The War That Killed Achilles

by Caroline Alexander

  Kléos—glory, fame, renown—stands at the heart of epic. The equation that valorous death wins compensation in glory is very ancient, widely attested in Indo-European and other poetry. The safeguarding and bestowal of such fame is the privilege of poets like Homer—Achilles’ glory is everlasting because he is the hero of the Iliad.60 The cultivation of this handy equation would be the work of future ages, as it had been of ancient ages past. One need look no further than the Dardanelles, Homer’s “Hellespont,” where, facing the very plain of Troy, war cemeteries memorialize the thousands who died in the criminally mismanaged Gallipoli campaign of 1915, with exactly this equation. “Their name liveth for evermore,” read the serried headstones of Gallipoli. “Their glory shall not be blotted out.”

  It was this ancient formula that Homer, through Achilles, confronted head-on. “ ‘I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death,’ ” Achilles told the Embassy:“Either,

  if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans,

  my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting;

  but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers,

  the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life

  left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly.

  And this would be my counsel to others also, to sail back

  home again.”

  Life is more precious even than glory. Achilles never wavers in this judgment. It is not, after all, for glory that he sacrifices his life, but for Patroklos.61 Achilles’ judgment is pointedly revisited and pointedly reem phasized in the Iliad’s sequel, the Odyssey. In an emotional scene at the heart of that epic, Odysseus descends to Hades, where he brushes against the shadowy souls of heroes from the Trojan War. While the Aethiopis told how “Thetis snatches her son from the pyre and conveys him to the White Island,”62 a kind of small paradise for heroes, Homer takes pains to underscore, again, that Achilles cannot escape his wholly mortal fate.

  “ ‘Son of Laertes and seed of Zeus, resourceful Odysseus,’ ” the ghost of Achilles hails his old companion; “‘ . . . how could you / endure to come down here to Hades’ place, where the senseless / dead men dwell, mere imitations of perished mortals?’ ”

  “ ‘Son of Peleus,’ ” Odysseus answers, with careful reverence, “ ‘far the greatest of the Achaeans, Achilles’ ”:

  “. . . no man before has been more blessed than you, nor ever

  will be. Before, when you were alive, we Argives honoured you

  as we did the gods, and now in this place you have great authority

  over the dead. Do not grieve, even in death, Achilles.”

  So I spoke, and he in turn said to me in answer:

  “O shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying.

  I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another

  man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on,

  than be a king over all the perished dead.”

  —Odyssey 11.473ff.63

  What if Achilles had honored his own first impulse, returned to Phthia, and grown old? Perhaps he would have restlessly paced out his life in the court of his father; perhaps, like disillusioned veterans of later wars, he would have taken to the woods and mountains of his childhood, surrounded by that inscrutable band of brothers, the Myrmidons. As it is, the conclusion of the Iliad makes clear that Achilles will die in a war that holds no meaning for him whatsoever.

  Thus was the centuries-old martial tradition inherited by Homer ultimately resolved. The stirring, bloody battles, the heroic speeches, and the pride of a warrior’s aristeía—all have been faithfully retained, along with the dramatic outlines of the ancient story. The Iliad never betrays its traditions.

  But the Iliad also never betrays its subject, which is war. Honoring the nobility of a soldier’s sacrifice and courage, Homer nonetheless determinedly concludes his epic with a sequence of funerals, inconsolable lamentation, and shattered lives. War makes stark the tragedy of mortality. A hero will have no recompense for death, although he may win glory.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My first and most obvious debt of gratitude is to the University of Chicago Press for its generous permission to include large segments of Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the Iliad; it is difficult for me to imagine this book without this text.

  A number of individuals have, over the years, provided me with memorable insights or experiences that pertain to this book. Jenny Lawrence sent me on my first journey to Troy for Natural History magazine. Similarly, an assignment for National Geographic resulted in meetings with many remarkable scholars; I recall in particular an afternoon at Cambridge with the late John Chadwick, a towering figure in the decipherment and study of Linear B; a delightful lunch in Athens with Dr. Spyros Iakovidis, field director of excavations at Mycenae; and an unforgettable day, from before dawn almost to day’s end, with the late Manfred Korfmann, director of the new excavations at Troy.

  I had the great good fortune to study under the direction of two remarkable Homeric scholars while working toward my doctorate at Columbia University. I am possibly one of a small subset of doctoral candidates who actually enjoyed the writing of their dissertation, thanks in enormous part to the kindness, attention, and insights of my supervisor, Laura Slatkin, who continued to mentor many nonclassical works I undertook long after I left Columbia. The breadth and depth of expertise that Richard Janko brought to any subject was legendary even when I was at Columbia, and I am grateful to him now for the time he took from a demanding schedule generously to read my manuscript. His comments were unfailingly valuable, and my book is the better for them.

