The War That Killed Achilles (16 page)

Life is more precious than glory; this is the unheroic truth disclosed by the greatest warrior at Troy. More extraordinary than its subversion of a conventional story line—the anticipated and triumphant return of the gift-laden hero—is the
Iliad
's very deliberate confrontation with the core tenets of its own tradition. That glory, honor, and fame are more important than life is a heroic convention so old it can be traced securely to Indo-European tradition; integral to this heroic view is the belief that glory—
kléos
—is achieved through heroic poetry, in other words, through epic.
³⁸
But with his unimagined speech, Achilles hijacks the
Iliad,
taking this particular epic onto thrilling new ground.
³⁹

The magnitude of Achilles' words is dramatically underscored by the reaction of aged Phoinix, the third member of the Embassy party, who “in a stormburst of tears” embarks upon a lengthy, digressive speech jumbling personal emotion with a heroic, cautionary tale. “ ‘How then shall I, dear child, be left in this place behind you / all alone?' ” he begins, and by addressing this most fearsome of man slayers as “ ‘dear child,' ” he establishes his position as a long-serving family retainer, who was sent to Troy by Peleus himself as a guardian of the young Achilles. Phoinix, it will be recalled, had first come to Phthia many years earlier, when he fled his own country after almost killing his father. Awarded care of Peleus' single child, Phoinix became nurse and mentor to Achilles:

Phoinix's long reminiscence of Achilles' childhood is in itself strikingly antiheroic. Epic as a genre has “difficulty in dealing with the infancy and youth patterns” of its heroes, since this material is inherently unsuitable to heroic tales.
⁴⁰
The usual remedy is to attribute to the young hero precocious feats in his childhood; the infant Herakles, for instance, strangled snakes in his crib. The deeds of the young Achilles while under Cheiron's tutelage in the mountains, where he reportedly slew wild beasts and outran deer, could surely have furnished the necessary material.
⁴¹
Instead Homer deliberately supplanted tales of daring for a baby-sitter's recollection of young Achilles' spewing up his wine.

Phoinix appears to have been invented by Homer for this scene.
⁴²
Broadly, he serves as a paternal figure in the place of the ever-absent Peleus, possessed of the kind of reminiscences expected from a father. Thus Phoinix—and Homer who has determinedly created him—humanizes Achilles at the precise moment the great warrior appears most pitiless; the young demigod was once a wholly human child, and not even Thetis, whose preoccupation with Achilles' death seems to preclude all other aspects of her maternal relationship, provides such memorable, touching details of Achilles as he was before he came to Troy.

This naturalistic prelude contrasts jarringly with the long, discursive tale that Phoinix next relates, a parable regarding a hero of old who, like Achilles, was angry with his people and who, like Achilles, rejected gifts of appeasement. It is a story from “the old days, the deeds that we hear of / from the great men, when the swelling anger descended upon them. / The heroes would take gifts; they would listen, and be persuaded.”

In Phoinix's parable, the hero Meleager kills his maternal uncle, incurring his mother's curse. Angered by his mother's act, Meleager remains resolutely inside his city, Kalydon, when it is besieged by an enemy people. A series of delegations arrive to beg him to come to his city's defense—chiefs, priests, his parents, including the offending mother, and his comrades, all to no avail. Finally his wife, Kleopatra, successfully intervenes, and Meleager enters the fray and succeeds in turning the tide of battle. By returning so late in the day, however, he does not get the gifts the delegations had first offered:

For all its great length and vividness, Phoinix's long parable is a clumsy effort. Its climactic warning against the potential loss of gifts would seem to be pointless given Achilles' own emphatic, adamantine rejection of any consideration of them. In fact, the parable is wholly pointless, for later in the epic Achilles will be swamped with gifts of honor, presented to him in the most public and gratifying manner possible. Indeed, the meaning of this interlude with Phoinix and his long speech seems to be precisely that he and it are inappropriate to Achilles' circumstances: Achilles is not, for all Phoinix's emotion, his “ ‘own child' ” who will “ ‘some day . . . keep hard affliction from me.' ” Peleus is Achilles' father, not Phoinix, and the filial duty of caring for his real father in old age, as will be seen, hangs very heavy on Achilles' heart. In all respects, in fact, Phoinix's tender memories and extended plea relentlessly mangle the most defining touchstones of Achilles' tragic life. Having fled from his own hated father, Phoinix came to Peleus, who “ ‘gave me his love, even as a father loves his own son / who is a single child brought up among many possessions' ”; but it is Achilles who is the single child and who has just declared he would like to return to his father to enjoy these many possessions. Peleus was one of the heroes at the Kalydonian Boar Hunt—it is one of his best-known feats—yet in Phoinix's rendition of the story of Meleager and the hunt, he never mentions Peleus—so much for heroic deeds' winning everlasting glory.
⁴³

