos’ ghost had lamented to Achilles, and the time for sitting apart would surely have been now, with dinner completed, and the other companions busy. Priam has come to Achilles at the most psychologically propitious moment. Silently, he slips to Achilles’ knees and takes hold of and kisses his “dangerous and man slaughtering” hands. As Achilles looks on in wonderment, Priam speaks to him “in the words of a suppliant”:“Achilles like the gods, remember your father, one who

  is of years like mine, and on the door-sill of sorrowful old age.

  And they who dwell nearby encompass him and afflict him,

  nor is there any to defend him against the wrath, the destruction.

  Yet surely he, when he hears of you and that you
are still living,

  is gladdened within his heart and all his days he is hopeful

  that he will see his beloved son come home from the Troad.

  But for me, my destiny was evil. I have had the noblest

  of sons in Troy, but I say not one of them is left to me.

  Fifty were my sons, when the sons of the Achaeans came here.

  Nineteen were born to me from the womb of a single mother,

  and other women bore the rest in my palace; and of these

  violent Ares broke the strength in the knees of most of them,

  but one was left me who guarded my city and people, that one

  you killed a few days since as he fought in defence of his country,

  Hektor; for whose sake I come now to the ships of the Achaeans

  to win him back from you, and I bring you gifts beyond number.

  Honour then the gods, Achilles, and take pity upon me

  remembering your father, yet I am still more pitiful;

  I have gone through what no other mortal on earth has gone

  through;

  I put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my children.”

  So he spoke, and stirred in the other a passion of grieving

  for his own father. He took the old man’s hand and pushed him

  gently away, and the two remembered, as Priam sat huddled

  at the feet of Achilles and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor

  and Achilles wept now for his own father, now again

  for Patroklos. The sound of their mourning moved in the house.

  Before Hermes took his leave of Priam, he had offered last advice: to entreat Peleion “ ‘in the name of his father, the name of his mother / of the lovely hair, and his child.’ ” In the event, Priam evokes only Achilles’ father, and indeed the shadow of Peleus looms large over this final chapter of the Iliad. Priam steps into Achilles’ shelter like “one who has murdered / a man in his own land, and he comes to the country of others”—in fact, like Peleus, who according to tradition came to Thessaly and Phthia as a suppliant exile after killing his half brother. And it is in receiving Priam that Achilles most closely emulates his father; where other traditions appear to have sung of Peleus’ heroic deeds, the Iliad knows him only as the father of Achilles and the recipient of the striking stream of other suppliant-exiles who wended their way to Phthia—Phoinix, Patroklos, the obscure Epeigeus.27

  Achilles is Pēleídēs, Pēleíōn—“son of Peleus”—but also Aiakidēs, “of the line of Aiakos,” Aiakos being Peleus’ own father: “Godlike Aiakos, finest of earth-men. He accomplished what was right for the Gods,” according to Pindar, for whom Aiakos was also “foremost in hand and in counsel.”28 It was for his judgment and just counsel that later traditions attest that Aiakos won special status in Hades, and Plato names him as one of the three judges of the dead.29 Priam’s symbolic journey to the land of the dead, then, concludes here, in the house of Achilles Aiakidēs who, like his father’s father, has power to pass judgment on the fate of the dead, in this case on the fate of Hektor’s body and, by association, Hektor’s restless psychḗ.30

  And it is by speaking of Peleus that Achilles attempts to console Priam. “ ‘Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals, / that we live in unhappiness,’ ” he says, and then embarks upon a paradigm of his own, about the fate of Peleus—Peleus, blessed with shining gifts from the gods themselves, rich, lord of the Myrmidons, and with an immortal wife:“But even on him the god piled evil also. There was not

  any generation of strong sons born to him in his great house

  but a single all-untimely child he had, and I give him

  no care as he grows old, since far from the land of my fathers

  I sit here in Troy, and bring nothing but sorrow to you and your

  children.”

  The ransom of Hektor is effected without delay, but accompanied by small incidents that reveal the consistency of Achilles’ character. When Priam presses the ransom on him with a little too much fervor, Achilles’ anger briefly flares: “ ‘I myself am minded / to give Hektor back to you,’ ” he warns, adding that “ ‘it does not escape me / that some god led you to the running ships of the Achaeans.’ ” Removing the ransom from the wagon, his companions leave cloaks and a tunic to shroud the corpse, and Achilles ensures that his maids wash Hektor’s body out of sight of Priam. His tact is less to spare Priam’s sensibilities than a precaution against the eruption of Priam’s latent paternal anger at the sight of his son, which, in turn, would surely cause “the deep heart of Achilles [to] be shaken to anger.” As in his elegant forestalling of Agamemnon’s possible defeat in competition at the funeral games, Achilles demonstrates profound knowledge of the disposition of men’s souls, including his own.