  A number of public lectures served as test runs for this book, and I am grateful to each venue—and, again, to Jenny Lawrence, whose idea the first lecture series was. I would like to express my gratitude to the New York Society Library, the Century Association, the late Mrs. Astor’s Reading Group, and to Jean Strouse, director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, who organized a lecture at the library. Most of these lectures were enhanced by actor Simon Prebble’s thrilling readings from the Iliad, and I am grateful to him for being so very instrumental in each evening’s success.

  My particular thanks are due to my editor, Wendy Wolf, for her deft work in navigating me through my own scholarship; it was also she who directly goaded me into undertaking this book, aided and abetted by my agent, Anthony Sheil, and so, at journey’s end, I now recognize my debt to them both. Also at Viking, my thanks are due to Bruce Giffords and Carla Bolte for their outstanding work on the challenging demands of editorial production and design, respectively.

  Closer to home, I would like to thank Laura Rollison, Joyce Bruce, Gary McCool, and the staff of Lamson Library, Plymouth State University, for their invaluable assistance in obtaining the many far-flung books and articles this work required. I would also like to thank Belinda and John Knight and Linda Baker Folsom for their unfailing support on the home front.

  Finally, I thank my sister, Joanna Alexander, and my mother, Elizabeth Kirby, for entertaining my Iliadic thoughts over the years, and my brother-in-law, Ron Haskins, for insights drawn from combat experience; and George Butler for reminding me, repeatedly, that I have profited more than Homer from his story.

  NOTES

  Preface

  1 The most rigorous and detailed attempt to date the Iliad, through statistical analysis of the incidence of key linguistic features in the Homeric poems relative to other early poetry, was made by Richard Janko, Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns (Cambridge, 1982), and yielded a range of 750-725 B.C. This mid- to late-eighth-century date is widely accepted. For arguments for a later date, around 670-660 B.C., see M. L. West, “The Date of the Iliad,” Museum Helveticum 52 (1995), 203-19.

  2 Paraphrased from Trevor Bryce, Life and Society in the Hittite World (Oxford, 2004), 98.

  3 Appian 3.2.13, quoted from Katherine Callen King
, Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer to the Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), 118.

  4 The tracking of the reception of the Iliad, and especially of Achilles, to medieval times has borrowed liberally from King, above.

  5 George Steiner, “Homer in English translation,” in Robert Fowler, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge, 2007), 365.

  6 For the history of the translation of Homer’s poems, see Simeon Underwood, English Translators of Homer: From George Chapman to Christopher Logue (Plymouth, UK, 1998).

  7 Strabo, Geography 1.3.2, in Horace Leonard James, trans., Strabo: Geography, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA, 1917), 179.

  The Things They Carried

  1 The Contest of Homer and Hesiod, in M. L. West, ed. and trans., Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives of Homer (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 319ff.

  2 M. L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford, 2007), 229ff.

  3 These characteristics paraphrased from M. L. West, “The Rise of the Greek Epic,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 108 (1988), 158.

  4 Carol G. Thomas and Craig Conant, The Trojan War (Westport, CT, 2005), 41.

  5 “There is a distinct lack of secondary information available for the Mycenaean army. This is a conspicuous omission in the study of ancient warfare, given the very militaristic character of Mycenaean culture.” Nicolas Grgu ric, The Mycenaeans c. 1650-1100 B.C. (Botley, Oxford, 2005), 6; this slender illustrated “school text” gives probably the most comprehensive account available of the Mycenaean army and warfare.

  6 While there are numerous highly specialized studies of specific aspects of the Mycenaean world, the most accessible overview is K. A. and Diana Wardle, Cities of Legend: The Mycenaean World (London, 1997). Nic Fields, Mycenaean Citadels c. 1350-1200 B.C. (Botley, Oxford, 2004), is a well-illustrated, up-to-date guide to the great Mycenaean sites. The story of the Linear B tablets is excitingly told by John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (Cambridge, 1990). After Michael Ventris cracked the code, he and Chadwick were largely responsible for making the contents of the Linear B tablets accessible to the world; for the documents themselves, see M. Ventris and J. Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1973).

  7 Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B, 159ff. The pathos and historical implications of the Trojan entry are discussed in Michael Wood, In Search of the Trojan War, rev. ed. (London, 2005), 182f.

  8 The different categories of women’s work are described in John Chadwick, “The Women of Pylos,” in J.-P. Olivier and Th. G. Palaima, eds., Texts, Tablets and Scribes: Studies in Mycenaean Epigraphy and Economy (Salamanca, 1988), 43-96.

  9 For Mycenaean interference in Anatolia, see Trevor Bryce, Life and Society in the Hittite World (Oxford, 2004), 259; the transportation of Anatolian inhabitants is discussed at p. 102.

  10 For a summary of evidence of contact between the Mycenaeans and Hittites, see Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier, “Mycenaeans and Hittites in War in Western Asia Minor,” in Robert Laffineur, ed., POLEMOS: Le contexte guerrier en Égée à l’ge du Bronze (Liège, 1999), 141-55; and Wood, 182ff.

  11 The topography of Troy is described in Manfred Korfmann, “Troy: Topography and Navigation,” in Machteld J. Mellink, ed., Troy and the Trojan War (Bryn Mawr, PA, 1986), 1-16. For the likelihood of malaria, and Trojan health in general, see J. Lawrence Angel, “The Physical Identity of the Trojans,” in Mellink, 63-76, especially 67; figs. 24-26. Skeletal remains for the Trojans of any era are slight—forty-five samples from Troy VI to VIIb, mostly from cremations. An infant:child:adult death ratio is calculated at 6:2:10, “possibly better than in contemporary Greece” (p. 68).

  12 After a lapse of nearly two centuries, additional levels were built from around 800 B.C. on into Roman times.

  13 For a guide to Troy, see Nic Fields, Troy c. 1700-1250 B.C. (Botley, Oxford, 2004). The detailed and excellent field reports from the ongoing excavation at Troy, under the auspices of the University of Tübingen and, until his untimely death in 2005, under the direction of Manfred Korfmann, have been published since 1991 in the periodical Studia Troica. Wood, 46ff., gives the best, very readable account of the history of excavation on the site from Heinrich Schliemann onward. H. Craig Melchert, ed., The Luwians (Leiden, 2003), contains a collection of essays about Luwian culture and history.

  14 The extent and significance of Troy VI became the subject of an unexpectedly heated debate that would have been entertaining had it not been so vituperative. In brief, Frank Kolb, a colleague of Manfred Korfmann’s, the director of new excavations at Troy, claimed that Korfmann’s reconstructions of the scale and importance of Troy were “fragments of fantasy.” The spectacle of the battle of Bronze Age professors drew bemused and bewildered media to a conference convened in Tübingen in 2002; wonderful it is to find passion running so high over a 3,200-plus-year-old archaeological site! The debate led to one happy result, which was a rigorous perusal of all evidence to date pertaining to the archaeology and history of the site by a team of Anatolian specialists. Their assessment, in favor of Korfmann, is a succinct overview of the archaeological record. See D. F. Easton, J. D. Hawkins, A. G. Sherratt, and E. S. Sherratt, “Troy in Recent Perspective,” Anatolian Studies 52 (2002), 75-109. Kolb’s argument is presented in Frank Kolb, “Troy VI: A Trading Center and Commercial City?,” American Journal of Archaeology 108 (2004), 577-614.

  15 Manfred Korfmann, “Troia: A Residential and Trading City at the Dardanelles,” in R. Laffineur and W.-D. Niemeier, eds., POLITEIA: Society and State in the Aegean Bronze Age, vol. 1 (Liège, 1995), 173-83, and plates XXIII- XXXIII.

  16 See Kyriacos Lambrianides and Nigel Spencer, “Unpublished Material from the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut and the British School at Athens and Its Contribution to a Better Understanding of the Early Bronze Age Settlement Pattern on Lesbos,” Annual of the British School at Athens 92 (1997), 73-107; and Nigel Spencer, “Early Lesbos between East and West: A ‘Grey Area’ of Aegean Archaeology,” Annual of the British School at Athens 90 (1995), 269-306, especially 273ff.

  17 More specifically, Wilusa was one of four kingdoms in western Anatolia referred to in the archives as “the Arzawa Lands.” Trevor Bryce, The Trojans and Their Neighbours (Abingdon, Oxon, 2006), 107ff. Bryce and Michael Wood (In Search of the Trojan War), 214ff., discuss the nature of Troy’s relationship to the Hittite Empire and its status within Anatolia.

  18 See Trevor R. Bryce, “Ahhiyawans and Mycenaeans—an Anatolian Viewpoint,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 8, no. 3 (1989), 297-310.

