The War That Killed Achilles (25 page)

On Olympos, Zeus summons his own assembly to address the pivotal developments on the Trojan plain, developments that represent the fulfillment of his own plans. “ ‘I think of these men though they are dying,' ” he allows to the other immortals. Achilles, if left to his own devices and powers, will make short work of the Trojans; therefore, Zeus announces, he is revoking his command that the gods keep out of the war. “ ‘Go down, wherever you may go among the Achaeans and Trojans / and give help to either side,' ” he urges, and then characterizes Achilles' prowess in the most dangerous of all possible terms: “ ‘I fear against destiny he may storm their fortress.' ”

Zeus' remarkable pronouncement gives promise of a thrilling turn of events; surely it marks the commencement of the much-anticipated
aristeía
of Achilles, “a man like the murderous war god.” Instead Homer nods again, and Zeus' order for the gods to mingle among the armies becomes the pretext for divine buffoonery. Aidoneus, lord of the dead, jumps from his throne and screams aloud in fear that all hell will, literally, break loose. Poseidon and Apollo square off against Athene and the war god Enyalios, as does Hera against Artemis. Less bellicose gods make uncomfortable appearances, such as Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis; “generous Hermes,” the god of boundaries and messenger of the gods; and crippled Hephaistos.

Nor does the first action of Achilles himself satisfy the dramatic expectations raised by the extended, momentous prelude. To be sure, the son of Peleus approaches like an open-jawed, foaming-mouthed, furious, glaring lion against Aineias, one of Troy's elite heroes. But this first encounter of Achilles' return—his first martial performance in the epic—threatens to be merely a battle of words. Achilles hails his enemy with cheerful, taunting words, at odds with the dark anger and grief he bears: “ ‘Does the desire in your heart drive you to combat / in hope you will be lord of the Trojans, breakers of horses, / and of Priam's honour. And yet even if you were to kill me / Priam would not because of that rest such honour on your hand. / He has sons.' ” The two heroes embark upon a kind of slanging match—flyting,
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playing the dozens—referencing each other's genealogy and ability to use words of insult; possibly this awkwardly placed encounter makes knowing reference to a tradition dedicated to the exploits of Aineias and his anger with
his
king.
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At last the two heroes close to exchange actual blows. Cowering under his shield, as the long Pelian ash spear whistles over his head, Aineias is at length rescued, and spirited away to safety, by Poseidon.
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Many lines pass, therefore, before Achilles embarks upon the kind of standard slaughter that characterizes the epic way of war. Cutting a swath through the Trojans, he kills a brother of Hektor, Polydoros, and suddenly finds himself in sight of Hektor himself, “ ‘the man who beyond all others has troubled my anger.' ” But the ensuing, greatly anticipated encounter between the epic's two contending heroes is also disconcertingly anticlimactic. “ ‘Son of Peleus, never hope by words to frighten me / as if I were a baby,' ” Hektor retorts to Achilles' challenge. “ ‘I myself understand well enough / how to speak in vituperation and how to make insults.' ” For a bewildering moment, there hovers the possibility of a repeat of the kind of war of words Achilles waged with Aineias. Achilles hurls his spear, however, and a brief exchange follows, and once again the gods intervene to whisk his enemy to safety; on this occasion, it is Apollo who sweeps Hektor away in a thick mist.

The convoluted action transpiring since Thetis' delivery of armor to Achilles has neither furthered the narrative nor heightened dramatic expectations. One can only assume that the broad entertainment afforded by divine foolery and clever references to other epic stories was not felt by ancient audiences to dissipate the dramatic tension—and this consideration is in itself enlightening. Despite the summaries that we possess of the lost epics of the Trojan Cycle, and the many scattered references in later literature, we today know very little about how these other traditions told their stories. But comparison with epics in other times and other cultures suggests they may have looked a lot like the interludes here that accompany Achilles'
aristeía.
Distracting as they are, these “un-Homeric” passages, then, serve modern audiences well—as reminders that the traditional story elements of the
Iliad
did not of themselves guarantee greatness.

The
Iliad
does not regain its high tone and gravitas until the end of Book Twenty, when Achilles'
aristeía
is under way in earnest. There is now nothing amusing about his confrontations with the enemy as he storms across the Trojan plain “as inhuman fire sweeps on in fury,” slashing through the Trojan forces, his chariot axle-high in blood and his immortal team of horses trampling underfoot the dead. Achilles' own hands are “spattered with bloody filth” as he drives the terror-stricken Trojans into the river Skamandros (also called Xanthos), leaping in after them so none can escape.

These will fulfill his vow to “ ‘behead twelve glorious / children of the Trojans' ” before the pyre of Patroklos. And it is here, by the tamarisk-lined river, that Achilles meets a Trojan named Lykaon blundering out of the water.

