The War That Killed Achilles (6 page)

As the
éris
between the two men goes from bad to unmanageable, Achilles takes hold of the scepter of the assembly, a symbol of royal authority, and unleashes another blistering assessment of his commanding officer:

After speaking, Achilles “dashed to the ground the sceptre” of the assembly; to Achilles this revered and potent object is only a piece of wood stripped of foliage.
⁶
His action neatly encapsulates the crisis of command: if the traditional trappings of authority are simply not recognized, then leadership of the gathered host is up for grabs. “ ‘So must I be called of no account and a coward / if I must carry out every order you may happen to give me,' ” says Achilles, toward the end of this confrontation. “ ‘Tell other men to do these things, but give me no more / commands, since I for my part have no intention to obey you.' ”

The altercation breaks off when Achilles stalks away to his quarters with his companions; in withdrawing from the war, he also withdraws the twenty-five hundred Myrmidon comrades who sailed with him.
⁷
A delegation under Odysseus, proverbially known for his smooth talking and diplomacy, is sent to return Chryseis to her father and to make propitiatory offerings and “perfect hecatombs” to Apollo; a hecatomb is believed to be a sacrifice of “a hundred cows”—in Greek
hekatòn bous
—an appalling slaughter, but the term seems to have become generalized over time to mean something along the lines of “a worthy number.”
⁸
While this delegation is busy, Agamemnon, making good on his threat, sends his heralds to Achilles' shelter to confiscate Briseis, Achilles' prize.

The heralds set out “against their will beside the beach of the barren / salt sea.” On their arrival at Achilles' camp, set confidently at the extreme end, and thus the most exposed position, of the long line of ships stretched along the beach, “These two terrified and in awe of the king stood waiting / quietly, and did not speak a word at all.” Achilles, however, receives them graciously, and the heralds duly return to Agamemnon with Briseis, who “all unwilling went with them.” While Briseis is still a silent cipher at this point, her reluctance is quietly suggestive of a tender relationship with her captor.

Once the little delegation has departed, Achilles drops his hauteur, and, going down to the sea, weeping, he calls upon his mother, the sea nymph Thetis:

Hearing her son, Thetis rises like mist from the sea and sits beside him, while Achilles tearfully relates all that has happened: the plague, the quarrel, the loss of Briseis and with her loss the assault to his honor. He then asks of Thetis the single favor that will define the rest of the epic: that she supplicate almighty Zeus, the son of Kronos, for a favor, reminding the king of the gods that she once saved him from destruction:

It is a weird and ultimately savage speech: “ ‘pin the Achaeans back against the ships and the water, / dying' ” is the summation of Achilles' murderous request. His references to obscure events of the Olympian past briefly part the elegant drapery that encloses the Homeric world, allowing a glimpse into the murky realm of mythology and folklore from which the
Iliad
was fomented. Characteristically, Homer eschews such outlandish, implausible creatures as hundred-handed monsters, but here it seems this creature—Briareus—was too closely associated with Thetis and her role as Zeus' savior to edit him out.
⁹
And in fact, Thetis' powerful claim on Zeus, the King of Heaven, can be shown to rest not so much on her rescue of him from rebellious gods as on a single detail submerged in the bizarre story of Briareus: “ ‘he is far greater in strength than his father.' ”

In the
Iliad
's heroic world, the attribute of being superior to one's father is very dangerous, associated above all with usurpation. Zeus, the king of gods, came to power by overthrowing his father, Kronos—as Kronos had overthrown his father before him. Among gods, a son greater in strength than his father, then, can, and usually does, overturn the cosmic order.
¹⁰

Among men, a central tenet of the heroic code is that the younger generation is inferior to the elder, or to the generation of its fathers. Old Nestor's authority among the Achaeans rests exclusively upon the fact, which he never tires of proclaiming, that he belongs to the age of heroes of old: “ ‘I fought single-handed, yet against such men no one / of the mortals now alive upon earth could do battle.' ” In heroic society, a hero is cajoled, bullied, or persuaded into line by being reminded of the illustrious deeds his father committed. Deference to the tenet that the fathers of old are greater than the heroes of today is part of the moral cement that holds heroic society together.
¹¹

The full significance of monstrous Briareus, however, is not only that he is, anomalously and dangerously, greater than his father; it is that he is evoked at just this juncture in the epic, in Achilles' own speech. The
Iliad,
as has been seen, is the product of a long and variegated tradition, arising and defining itself over centuries amid other, sometimes competitive, sometimes complementary, traditions. Knowledgeable of these other stories, audiences of Homer's own time would have recognized the
Iliad
's allusions; indeed, sometimes the allusions are explicit enough to suggest that the
Iliad
is deliberately playing upon its audience's familiarity with the wider epic material. Often, however, as here, the allusion is obscure, compressed to a telltale phrase buried in the larger narrative. Modern readers, ignorant of the lost traditions, might be led to such subtle references by an outside source—a scene on a vase painting, for example, or a passage in other poetry—that makes more explicit the submerged myth. Those places in the
Iliad,
therefore, where an unknown myth is touched upon bear close study—and such is the case with Achilles' passionate evocation of Thetis' rescue of Zeus with the aid of a being superior in strength to his father.

