The War That Killed Achilles (32 page)

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.
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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 dragged by loss and enslavement.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.' ”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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“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.”
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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.
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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:

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.
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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,”
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a kind of small paradise for heroes, Homer takes pains to underscore, again, that Achilles cannot escape his wholly mortal fate.