  When the body of Hektor has been washed, anointed, and decently clad, it is Achilles himself who lifts it and lays it on a litter and with his companions bears it to the wagon. Returning to his shelter, he reports to Priam, “ ‘Your son is given back to you, aged sir, as you asked it.’ ” Still the deferential host, he urges Priam to join him in a meal, offering an unexpected paradigm from legends of old to illustrate the necessity of eating in the face of grief: even Niobe “ ‘remembered / to eat,’ ” Achilles says, and recounts at some length the infamous story of the death of Niobe’s twelve children at the hands of the children of Leto.31 A great deal has been written about this incident, which is curious in many regards. In the first instance, the use of anything as conventional as a traditional paradigm, or “old saw,” to validate his opinion is highly uncharacteristic of Achilles, who typically speaks his meaning bluntly, stating what he himself knows and he feels: more expected would have been for him to have counseled Priam to eat “as I myself have eaten although worn out with sorrow,” or words to this effect. The salient point—that Niobe ate—is not found in any known version of this well-attested myth, and is almost certainly a Homeric adaptation. And if the point—the eating—was not intrinsic, but tacked on—why should Achilles have chosen this particular story?32

  The essence of Niobe’s tragedy, as related by poets from Homer to the lyric poets to the tragedians, is that Niobe, a mortal, compared herself favorably to the goddess Leto, boasting that she had twelve children and Leto only two—Apollo and Artemis. In revenge for this hubris against their mother, the children of Leto slew the children of Niobe, Apollo killing the boys, Artemis the girls. The children did not die gently, but “ ‘nine days long they lay in their blood, nor was there anyone / to bury them, for the son of Kronos made stones out of / the people.’ ” Niobe herself was turned to stone, and, petrified, she still mourns, in the form of the rock face of Mount Sipylos in Lydia, over which running water courses like tears.33

  The usual explanation for Achilles’ choice of paradigm is that Priam, like Niobe, lost many children, one of whom also lay unburied for many days. Yet the paradigm has meaning for Achilles as well. In both her excessive pride in her offspring and her eternal grieving for their brutal and early deaths, Niobe evokes no one so much as Thetis.34 The agent of the untimely deaths of both mothers’ children is Apollo. One must wonder if lurking behind Apollo’s otherwise inexplicable malevolence toward Achilles lies a tradition that Thetis had sung her beloved son’s praises somewhat too keenly. The paradigm from Achilles’ lips becomes poignant, then, as yet another reminder of his own fast-approaching death.

  As he did for the Embassy, so Achilles now prepares dinner for his guest, and he and Priam eat watching each other across the table with mutual wonderment. Priam marvels at the young warrior’s “size and beauty, . . . like an outright vision / of gods.” Achilles wonders at Priam’s brave looks “and listened to him talking.” This last is a pregnant, tantalizing line. Of what, one must wonder in turn, could Priam have possibly spoken?

  When the meal is completed, Achilles prepares a bed for Priam in the porch of his shelter; this is the second aged visitor to sleep over, the first being Phoi
nix, following the failed Embassy. It is perhaps mindful of that Embassy that Achilles lets fly a last shot at Agamemnon. “ ‘Sleep outside, aged sir and good friend,’ ” he says, “sarcastic,” noting that if one of the Achaeans came during the night, “ ‘he would go straight and tell Agamemnon, shepherd of the people, / and there would be delay in the ransoming of the body.’ ”

  Before the two men turn in, Achilles puts one last question, practical and generous, to Priam: How many days will he need to accomplish Hektor’s funeral? Priam’s answer as, thinking out loud, he carefully counts on trembling fingers the remaining crushing duties required in the disposal of his son represents a last, masterful touch of characterization of the old king, broken but bound to see this fearful business through. There is wood to be gathered for the pyre, he tells Achilles, adding without irony or anger, “ ‘for you know surely how we are penned in our city’ ”:“Nine days we would keep him in our palace and mourn him,

  and bury him on the tenth day, and the people feast by him,

  and on the eleventh day we would make the grave-barrow for him,

  and on the twelfth day fight again; if so we must do.”

  Then in turn swift-footed brilliant Achilles answered him:

  “Then all this, aged Priam, shall be done as you ask it.

  I will hold off our attack for as much time as you bid me.”

  So he spoke, and took the aged king by the right hand

  at the wrist, so that his heart might have no fear.

  Priam and Achilles meet in the very twilight of their lives. Their extinction is certain and there will be no reward for behaving well, and yet, in the face of implacable fate and an indifferent universe, they mutually assert the highest ideals of their humanity. Like all cease-fires, the truce that Achilles pledges for Priam floats the specter of a wistful opportunity.

  “Since about tea time yesterday I don’t think there’s been a shot fired on either side up to now,” wrote an anonymous British soldier on Christmas Day 1914, recording the almost surreal suspension of all action early in the Great War that came to be known as the Christmas Truce. Across the trench lines, British and German soldiers spontaneously sang carols, lit candles, and played impromptu soccer games in No-Man’s-Land. “We can hardly believe that we’ve been firing at them for the last week or two—it all seems so strange.”35