In his long-winded discursiveness, in his insistence on “ ‘the old days also, the deeds that we hear of / from the great men,' ” Phoinix is like no one else so much as Nestor. Stuck in his time warp, faithfully invoking the old traditions, Phoinix does not, for all his passion and tears, address a single syllable to Achilles' most striking assertion—that the war is not worth the value of his life. The speech that no warrior before has uttered—a speech that indeed negates the warrior's heroic code—receives in exchange only a conventional appeal to heroes of old. Perhaps for another hero, perhaps in another epic, such a time-honored tactic would have been persuasive, but this is Achilles, and this is the
Iliad,
and this is perhaps Homer's declaration that the old heroic values enshrouded in their formless prolixity are no longer relevant. With his outright rejection of conventional gifts, conventional appeals, and, above all, the conventional heroic code, Achilles has crossed into new territory, where stories of what moved the men of old—
kléa andrōn
—have no force.

Among the many idiosyncratic features of Achilles' language are his unique words, his use of striking similes, of violent words and invective, and his “tendency to invoke distant places”:
⁴⁴

The distant place Achilles most consistently evokes is his own home, Phthia; Phthia, related to
phthíō,
“waste away, decay, wane dwindle”;
⁴⁵
Phthia, where the soil is rich and men grow great, is also the Waste Land, and it is here that his heroic father is languishing, his
kléos,
or glory, if one is to judge by its absence in the
Iliad,
already dwindled. Phthia is where Achilles now chooses to bury himself for the rest of what he hopes will be a long and undistinguished life.
⁴⁶

The choice of two destinies—to die at Troy and win everlasting glory or to return to live a long life in the Waste Land, where glory withers away—is, as far as can be judged from the material that has survived, also unique to the Embassy. Elsewhere, even in the
Iliad,
Achilles shows no awareness of this prophecy, and it would seem to be another feature that was invented by Homer for this remarkable scene. The prophecy serves to ensure that Homer's audience—if not Phoinix and the Embassy delegates—do not overlook the considered, passionate decision of this now-reluctant warrior. While Achilles is still enraged with Agamemnon, it is no longer wrath that drives him homeward, but the determination to live.

“ ‘Phoinix my father, aged, illustrious, such honour is a thing / I need not. I think I am honoured already in Zeus' ordinance' ” is Achilles' response to Phoinix's shrill urging that he accept gifts:

Odysseus and Aias take the hint, and it remains for Aias, the least eloquent of the delegation, to speak in parting with a soldier's blunt words. “ ‘He is hard, and does not remember that friends' affection / wherein we honoured him by the ships, far beyond all others,' ” Aias says, ostensibly addressing himself to Odysseus. “ ‘Pitiless.' ”

And it is Achilles the companion-in-arms, the comrade, whom Aias' straight-talking words now fatally touch; more to the point, while Homer can challenge and interpret his tradition innovatively, he cannot credibly thwart its entire story—his legendary hero cannot simply exit Troy. “ ‘Son of Telamon, seed of Zeus, Aias, lord of the people: / all that you have said seems spoken after my own mind,' ” Achilles begins, and with no thought for the high words that he just expressed about life and mortality, he reverts to the traditional theme, his wrath toward Agamemnon. Now he offers a vaguely stated compromise:

Significantly, when the defeated delegation returns to the Achaean camp, Odysseus, in debriefing Agamemnon and his anxious comrades, makes no mention at all of Achilles' final position, reporting instead only that Achilles has said he is going home; it is as if Homer were determined to emphasize, unambiguously and unforgettably, that this was Achilles' first choice: “ ‘And he himself has threatened that tomorrow as dawn shows / he will drag down his strong-benched, oarswept ships to the water. / He said it would be his counsel to others also, to sail back / home again.' ”

 

 

For centuries, scholars have debated the Embassy scene and what exactly it was that Achilles really wanted. Should he have accepted the gifts, or was he right to reject them? Since Achilles' refusal to be appeased marks the beginning of his tragedy, the usual conclusion is that he made the wrong decision and he will learn his lesson. But the point of the Embassy scene was to establish that Achilles had three options, not two, and it is the third that will break his heart. Achilles' tragic error did not lie in his acceptance or rejection of Agamemnon's gifts; his tragic error was that he did not follow where his thoughts always seem to tend—to Phthia beyond the sea; to Peleus, his father; to home.

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