The War That Killed Achilles

by Caroline Alexander

  “ ‘I for my part did not come here for the sake of the Trojan / spearmen to fight against them, since to me they have done nothing,’ ” Achilles declared passionately in the very opening of the Iliad. Ten years into the war, the death of Patroklos finally made the stakes of this conflict personal. But by surrendering Hektor, Achilles also surrenders the only shred of real animosity he ever harbored against the enemy. Had Achilles been commander in chief of the Achaean alliance, where, one wonders, would events have gone from here? Perhaps an abrupt recall of troops and the slow exodus back to Greece, and Phthia . . . As it is, the last we see of the Iliad ’s hero is of him sleeping “in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and at his side lay Briseis of the fair colouring.” After the extravagance of bloodshed and anguish, matters are more or less back to where they were when the epic quarrel began.

  Agamemnon’s craven character and the greed that underpins Mycenae’s wealth of gold are as well known to the gods as they are to Achilles. Stepping into Priam’s dreams, Hermes reappears with a warning, urging the old man to leave the camp before the dawn. As rich as was the ransom Priam paid for Hektor, Hermes says, his remaining sons at Troy “ ‘would give three times as much ransom / for you, who are alive, were Atreus’ son Agamemnon / to recognize you.’ ”

  In short order, Hermes has Priam and Idaios on their way to Troy, taking final leave at the river Xanthos, as “dawn, she of the yellow robe, scattered over all earth.” In a brilliant stroke of dramatic pacing, Homer cuts the action suddenly to Troy, where from the height of the citadel Hektor’s sister Kassandra sees the small team trudging homeward and cries out to the sleeping city:“Come, men of Troy and Trojan women; look upon Hektor

  if ever before you were joyful when you saw him come back living

  from battle.”

  At the gates of the city, the grieving populace besieges Hektor’s bier. One by one, the three women most central to Hektor’s life approach to mourn him: Andromache; his mother, Hekabe; and Helen. Calling to the people, King Priam gives orders for the funeral, urging the men not to fear ambush as they range far and wide collecting timber for the pyre, since “ ‘Achilles / promised me, as he sent me on my way from the black ships, / that none should do us injury until the twelfth dawn comes.’ ” Trusting to Achilles’ word—and to his authority to uphold it—the Trojans over the many days undertake the funeral. Again the pyre, the gleaming wine and dampened ashes, again a gathering of bones, wrapped this time in robes of purple and laid in a golden casket; and then the last lines of the Iliad: They piled up the grave-barrow and went away, and thereafter

  assembled in a fair gathering and held a glorious

  feast within the house of Priam, king under God’s hand.

  Such was their burial of Hektor, breaker of horses.

  Epic, some may claim, is limited by its genre; nonheroic subjects, such as the lives of women and children, cannot be accommodated within its heroic mandate, and tragedy, for example, picks up where epic must leave off. Yet no subsequent work of literature of any genre has ever made the fate of the entirety of any people more vividly and tragically unambiguous. In the epic’s finale, the import of its title becomes clear: the Iliad relates the fate of the soon-to-be-extinct city of Ilion. Through the speeches of Andromache and Priam, Homer conjures the individual destructions that will accompany the catastrophic fall of Troy: the Trojan War represents Total War.

  The ruins of Troy were still visible in Homer’s day, in the mid-eighth century B.C., and perhaps minimally inhabited by local squatters. Around 700 B.C.—conceivably still in Homer’s lifetime—Aeolian Greeks migrated over from the nearby island of Lesbos and established a colony amid the ruins. Now settled at Troy, the Greek newcomers possibly supplemented their own traditions of the war with novel local stories.36 In this regard, a scrap of Luwian, the language of the Trojans, embedded in a thirteenth-century Hittite ritual text is particularly tantalizing: “ahha-ta-ta alati awienta wilusati

  —When they came from steep Wilusa. . . .”37

  A common Homeric epithet for Ilios—Wilios—is aipeinē, aipús, “sheer,” “steep.” Was it possible—and why should it not be?—that there was once a Trojan epic about the war?