From later poetry it is known that Achilles' mother, divine Thetis, bore a unique destiny: to bear a son who would be stronger than his father, whoever that father might be. The most explicit evidence comes from the poet Pindar, who although writing some two and a half centuries after the
Iliad
can be shown to draw upon very old, even pre-Iliadic traditions. The subject of the poem in question is the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, a favorite subject of both poetry and art:

This the assembly of the Blessed Ones remembered,
When Zeus and glorious Poseidon
Strove to marry Thetis,
Each wishing that she
Should be his beautiful bride.
Love held them in his grip.
But the Gods' undying wisdom
Would not let the marriage be,

When they gave ear to the oracles. In their midst
Wise-counselling Themis said
That it was fated for the sea-goddess
To bear for son a prince
Stronger than his father,
Who shall wield in his hand a different weapon
More powerful than the thunderbolt
Or the monstrous trident,
If she wed Zeus or among the brothers of Zeus.
“Put an end to this. Let her have a mortal wedlock
And see dead in war her son. . . .”

—Isthmian
8.29-40
¹²

It seems, then, that the minor sea goddess Thetis was pursued by the two most powerful gods of the cosmic order—Zeus and Poseidon—and that when her destiny was disclosed to her suitors, their ardor turned to fear and a marriage with a mortal—Peleus—was quickly arranged. Her offspring would not be the most powerful god in the universe, the lord of heaven, but instead the “best of the Achaeans,” a mortal who will die. A cosmic crisis was thus averted, but the price, to Thetis' eternal sorrow, would be the certain, untimely death of her short-lived son, Achilles.
¹³

Honor for death—this seems to have been the bargain. If Achilles is dishonored at Agamemnon's hands, the bargain has been transgressed and he loses all. This small scene between the sorrowing mother and her weeping son is, as it now turns out, one of the most potent in the epic, representing the moment from which all subsequent action will be unfolded. Revealed, too, is the high import of the
Iliad
's choice of what had at first appeared to be the least significant period in the long Trojan War. In the few days covered by the
Iliad
's narrative, no cities will be stormed and the war will not be brought to conclusion. But the rebellion that would have played in heaven will take place on earth. Achilles will assert his birthright—not as the lord of heaven but as the best of the Achaeans. Stronger than all his father's generation, the legendary men of old, he will also operate beyond the reach of the conventional moral code of their society.

It is against this charged history that Thetis comes to Olympos to make her plea. Finding Zeus, her former suitor, sitting apart from the other gods, she goes directly to him, taking her place beside him, “with her left hand embracing / his knees, but took him underneath the chin with her right hand”—the supplicant's posture. Her plea to him is strikingly brief, eight lines only:

Zeus' initial response is an ominous silence, and Thetis, clinging to his knees, has to plead again:

Zeus' reluctance, as it turns out, is not on account of the enormity of the request or the toll of human life entailed but because it will put him on a collision course with his wife (and sister), the goddess Hera, who is an unflagging champion of the Achaeans and an inveterate, pathological hater of Trojans. Nonetheless, reluctantly, he complies, bending his head in promise. Her petition granted, Thetis descends from Olympos to the ocean in a single leap, leaving Zeus to handle Hera, who immediately, as he had feared, speaks “revilingly” to him, charging him with treachery.

Elsewhere, Zeus similarly threatens other gods; the point of the scene with Hera is not that he is an abusive husband but that there exists no agency that can stand up to his might. This point is underscored by the exchange immediately following between Hera and her son, the lame smith of the gods, Hephaistos. Cautioning his mother against causing unpleasantness on Olympos “ ‘for the sake of mortals,' ” he also reminds her of an earlier occasion on which he had once tried to intervene on her behalf and was himself hurled by Zeus from Olympos: “ ‘all day long I dropped helpless, and about sunset / I landed in Lemnos, and there was not much life left in me.' ” Zeus, as Hephaistos declares, “ ‘is far too strong for any.' ”

Zeus' threat to Hera at the end of this first Book echoes that of Agamemnon's threat to Chryses at the beginning, just as Hera's fright is reminiscent of that of Kalchas. The little scene on Olympos ironically shadows Agamemnon's strutting of power on earth below and is a reminder of the unassailable magnitude of the real thing: the authority of Zeus is that against which the combined forces of all the other gods cannot contend—this is what it means to be the lord of heaven. Book One ends peacefully on Olympos. The gods resume their feasting, and when the sun goes down, Zeus goes to bed with Hera beside him.