The War That Killed Achilles (12 page)

Cults honoring Diomedes throughout the Greek world are inevitably associated with horses, an association upheld in the
Iliad,
and in at least one instance with human sacrifice.
⁹
Out of these old, disturbing traditions, the
Iliad
's Diomedes has been considerably refined, and while a courageous and effective warrior, he is also gracious and well spoken, both on the field and off. He is integral to the larger story of the siege and capture of Troy that takes place beyond the parameters of the
Iliad.

As Diomedes blazes through the enemy forces, he twice—remarkably—transgresses into the divine realm. When Aphrodite, “the lady of Kypros,” rescues her son Aineias, Diomedes' response displays a dangerous lack of awe; swinging his sword at her, he catches the goddess on her hand, causing
ichōr,
“that which runs in the veins of the blessed divinities” instead of blood, to flow. Shrieking, Aphrodite retreats to Olympos, as Diomedes shouts a warning after her:

Diomedes' dim view of the goddess of love and desire is humorously shared by the more warrior-like goddesses, Athene and Hera, who scornfully mock the Kyprian's tearful return to Olympos. Smiling indulgently at Athene, Zeus gently scolds Aphrodite for straying beyond the bedroom into the battlefield. It is left to her mother, Dione, to comfort the shaken goddess and to treat her wound. Taking her daughter's arm, she “stroked away . . . the ichor, / so that the arm was made whole again and the strong pains rested.”

Athene herself plays a direct role in Diomedes' second assault on a god. Having obtained permission from Zeus to interfere in the fray, she and Hera, letting forth a shrieking war cry, swoop from Olympos to earth in their divine chariot. Parking horses and chariot on the Trojan plain, the two set forth “in little steps like shivering / doves, in their eagerness to stand by the men of Argos”—this image of the bloodthirsty divinities shivering in excitement as they mince toward their prey is inexpressibly sinister. On arrival, Athene immediately accosts Diomedes and directs him to charge straight for Ares, the very god of war, who, fighting for the Trojans, is hewing his own havoc on the field. Shoving Diomedes' henchman out of the way, Athene climbs beside him in his chariot, causing it to groan under her Olympian weight, and, taking up the whip and the reins, drives straight for Ares. The war god's response is to stab at Diomedes with his spear, but, easily, Athene brushes him aside, and it is Diomedes who “drove forward / with the bronze spear; and Pallas Athene, leaning in on it, / drove it into the depth of the belly where the war belt girt him.” Bellowing with pain and dripping immortal ichor
,
Ares, like Aphrodite before him, makes his way speedily to Olympos to complain loudly to Zeus, but here he is met with blistering contempt. “ ‘Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar,' ” says Zeus. “ ‘To me you are most hateful of all gods who hold Olympos.' ” Nonetheless, it is not fitting that Ares, immortal as he is, remain wounded, and at Zeus' behest Paiëon, the god of healing (whose traits were later assumed by Apollo), administers medicinal herbs, and the god of war is healed.
¹⁰

The remarkable accumulation of the variety of woundings and rescues in this first of the
Iliad
's extended scenes of battle helps establish the parameters of mortal conflict on the heroic field of war. There are the minor characters who live to die at a greater hero's hands; there are those whom the gods choose to rescue, at least for the day, from certain death; there are the demigods who are rescued and healed by divine intervention. And then there are the gods themselves, who, like the mortals who so entertain them, throw themselves energetically into the fray, inflict and suffer wounds, bleed, feel pain and even fear. The remarkable
aristeia
of Diomedes shows that not only gods but men can cause divine ichor to flow; conversely, a divine touch can heal mortal and immortal wounds alike. This occasional blurring of boundaries between human and divine spheres serves to harden rather than obscure the essential, unassailable differences between god and man. Notwithstanding all the varieties of wounds and wounding, a single, salient fact remains, as Apollo reminds Diomedes: “never the same is / the breed of gods, who are immortal, and men who walk on the ground.” The gods can play at war, but mortal heroes—healed or wounded, rescued or abandoned—must eventually die.

Death: the
Iliad
is ever mindful that war is about men killing or men killed. In the entire epic, no warrior, whether hero or obscure man of the ranks, dies happily or well. No reward awaits the soldier's valor; no heaven will receive him. The
Iliad
's words and phrases for the process of death make clear that this is something baneful: dark night covers the dying warrior, hateful darkness claims him; he is robbed of sweet life, his soul goes down to Hades bewailing its fate.
¹¹
Again and again, relentlessly, the
Iliad
hammers this fact: The death of any warrior is tragic and full of horror. Even in war, death is regrettable.

Diomedes'
aristeía
overruns the boundaries of Book Five, continuing into Book Six, where his martial success serves to inspire his Achaean companions to battle fever. Amid the ensuing wave of slaughter, Menelaos captures a Trojan warrior, Adrestos, alive. At Menelaos' knees, the captive begs for his life to be spared in exchange for a ransom from his father. Moved, Menelaos is on the point of sparing him when his brother, Agamemnon, comes “on the run” to dissuade him:

It is no surprise, perhaps, that Agamemnon should reject an offer of ransom; nor that his actions should be enthusiastically endorsed by zealous Nestor. Nestor's suggestion that plunder be gained by stripping the dead corpses, rather than by taking ransom, is a potent reminder that the war at Troy is principally about the acquisition of possessions. The terms of Menelaos' duel with Paris were that if Menelaos won, the Trojans would give back not only Helen but “Helen and all her possessions.” There has been no evidence to this point in the epic that heroes fight for anything as insubstantial as glory.