  As ages passed, new generations of colonizers came and went, as well as squatters and conquerors, leaving levels of habitation on the already legendary site. A traveler to Troy in the second century B.C. recalled that “when as a lad he visited the city, . . . he found the settlement so neglected that the buildings did not so much as have tiled roofs.”38 Still, through all these ages, the mystique of old Troy—Homer’s Troy—persisted, and according to the third-century-A.D. writer Philostratus, the site was haunted by the ghosts of its dead heroes.39

  The fates of these heroes and the Iliad ’s few heroines were to be the stuff of later legends. Poets of the epic cycle strode roughshod over the Iliad’s chosen time frame to chronicle remorselessly the full and complete events of the remainder of the war. Arctinus of Miletus, working around 650 B.C. and according to unsubstantiated legend a pupil of Homer’s, is credited with the Iliad’s immediate sequel, the Aethiopis. An ancient commentary on the last line of the Iliad also records what may have been the first, lost, transitional lines of the Aethiopis: So they busied themselves with Hector’s funeral. And an Amazon

  came,

  a daughter of Ares the great-hearted, the slayer of men....40

  In this sequel, Achilles falls in love with the queen of the Amazons, Penthesilea, a Trojan ally, at the moment that he kills her. He himself meets his death when an arrow shot by Paris, but apparently guided by Apollo, strikes him in the ankle. This unlikely mortal wound must surely reflect the folk tradition that Achilles was invulnerable everywhere except for his foot.41

  The fall of Troy itself was the subject of two later epics in the Trojan Cycle, the Little Iliad and the Ilias Persis, or The Sack of Ilion, both of which related the stratagem of the Trojan Horse; it is possible that the “horse” reflects a memory from the Bronze Age of Assyrian siege machines, battering rams surmounted by a boxlike casing that protected the men inside as they advanced against a city.42 This famous decoy was built by one Epeios from wood felled on Mount Ida,43 and—a pleasing detail recorded by one scholiast—“Arctinus says that it was 100 feet long and 50 feet wide, and that its tail and knees could move.”44 Proclus’ summary of the Sack of Ilion tells that:The Trojans are suspicious in the matter of the horse, and stand round it debating what to do. . . . Some want to push it over a cliff, and some to set fire to it, but others say it is a sacred object to be dedicated to Athena, and in the end their opinion prevails. They turn to festivity and celebrate their deliverance from the war. . . . Sinon holds up his firebrands for the Achaeans, having first entered the city under a pretence. They sail in from Tenedos, and with the men from the wooden horse they fall upon the enemy. . . . They put large numbers to death and seize the city.45

  The aftermath of the Trojan War, the manner in which the war continued to direct the lives of its survivors, became a powerful theme for later poets and other writers. Through them we learn that Paris was killed by the Greek hero Philoktetes, who had previously been abandoned by his companions on a nearby island; like Paris, Philoktetes was renowned as an archer.46 Priam was slain in his courtyard by Achilles’ son Neoptolemos, whose name means “new war.” Priam’s daughter Kassandra was raped at Athene’s altar by the lesser Lokrian Aias and then taken as booty by Agamemnon to Mycenae, where she met her death at the hands of Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra. Another of Priam’s daughters, Polyxena, had her throat cut on Achilles’ tomb. Priam’s wife, Hekabe, was turned into a dog, and her grave became a landmark for sailors, known as Cynossema—“the bitch’s tomb.” A number of explanations have been offered to make intelligible Hekabe’s peculiar, and peculiarly vicious, fate—that she was stoned to death like a dog, that she howled like a dog in grief—but the main point seems to have been to make indelible the depths of abasement to which she had been drag
ged by loss and enslavement. 47 Andromache, whom the death of Hektor caught while she was at her loom, weaving as her own fate unraveled, was enslaved, too, as she had long feared, handed as a prize to Achilles’ son, to whom according to some versions she bore a son; Astyanax, her son by Hektor, was dashed to death from the walls of Troy.48

