Read The War That Killed Achilles Online
Authors: Caroline Alexander
The War That Killed Achilles (13 page)
Just as Glaukos' exchange with Diomedes established that friendship is not confined to allies, so Hektor's relationship with Paris establishes that hatred is not confined to the enemy. When Hektor leaves, the women select an elaborate robe and with tearful supplication one of them lays their offering on the knees of Athene's statue, praying for pity upon “ âthe town of Troy, and the Trojan wives, and their innocent children.' / She spoke in prayer, but Pallas Athene turned her head from her.”
Hektor finds his brother Paris in his chamber, “busy with his splendid armour,” where Helen is sitting with her women; this, it appears, is how Paris and Helen spend most of their days. “ âStrange man!' ” Hektor rebukes him. “ âThe people are dying around the city and around the steep wall / as they fight hard; and it is for you that this war with its clamour / has flared up about our city.' ” Compliant, almost cheerfully so, as is his way, Paris allows that Helen had just been “ âwinning me over / and urging me into the fight.' ”
18
Turning from her women, Helen herself addresses Hektor, “in words of endearment” and also with characteristic words of self revilement.
18
Turning from her women, Helen herself addresses Hektor, “in words of endearment” and also with characteristic words of self revilement.
This second meeting with Helen and Paris essentially repeats many of the elements of the first. Then as now their relationship is most starkly defined by Helen's loathing of her Trojan husband and herself. Yet the repetition is strategic. The sad, bitter union between these two agents of the war is reestablished here in order to set at best advantage one of the
Iliad
's most memorable scenesâthe meeting of Hektor with his own wife, Andromache, and their son.
Iliad
's most memorable scenesâthe meeting of Hektor with his own wife, Andromache, and their son.
Hektor had returned to Troy, it will be recalled, only to enjoin his mother and the Trojan women to supplicate Athene. Now, spontaneously, he decides to look for his own wife. When he does not find her at home, he asks their housekeeper of her whereabouts and is told that, hearing the Trojans were falling back, Andromache had gone to the wall “ âlike a woman / gone mad, and a nurse attending her carries the baby.' ” Hektor, believing he has missed his wife, returns the way he had come and is nearing the Skaian Gates, “whereby he would issue into the plain.” Suddenly Andromache comes running to meet himâa few steps more and Hektor would have been out the gate and one of the most celebrated scenes in literature would not have happened.
She came to him there, and beside her went an attendant carrying
the boy in the fold of her bosom, a little child, only a baby,
Hektor's son, the admired, beautiful as a star shining,
whom Hektor called Skamandrios, but all of the others
Astyanaxâlord of the city; since Hektor alone saved Ilion.
Hektor smiled in silence as he looked on his son, but she,
Andromache, stood close beside him, letting her tears fall,
and clung to his hand and called him by name and spoke to him:
“Dearest,
your own great strength will be your death, and you have no pity
on your little son, nor on me, ill-starred, who soon must be your
widow;
for presently the Achaeans, gathering together,
will set upon you and kill you; and for me it would be far better
to sink into the earth when I have lost you, for there is no other
consolation for me after you have gone to your destinyâ
only grief.”
the boy in the fold of her bosom, a little child, only a baby,
Hektor's son, the admired, beautiful as a star shining,
whom Hektor called Skamandrios, but all of the others
Astyanaxâlord of the city; since Hektor alone saved Ilion.
Hektor smiled in silence as he looked on his son, but she,
Andromache, stood close beside him, letting her tears fall,
and clung to his hand and called him by name and spoke to him:
“Dearest,
your own great strength will be your death, and you have no pity
on your little son, nor on me, ill-starred, who soon must be your
widow;
for presently the Achaeans, gathering together,
will set upon you and kill you; and for me it would be far better
to sink into the earth when I have lost you, for there is no other
consolation for me after you have gone to your destinyâ
only grief.”
Andromache is already a casualty of the war. Her father, Eëtion, was killed by Achilles along with her seven brothers; her mother, who had been captured and ransomed by Achilles, died shortly afterward, perhaps of grief.