  19 The early Greek form of Ilios would have been Wilios, using the roughly w-sounding “digamma,” a letter that is present in Linear B and still “felt” in the Homeric poems, principally by certain metrical anomalies that are resolved if the lost letter is reinserted; once common to all Greek dialects, it fell out of use in each at different times. Confirmation of the Hittite geographical and political landscape was made only relatively recently with the translation of a key monumental and much-weathered cliff face inscription; see J. D. Hawkins, “Karabel, Tarkondemos and the Land of Mira: New Evidence on the Hittite Empire Period in Western Anatolia,” Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft 23 (1998), 7-14; and J. D. Hawkins, “Tarkas nawa King of Mira: ‘Tarkondemos,’ Boǧazköy Sealings and Karabel,” Anatolian Studies 48 (1998), 1-31.

  20 For the full, fragmented text of this letter, see John Garstang and O. R. Gurney, The Geography of the Hittite Empire (London, 1959), 111-14; the reference to Wilusa is at IV 7-10, p. 113.

  21 On the seal, see J. David Hawkins and Donald F. Easton, “A Hieroglyphic Seal from Troia,” Studia Troica 6 (1996), 111-18.

  22 For evidence of Troy’s trade, see Bryce, The Trojans and Their Neighbours, 122ff.

  23 Manfred Korfmann, “Bes̜ik Tepe: New Evidence for the Period of the Trojan Sixth and Seventh Settlements,” in Mellink, 17-28 and figs. 14-23.

  24 For the sparse evidence of a Mycenaean presence in the Black Sea region and an examination of the
several obstacles to Mycenaean penetration, see Marta Guzowska, “The Trojan Connection or Mycenaeans, Penteconters, and the Black Sea,” in Karlene Jones-Bley and D. G. Zdanovich, eds., Complex Societies of Central Eurasia from the 3rd to the 1st Millennium B.C., vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 2002), 504-17. Korfmann points out that as late as 1908, the British Admiralty’s Black Sea Pilot stated that the stiff, contrary wind coming out of the Dardanelles “lasts sometimes so long that it is not a rare occurrence to see 200 or 300 vessels . . . waiting a favourable and enduring breeze”; Korfmann, “Troy: Topography and Navigation,” 7. Benjamin W. Labaree, “How the Greeks Sailed into the Black Sea,” American Journal of Archaeology 61, no. 1 (1957), 29-33, argues that knowledgeable navigation could have exploited monthly variations in shifting southerly winds in both the Bosporus and Black Sea.

  25 This possibility is raised by Richard Janko, “Go away and rule” (a review of Joachim Latacz’s Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery), Times Literary Supplement, April 15, 2005, 6-7.

  26 The first sack of Troy at the hands of Herakles is referred to at Iliad 5.628-51; see P.B.S. Andrews, “The Falls of Troy in Greek Tradition,” Greece & Rome, 2nd series, vol. 12, no. 1 (April 1965), 28-37; Andrews suggests that a horse raid was the motive for the Trojan War. For the failed expedition to Troy, in which the Greeks mistakenly landed near the wrong city, see the Cypria, argument 7; Strabo passes censorious judgment on the escapade: Strabo, Geography 1.1.17. The event has an intriguing parallel in Hittite texts: L. A. Gindin and V. L. Tsymbursky, “The Ancient Greek Version of the Historical Event Reflected in a Hittite Text,” Vestnik Drevnej Istorii 176 (1986), 81-87 (English summary of the Russian on p. 87). Rhys Carpenter has argued that the two Achaean attempts on Troy represent two traditions: “one school (shall we call it the Aeolic?) attaching Troy and its river to Teuthrania at Pergamon above the Kaikos [River], the other (shall we call it the Ionic?) to the Hellespont at Ilios on the Scamander”; Rhys Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction, and Saga in the Homeric Epics (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1958), 57ff. The story of the first, botched landing is the subject of a recently discovered fragment of a poem by Archilochus: “Gladly did the sons of the immortals and brothers, whom Agamemnon was leading to holy Ilium to wage war, embark on their swift ships. On that occasion, because they had lost their way, they arrived at that shore. They set upon the lovely city of Teuthras, and there, snorting fury along with their horses, came in distress of spirit. For they thought they were attacking the high-gated city of Troy, but in fact they had their feet on wheat-bearing Mysia. . . . ” (P. Oxy, LXIX 4708, D. Obbink, trans.). The translation as well as images of this exciting new papyrological find can be seen at www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/POxy/monster/demo/Page1.html.