  Other epics and later poetry told of the mixed fates of the Achaean veterans. Nóstoi, or Returns, was the last installment in the Epic Cycle. Homer’s Odyssey, of course, told of the most famous nóstos of all, that of Odysseus, who is portrayed as the ultimate survivor, enduring, resourceful, and “of many wiles.” Admirable as the hero of his own epic, elsewhere the resourceful Odysseus is more usually cast as a mendacious, manipulative swindler and, in one tradition, the murderer of Astyanax.49 Most notorious is the role Odysseus plays in the suicide of Aias, the only Achaean warrior of any standing in the Iliad to fight without divine patronage. After Achilles’ death, his prized armor was to be awarded to the best of the remaining Achaeans, a competition that came down to two men—Odysseus and Aias. Although widely acknowledged as the best of the Achaeans after Achilles, Aias is defeated by Odysseus, who, with the contrivance of Athena, wins a vote held by the assembled Achaeans.50 In a fit of divinely induced madness, Aias attempts to kill Odysseus, and when he wakes from his madness, humiliated, he takes his own life, the casualty of yet another epic “quarrel.” Odysseus himself, after ten years of wandering, finally made his way home to his island kingdom, Ithaka, where his wife had waited loyally for twenty long years.

  Diomedes also endured a delayed homecoming, but to an unfaithful wife. Continuing westward, he eventually settled in Italy.51 A bloody homecoming awaited Agamemnon at the hands of his wife, Clytemnestra, who murdered him in his bath on the day of his return to Mycenae. The other son of Atreus, Menelaos, and his repentant wife, Helen, live happily ever after, back home in Sparta. The Odyssey tells of a visit to them by Odysseus’ son, who finds them, middle-aged and domestic, exchanging coy remembrances of momentous events past: “ ‘Sit here now in the palace and take your dinner and listen / to me and be entertained,’ ” says Helen, and she launches into a reminiscence of Odysseus coming to spy on Troy in disguise. “ ‘Yes, my wife,’ ” says Menelaos indulgently when she has finished. “ ‘All this that you said is fair and orderly,’ ” and in turn he recalls how Helen—“ ‘moved by / some divine spirit’ ”—had almost thwarted the Greek ambush by calling the names of the warriors hidden inside the Trojan Horse, impersonating the voice of each man’s wife.52 For Nestor, too, also returned to the comfort of his palace at Pylos, the Trojan War furnished one more great story of campaigns past, “ ‘in that country’ ” around the city of Priam, where “ ‘all who were our best were killed in that place.’ ”53

  Tellingly, the Iliad’s most outstanding Achaean heroes are unambiguously cast as villains in the works of later writers. Agamemnon, Menelaos, and Odysseus make multiple appearances in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as bullying, duplicitous, cold-blooded tyrants; Helen, apart from Euripides’ tragicomedy in her name, is usually cursed, especially by other female characters, as an outright whore. Strikingly, the line of Peleus alone generally retains its epic nobility. This is true not only of the reluctant warrior Achilles and Peleus himself but also, unexpectedly, of Achilles’ son Neoptolemos, who certainly had blood on his hands. “At Troy he wasn’t commonly thought a coward,” Andromache, of all people, says heatedly in defense of the young hero in Euripides’ tragedy of her name. “He’ll do the right thing now—worthy of Peleus / And of Achilles his father.”54 Of Peleus himself, various traditions tell that he was cast out of Phthia by a neighboring king. His fate, then, was that which Priam had evoked in his supplication of Achilles: “And they who dwell nearby encompass him and afflict him, / nor is there any to defend him against the wrath, the destruction.”

  Writing in the early first century B.C., Strabo summarized the far-reaching consequences of the disastrous war at Troy as it was understood by later history: “For it came about that, on account of the length of the campaign, the Greeks of that time, and the barbarians as well, lost both what they had at home and what they had acquired by the campaign, and so, after the destruction of Troy, not only did the victors turn to piracy because of their poverty, but still more the vanquished who survived the war.” 55

  That after the roll of centuries, this same Iliad, whose message had been so clearly grasped by ancient poets and historians, came to be perceived as a martial epic glorifying war is one of the great ironies of literary history. Part of this startling transformation can undoubtedly be attributed to the principal venues where the Iliad was read—the elite schools whose classically based curriculum was dedicated to inculcating into the nation’s future manhood the desirability of “dying well” for king and country. Certain favorite outstanding scenes plucked out of context came to define the entire epic: Hektor’s ringing refusal to heed the warning omen, for example—“ ‘One bird sign is best: to fight in defence of our country’ ”—or his valiant resolution—“ ‘not die without a struggle and ingloriously.’ ” Homer’s insistent depiction of the war as a pointless catastrophe that blighted all it touched was thus adroitly circumvented.