“Hektor, thus you are father to me, and my honoured mother, you are my brother, and you it is who are my young husband. Please take pity upon me then, stay here on the rampart, that you may not leave your child an orphan, your wife a widow, but draw your people up by the fig tree, there where the city is openest to attack, and where the wall may be mounted. . . .”
Then tall Hektor of the shining helm answered her: “All these
things are in my mind also, lady; yet I would feel deep shame
before the Trojans, and the Trojan women with trailing garments,
if like a coward I were to shrink aside from the fighting;
and the spirit will not let me, since I have learned to be valiant
and to fight always among the foremost ranks of the Trojans,
winning for my own self great glory, and for my father.
For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it:
there will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish,
and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear.
But it is not so much the pain to come of the Trojans
that troubles me, not even of Priam the king nor Hekabe,
not the thought of my brothers who in their numbers and valour
shall drop in the dust under the hands of men who hate them,
as troubles me the thought of you, when some bronze-armoured
Achaean leads you off, taking away your day of liberty,
in tears; and in Argos you must work at the loom of another,
and carry water from the spring Messeis or Hypereia,
all unwilling, but strong will be the necessity upon you;
and some day seeing you shedding tears a man will say of you:
âThis is the wife of Hektor, who was ever the bravest fighter
of the Trojans, breakers of horses, in the days when they fought
about Ilion.'
So will one speak of you; and for you it will be yet a fresh grief,
to be widowed of such a man who could fight off the day of your
slavery.
But may I be dead and the piled earth hide me under before I
hear you crying and know by this that they drag you captive.”
things are in my mind also, lady; yet I would feel deep shame
before the Trojans, and the Trojan women with trailing garments,
if like a coward I were to shrink aside from the fighting;
and the spirit will not let me, since I have learned to be valiant
and to fight always among the foremost ranks of the Trojans,
winning for my own self great glory, and for my father.
For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it:
there will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish,
and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear.
But it is not so much the pain to come of the Trojans
that troubles me, not even of Priam the king nor Hekabe,
not the thought of my brothers who in their numbers and valour
shall drop in the dust under the hands of men who hate them,
as troubles me the thought of you, when some bronze-armoured
Achaean leads you off, taking away your day of liberty,
in tears; and in Argos you must work at the loom of another,
and carry water from the spring Messeis or Hypereia,
all unwilling, but strong will be the necessity upon you;
and some day seeing you shedding tears a man will say of you:
âThis is the wife of Hektor, who was ever the bravest fighter
of the Trojans, breakers of horses, in the days when they fought
about Ilion.'
So will one speak of you; and for you it will be yet a fresh grief,
to be widowed of such a man who could fight off the day of your
slavery.
But may I be dead and the piled earth hide me under before I
hear you crying and know by this that they drag you captive.”
So speaking glorious Hektor held out his arms to his baby, who shrank back to his fair-girdled nurse's bosom screaming, and frightened at the aspect of his own father, terrified as he saw the bronze and the crest with its horse-hair, nodding dreadfully, as he thought, from the peak of the helmet. Then his beloved father laughed out, and his honoured mother, and at once glorious Hektor lifted from his head the helmet and laid it in all its shining upon the ground. Then taking up his dear son he tossed him about in his arms, and kissed him.
With the baby in his arms, Hektor prays aloud to Zeus that his son will thrive and grow great and come to rule over Ilion, that the Trojans will say of him “ âHe is better by far than his father.' ” Listening to her husband's prayer, Andromache smiles through her tears, and Hektor, pitying her, strokes her hand and takes his leave.
“Hektor of the shining helm”: this was not, as it turns out, a heroic attribute. Unheroic, too, is Hektor's unique prayer that his son be called “better by far than his father,” a father's instinctive inversion of the conventional dictate that sons are inferior to the heroic generation that preceded them. Much in this scene has been inverted. It is Andromache who, with her naïve and pitiful plea, gives military directives, begging her husband to “ âstay here on the rampart, . . . draw your people up by the fig tree, there where the city / is openest to attack' ”: the Hellenistic commentator Aristarchus wanted to excise these lines on the grounds that “the words are inappropriate to Andromache, since she sets herself up against Hektor in generalship.”
19
On the other hand, it is Hektor the warrior who disarms to toss and kiss his child.
19
On the other hand, it is Hektor the warrior who disarms to toss and kiss his child.
The actions that most memorialize Hektor, here and later, are emphatically unheroic, and commentators over the years have sourly remarked upon the discrepancy between his outstanding reputation as a warrior and, relative to other heroes, his modest accomplishmentsâand even weaknessesâon the battlefield; but it is precisely these inconsistencies that render him one of the most believable and sympathetic figures in the
Iliad.
Perhaps not a warrior by natureâ“ âI have learned to be valiant' ”âthe husband and father shoulders the burden that has fallen unfairly upon him and fights the war he hates for a cause he disowns out of honor and duty.
20
Iliad.
Perhaps not a warrior by natureâ“ âI have learned to be valiant' ”âthe husband and father shoulders the burden that has fallen unfairly upon him and fights the war he hates for a cause he disowns out of honor and duty.
20
Andromache's anxious identification of Achaean heroes from the ramparts mirrors Helen's nostalgic identification of her former kinsmen to Priam, from the same rampart. Both women, Homer makes clear, will earn a bitter renown in future ages: “ âwe shall be made into things of song for men of the future,' ” says Helen bitterly of herself and Paris at one point, during Hektor's visit with them. “ â “This is the wife of Hektor, who was ever the bravest fighter / of the Trojans, breakers of horses, in the days when they fought about Ilion.” / So will one speak of you,' ” Hektor tells Andromache.
The eventual fate of Andromache and Astyanax was told in one of the epics of the Trojan Cycle, the
Little Iliad,
attributed to the poet Lesches, from Lesbos, which related events following the downfall of Troy: “But great-hearted Achilles' glorious son led Hektor's wife back to the hollow ships,” one ancient testimonial of the lost epic reads; “her child he took from the bosom of his lovely-haired nurse and, holding him by the foot, flung him from the battlement, and crimson death and stern fate took him at his fall. . . .”
21
The fate of Astyanax is thought to have been well established in pre-Homeric myth. Vase paintings from as early as the late eighth century B.C. depict his death, and by the sixth century B.C. it had become a popular motif, along with other events depicting the terrible aftermath of the fall of Troy.
22
It is likely, then, that audiences of Homer's time listened to the scene between his parents with foreknowledge that Andromache would be enslaved and Astyanax killed. Notwithstanding its terrible scenes of wounding and dying on the field of war, the
Iliad
hints that there are fatesâAndromache'sâthat may be worse than death.
23
Little Iliad,
attributed to the poet Lesches, from Lesbos, which related events following the downfall of Troy: “But great-hearted Achilles' glorious son led Hektor's wife back to the hollow ships,” one ancient testimonial of the lost epic reads; “her child he took from the bosom of his lovely-haired nurse and, holding him by the foot, flung him from the battlement, and crimson death and stern fate took him at his fall. . . .”
21
The fate of Astyanax is thought to have been well established in pre-Homeric myth. Vase paintings from as early as the late eighth century B.C. depict his death, and by the sixth century B.C. it had become a popular motif, along with other events depicting the terrible aftermath of the fall of Troy.
22
It is likely, then, that audiences of Homer's time listened to the scene between his parents with foreknowledge that Andromache would be enslaved and Astyanax killed. Notwithstanding its terrible scenes of wounding and dying on the field of war, the
Iliad
hints that there are fatesâAndromache'sâthat may be worse than death.
23
In structural terms, the scene between Hektor and Andromache is wholly irrelevant to the
Iliad.
It does not advance the epic story in any substantive way, and it adds nothing at all to the main narrative arc, which is the story of Achilles' wrath and alienation, and their aftermath. Strictly regarded, it is as wild a digression as the meeting between Glaukos and Diomedes. And yet it is one of the handful of scenes without which the
Iliad
could not have been the
Iliad.
It casts a shadow behind, on events that have already occurred, as well as on everything that is to come. Nestor's rally of the Achaeans in Book Two, urging no man to go home “until after he has lain in bed with the wife of a Trojan” is exposed in all its brutality. The little, compressed biographies that pathetically accompany each fallen man are made suddenly more vivid. Even Glaukos' celebrated wordsâ“ âSo one generation of men will grow while another / dies' ”âhave a new and tragic import.
Iliad.
It does not advance the epic story in any substantive way, and it adds nothing at all to the main narrative arc, which is the story of Achilles' wrath and alienation, and their aftermath. Strictly regarded, it is as wild a digression as the meeting between Glaukos and Diomedes. And yet it is one of the handful of scenes without which the
Iliad
could not have been the
Iliad.
It casts a shadow behind, on events that have already occurred, as well as on everything that is to come. Nestor's rally of the Achaeans in Book Two, urging no man to go home “until after he has lain in bed with the wife of a Trojan” is exposed in all its brutality. The little, compressed biographies that pathetically accompany each fallen man are made suddenly more vivid. Even Glaukos' celebrated wordsâ“ âSo one generation of men will grow while another / dies' ”âhave a new and tragic import.
“ âNo, let not one of them go free of sudden / death and our hands,' ” Agamemnon urged, as Menelaos was poised to spare the life of a supplicant; “ ânot the young man child that the mother carries / still in her body, not even he.' ” The single scene before the Skaian Gates makes it impossible to contemplate with any joy the spectacle of Priam's towers burning. Simply put, the Trojans are no longer the enemy of this Greek epic. And if the Trojans are not the enemyâwho is?
Land of My Fathers
Toward dusk of the third day, following the cremation of their dead from the previous days' battles, the Achaeans embark upon a task of sudden urgency. Beside the remains of their burned-out funeral pyre, they build a fort “with towered ramparts, to be a defence for themselves and their vessels,” surrounded by a deep, wide ditch, filled with sharp stakes.
The building of the fortification is embarked upon without discussion or prelude, and it is unclear what prompted this precaution, but it signals a slow yet inexorable turn in the fortunes of the Greeks and in the action of the epic. A little earlier, Zeus had addressed an assembly of the Olympians and in forceful, threatening language prohibited any god from interfering in the war: henceforth the two mortal armies will face each other on a level field. And although numerically inferior, the Trojans, “caught in necessity, for their wives and their children,” will gain the upper hand. Thus, at last, does Zeus take decisive action to honor his pledge to Thetis, for fight as they will, the Achaeans cannot win without Achilles.
Slowly, in a series of battles fought by individual heroes, the momentum shifts toward the Trojans. By nightfall the Greeks are on the run, driven back to their very ships. Standing “on clean ground, where there showed a space not cumbered with corpses,” Hektor excitedly gives his men their orders for the night and for the following dawn that will surely bring success. Succumbing to the heady taste of imminent victory, this most careful of heroes drops his reserve to cry in dangerous exaltation:
“Oh, if I only
could be as this in all my days immortal and ageless
and be held in honour as Athene and Apollo are honoured
as surely as this oncoming day brings evil to the Argives.”
could be as this in all my days immortal and ageless
and be held in honour as Athene and Apollo are honoured
as surely as this oncoming day brings evil to the Argives.”
High on Olympos, however, where the gods have been watching this turn in the tide of battle, Zeus has already pronounced what he knows will be the inevitable outcome of the ensuing events: Hektor will prevail in battle until the time that “ âthere stirs by the ships the swift-footed son of Peleus,' ” the father of gods and men had stated, “ â on that day when they shall fight by the sterns of the beached ships / in the narrow place of necessity over fallen Patroklos. / This is the way it is fated to be.' ” The remainder of the epic is similarly punctuated with blunt summaries of the events ahead, ensuring that the audience feels the weight of the impending tragedies. Now, despite what Achaeans or Trojans might in their innocence believe, the audience knows what Zeus knows: Achilles' comrade Patroklos will die, Achilles will “stir,” and Hektor will at that time be stopped from fighting.
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