Lykaon is a son of Priam by a concubine, and as evil fate would have it, this is his second encounter with Achilles, who had captured him in a night raid during some earlier stage of the war. At that time, Achilles had spared his life and sold him in Lemnos, where eventually he was redeemed by a family friend. Now, as Achilles prepares to make his kill, Lykaon runs under the upheld Pelian ash spear. Grasping it with one hand, he clasps Achilles' knees in supplication with the other, begging that his life be spared again for ransom:

Buried in the pathos of Lykaon's death is a revelatory fact: in the days before Patroklos' death, it was Achilles' “ ‘heart's choice to be sparing.' ” Achilles' actions—and character—in the early days of the war have remained more or less obscure, falling as they do outside the
Iliad
's chosen time frame. Yet sufficient small hints of the kind of man he was can be gleaned from other incidents in the epic and tend to substantiate his claim that he is now a changed man. The departure of Briseis from his shelter is one such example, who, captive though she was, leaves “all unwilling,” and there is the testimony of Andromache, whose father Achilles slew “but did not strip his armour, for his heart respected the dead man.” Nor does it appear that bloodlust overwhelmed Achilles in the heat of these early battles. The self-portrait he offers during both his confrontation with Agamemnon in Book One and the Embassy in Book Nine is that of a weary man engaged in the exhausting work of war, which he performs expertly but without much appetite: “ ‘Always the greatest part of the painful fighting is the work of my hands.' ” When, therefore, Achilles tells Lykaon that “ ‘it was the way of my heart's choice to be sparing / of the Trojans,' ” this is not a rhetorical flourish to make the death of Lykaon more pathetic. Achilles the warrior was once gallant and chivalrous; since the death of Patroklos, he is a different, murderous man.

In his study of combat trauma on American veterans of the Vietnam War, Dr. Jonathan Shay was struck by how vividly and realistically the descriptions of Achilles' actions and state of mind after the death of Patroklos resembled those of the veterans under his psychiatric care. This was particularly striking of the phenomenon, triggered by some incident—injustice, betrayal, loss of a friend—of the so-called berserk state. As one veteran recalled:

Combat trauma undoes character.
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The cosmic reach of Achilles' furious, raging
aristeía
is evoked by the striking similes clustering around him since his return: fire blazes around his head like the signal flares of a besieged city; his eyes glitter “like sunflare”; his shield glimmers like fire across the water, like moonlight; his helmet shines like a star. These elemental images set up Achilles' elemental battle with one of the few foes capable of threatening him—the river Skamandros, a force of nature. Its eddying waters clogged with the bodies of men Achilles has slaughtered, Skamandros raises his voice in protest and indeed supplication: “ ‘O Achilles, your strength is greater, your acts more violent / than all men's,' ” the river implores. “ ‘For the loveliness of my waters is crammed with corpses, I cannot / find a channel to cast my waters into the bright sea / since I am congested with the dead men you kill so brutally. / Let me alone, then; lord of the people, I am confounded.' ”

Achilles' slighting response—that he will not leave off killing until Hektor “ ‘has killed me or I have killed him' ”—goads Skamandros into hostile action, and, rearing his waters, he comes at Achilles in a dangerous wave. Scrambling out of the river, Achilles makes an undignified dash across the plain, with the river, now surging out of its banks, in fierce pursuit. The lengthy episode is another of the nonheroic interludes that perplexes Achilles'
aristeía.
Its outlandish, fabulous tone, so uncharacteristic of Homer, leads one to suspect an older myth lurking behind the episode, one in which the warrior hero did actual battle against powers of nature and monsters, as in Near Eastern archetypes where a hero battles the Flood.
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At length, Hera calls on her lame son for help, and Hephaistos makes a spectacular and unexpected appearance as pure Fire, parching the plain, drying the land, and burning the many corpses:

Blighting the kind of peaceful landscape he so lovingly evoked on Achilles' shield, Hephaistos brings his involvement in Achilles' fate full circle. He cannot keep death from the son of Thetis, but he can fulfill the smith's traditional epic role of protecting young heroes. This swift, startling scene is also the
Iliad
's only description of the physical damage done to the plain of Troy, and it unnervingly conjures timeless images of the scorched-earth tactics that invading armies inflict upon their enemies' land.

Achilles' savage scamper over the plain drives the Trojans before him, back to Troy. Simultaneously the gods terminate their own battles, and abruptly, with little prelude, return to Olympos. Watching from the battlements of his doomed city, Priam groans aloud and calls for the guards to open the city gates for his routed army. One warrior, Agenor, holds his ground, inspirited by Apollo, the only god who has not left for Olympos, but who stands close by the Trojan, “leaned there on an oak tree with close mist huddled about him.” Thus unnaturally emboldened, Agenor calls out to Achilles:

But this is not true—the fighters have fled; everyone has fled. Even the gods have fled. Moments later, Agenor has also fled, spirited away by Apollo “in a dense mist,” out of the battle and Achilles' range. Apollo himself takes on the likeness of Agenor and in this impersonation goads Achilles into giving chase, leading him away from the walls of Troy and allowing the terrified Trojans to bolt for the city.

Playful on the surface, the interlude of futile chase directly pits Achilles against his own most implacable and malevolent enemy. No god hates him more personally than does Apollo.
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Dubbed “the most Greek” of the gods, Apollo of later classical times embodied the physical perfection of male youth and the cool rationalism and serene aloofness of the cultivated soul. In the
Iliad,
the traits that will later closely define him are discernible but not necessarily prominent.
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The god who sends the devastating plague in Book One, Apollo is also the god who can recall it—who can
loigón amúmein,
or “ward off destruction”—a prelude to his later attribute as a healer. He is the “God of Afar,” the god of withdrawal, at a distance from man, for whom he manifests disdain. His preferred dwelling is among the Hyperboreans, mysterious dwellers of the Far North, away from the imperfect, impure world of man.
³⁶
To round out his civilized virtues, Apollo is the god of music, associated particularly with the lyre. Reference is made to this skill by Hera, when she reminds Apollo that at the marriage of Achilles' parents, “ ‘ you too feasted among them / and held your lyre, o friend of the evil, faithless forever.' ”
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