  The manner in which the Trojan War haunted the memory of the veterans who had survived it is most powerfully evoked by Homer himself. In the Odyssey, Odysseus, toward the end of his ten-year voyage home after the fall of Troy, sojourns at the royal court of the Phaiakians. He has not yet revealed his identity to his hosts when he requests a song from the court bard, Demodokos:

  “. . . sing us the wooden horse, which Epeios made with Athene helping, the stratagem great Odysseus filled once with men and brought it to the upper city, and it was these men who sacked Ilion.”

  —Odyssey 8.492-95

  The bard complies, singing of how the Greeks broke their ambush and “streamed from the horse and sacked the city.” Hearing this story, to the amazement of his Phaiakian hosts, and perhaps also to himself, Odysseus unexpectedly breaks down, overcome by memories:

  As a woman weeps, lying over the body

  of her dear husband, who fell fighting for her city and people

  as he tried to beat off the pitiless day from city and children;

  she sees him dying and gasping for breath, and winding her body

  about him she cries high and shrill, while the men behind her,

  hitting her with their spear butts on the back and the shoulders,

  force her up and lead her away into slavery, to have

  hard work and sorrow, and her cheeks are wracked with pitiful

  weeping.

  Such were the pitiful tears Odysseus shed from under

  his brows.

  —Odyssey 8.523-32

  This, then, is Homer’s own last word on the legendary Trojan War.

  Amid the deposits found at the heroic burial at Lefkandi was a gold pendant disk that had once adorned the woman buried with the hero. Elaborately mounted and decorated with granular work, it was found lying on the throat of the female skeleton, with the gold and faience beads that had secured it broken and scattered.56 When examined, this piece of jewelry was found to predate the burial itself by nearly seven hundred years. An old Babylonian heirloom, it had been handed down for over twenty generations and brought to Greece, somehow, at some time.

  This small relic is a concrete reminder of the tenacity with which things of value can be retained, even through turbulent times and migrations. In such a way did the scattered shards of Mycenaean history end up in Homer’s Iliad: Aias’ towering shield, silver-studded swords, the well-built walls of Troy and Mycenae’s wealth in gold—these details of times long past were preserved and passed on in faithful stories.

  But handed down with the reminiscences of Mycenaean glory were also memories of more recent and more painful times. The Iliad speaks casually of suppliant exiles who have fled their homes after murdering men of high estate, the selling of captives into slavery, the
looting of cities, threats of usurpation, all of which provide murky glimpses into the period of upheaval in which its tradition was forged.57 It is to such actual memories that we may owe the Iliad’s most haunting images. Priam’s predictions that he will live to see ‘ “innocent children / hurled to the ground in the terror of battle’ ” and that his own body will be ripped raw by his dogs, pitifully revealing his old man’s private parts—the shocking specificity of such scenes arise, surely, not from poetic invention but historic memory. The slaughter and enslavement of conquered peoples are commonplaces of war, like broken treaties and inept commanders, but historic counterparts can also be found for the less generic events that most characterize the Iliad. Priam’s Embassy to Achilles for his son, for example, is echoed in a Hittite text recording the mission of a suppliant parent for her son: “I would certainly have marched against him and destroyed him utterly, but he sent forth his mother to meet me,” records Mursili II in a document written in the late fourteenth century B.C. “And since a woman came to meet me and fell at my knees, I gave way to the woman.”58

  “The Greeks at the beginning of their history passed though the very fires of hell,” wrote the great scholar Gilbert Murray of the long and difficult period of migration following the fall of the Mycenaean world. “They knew, what Rome as a whole did not know, the inward meaning and the reverse side of glory.”59