The onslaught of Diomedes, aided by Athene, has made nonsense of the pledge Zeus gave Thetis to honor Achilles—“ ‘to help the Trojans, / and pin the Achaeans back against the ships and the water, / dying.' ” With the Trojans in near rout, the Trojan prince Helenos urges on his brother Hektor a course of action that will have momentous consequences for the epic: Hektor will return to the city and instruct their mother, Hekabe, and the other women to make an offering to the city's cult statue of Athene, promising the goddess rich gifts “ ‘if only she will have pity / on the town of Troy, and the Trojan wives, and their innocent children.' ”

Obediently, Hektor strides away to the city, his shield—a Mycenaean relic, to judge from its description—across his back: “against his ankles as against his neck clashed the dark ox-hide, / the rim running round the edge of the great shield massive in the middle.”
¹³
If the ensuing scene between Hektor and the women of Troy was as famous in Homer's time as it has become today, then the lengthy interlude that now intervenes between his departure and arrival, retarding the anticipated scene, may have been a tactic to increase audience expectation. As it is, as Hektor recedes, Glaukos “sprung of Hippolochos” and Diomedes emerge as if from nowhere to encounter each other in the space between the two armies.

“ ‘Who among mortal men are you, good friend?' ” Diomedes inquires, adding unconvincingly that if he is “ ‘some one of the immortals come down from the bright sky, / know that I will not fight against any god of the heaven.' ”

“ ‘High-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask of my generation?' ” Glaukos responds.

The famous opening lines of Glaukos' speech are one of the
Iliad
's more obvious debts to Eastern literature, and a close counterpart can be found, to choose one example from the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Psalms: “Man's days are like grass, like the blossom of the field, so he blooms. For the wind passes over it and it is not there.”
¹⁴
(On the other hand, similar words of the later Ecclesiasticus are probably inspired by Homer: “As with the leafage flourishing on a dense tree—it drops, and puts forth others—so with the generation of flesh and blood).
¹⁵

The story of Glaukos' forebears forms a long, dense digression. At the heart of his tale is the saga of Bellerophontes “ ‘the blameless,' ” who was falsely accused of trying to seduce the wife of a political rival, Proitos, whose advances he had in fact spurned. Reluctant to have him killed outright, Proitos instead sent Bellerophontes to Lykia, in southwest Asia Minor, bearing “ ‘murderous symbols, / which he inscribed in a folding tablet, enough to destroy life,' ” which Bellerophontes was instructed to show to Proitos' father-in-law. These “murderous symbols” are the
Iliad
's only reference to writing and are thought to refer either to some memory of the Linear B pictograph script or to Hittite cuneiform. A folding tablet of wood such as Glaukos describes has been discovered in the wreck of a Bronze Age ship dating to the fourteenth century B.C., off the southern coast of Turkey.
¹⁶

The point of this digression is the revelation that Glaukos' forebear migrated from Greece to Lykia, the land of a Trojan ally, and that in this complicated story Diomedes, who has been patiently standing on the battlefield listening, recognizes that he and the enemy before him are descended from men who were guest friends, men who had honored the sacred laws of hospitality to strangers. “Gladdened,” Diomedes drives his spear into the ground and extends his hand in friendship: “ ‘See now, you are my guest friend from far in the time of our fathers. . . . Let us avoid each other's spears, even in the close fighting.' ”

Elsewhere in the epic, an exchange of genealogies between heroes establishes bragging rights as much as identity. Here, however, it serves the unheroic function of suggesting that if a hero tells his biography long enough, a common story may be found. Some of the very little that can be safely surmised of the Dark Age populations, and audiences, of Homer's time is the fact that their forebears had traveled—from land to land and from people to people. Guest friendships—always a potent concept in Greek culture—had surely been formed along the way and would have been retained in long family memory. This function of genealogical recitations still persists today. In her memoir of coming of age in Somalia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes how “Somali children must memorize their lineage. . . . Whenever a Somali meets a stranger, they ask each other, ‘Who are you?' They trace back their separate ancestries until they find a common forefather.”
¹⁷

The interlude between Glaukos and Diomedes concludes, and abruptly the
Iliad
has us back with Hektor, at the very gates of Troy. Immediately he is besieged by the Trojan women, asking “after their sons, after their brothers and neighbours, / their husbands; and he told them to pray to the immortals, / all, in turn; but there were sorrows in store for many.”

Hektor's arrival marks the second time the
Iliad
has opened up the civilian world inside the walls of Troy. The first occasion mostly served to introduce Helen, at which time, during the optimistic lull preceding the duel between Paris and Menelaos that was intended to end the war, there was a sense of something close to peace: from the walls of Troy, Priam and Helen had looked down on the men of both camps lolling in the grass, their armor piled beside them. Now Troy is again at war, and from the walls where Helen watched her husbands prepare for battle, the city's desperate women have been forced to watch the devastation of their men; “but there were sorrows in store for many,” and this despite their pleas to every god in heaven.

Turning from them, Hektor enters the palace of Priam, with its smooth-stone cloister walks and sleeping chambers—fifty in all for his many sons and twelve for his daughters, where, in pointed comparison with Paris and Helen, each son sleeps “beside his own wedded wife,” each son-in-law beside “his own modest wife.” In the wonderful calm of these smooth-stone cloisters, Hektor meets his mother, Hekabe, and one of his sisters, the lovely Laodike. Resisting their pleas to take a rest, Hektor charges his mother with the task of making an offering to the statue of Athene, repeating the injunction given to him by Helenos. He himself will look for Paris and, once again, drag him out to battle: