The War That Killed Achilles (17 page)

From a peak on Mount Ida overlooking the plain of Troy, Zeus, the father of gods and men, sits in splendid isolation, “rejoicing in the pride of his strength . . . , watching the flash of the bronze, and men killing and men killed.” Hitherto the gods have been busily embroiled in the activities of the field, but now the epic pulls back to unfold a more chilling divine perspective, which is war as pure spectacle.

Dawn has broken on the twenty-fifth day of the
Iliad,
and the longest day in the epic. Night does not come until well into Book Eighteen, and the intervening narrative encompasses the epic's bloodiest, most unrelieved, and ultimately most momentous fighting.
¹
The harsh injunction that Zeus laid upon the other gods in Book Eight to keep clear of the battle is still in force: “ ‘And any one I perceive against the gods' will attempting / to go among the Trojans and help them, or among the Danaans, / he shall go whipped against his dignity back to Olympos.' ” Absent divine interference—and Achilles, who remains in his shelter, where the Embassy left him—the momentum of the war continues in favor of the Trojans, as Zeus intends.

A cascade of similes drawn from the broadest sweep of life conveys the extent of slaughter in the now all-encompassing universe of battle. The Achaeans and Trojans square off “like two lines of reapers who, facing each other, / drive their course all down the field of wheat or of barley / for a man blessed in substance.” Although hard-pressed, the Achaean lines stand firm, “held evenly as the scales which a careful widow / holds, taking it by the balance beam, and weighs her wool evenly / at either end, working to win a pitiful wage for her children.” The infinite ways of wounding and of dying are paraded in pitiless detail. Pierced by a spear, a warrior's “heart was panting still and beating to shake the butt end / of the spear.” An arrow driven into his bladder, a fallen warrior, in the hands of his companions, “gasped out his life, then lay like a worm extended / along the ground.”

Outstanding performances by the most important Achaean heroes punctuate the long sweep of battle narrative and provide dramatic tension by delaying the inevitable arrival of Hektor and the Trojans at the Achaean ships, in accordance with Zeus' earlier prediction. The most startling
aristeía
belongs to Agamemnon, in his most warrior-like moment in the epic. Having donned his armor, he takes up his splendid shield with its ten circles of bronze, studded with pale tin and dark cobalt, in the middle of which is “the blank-eyed face of the Gorgon / with her stare of horror, and Fear was inscribed upon it, and Terror.”

The arming of Agamemnon, one of four elaborate arming scenes in the epic, is the prelude to what is one of the most unsavory series of slaughters in the war: “Agamemnon stabbed straight at his face as he came on in fury / with the sharp spear, nor did the helm's bronze-heavy edge hold it, / but the spearhead passed through this and the bone, and the inward / brain was all spattered forth”; “as a lion seizes the innocent young of the running / deer, and easily crunches and breaks them caught in the strong teeth / when he has invaded their lair, and rips out the soft heart from them, . . . so there was no one of the Trojans who could save these two / from death”; “Hippolochos sprang away, but Atreides killed him dismounted, / cutting away his arms with a sword-stroke, free of the shoulder, / and sent him spinning like a log down the battle.”

Briefly, the Trojans are routed and flee toward their city while Agamemnon “followed them always, screaming, / Atreus' son, his invincible hands spattered with bloody filth.” This is less a portrait, in the grand manner, of a warrior gripped by battle fury than of a man unhinged. At length, Agamemnon's bloody rant is ended by a wound to his arm, the effects of which are described in pointedly unheroic terms: pain breaks upon the son of Atreus, as when “the sharp sorrow of pain descends on a woman in labour, / the bitterness that the hard spirits of childbirth bring on.”

One by one, the Achaeans' best warriors limp off the field, and it is now the Trojan warriors who shine. The dramatic, thrilling climax of this long sequence is the triumphant arrival of the Trojans at the very gates of the Achaean camp. Beneath the high walls of the palisade that shelters the beached Achaean ships, Hektor, at the head of a pack of Trojans, heaves up a massive stone and hurls it at the gates. Groaning and splintering, the gates give way under the impact, and Hektor bursts in, “with dark face like sudden night,” shining “with the ghastly / glitter of bronze . . . ; and his eyes flashed fire.”

 

 

Zeus is not the only god watching this spectacle. From his own lookout on a forested summit on the island of Samothrace, Poseidon regards the plight of the Achaeans with pity. Poseidon—Zeus' younger brother, lord of the sea and shaker of the earth—is an implacable enemy of the Trojans, and along with the other immortals he bristles under his brother's injunction to keep out of the fray. But Samothrace is in sight of Mount Ida, where Zeus is ensconced, and from this convenient vantage Poseidon is able to see not only the whole of the Trojan plain but also the strategic moment when Zeus turns his attention elsewhere.

Seizing this moment in impulsive defiance, Poseidon descends the mountain in three long strides; the fourth brings him to his golden, glittering house in the depths of the sea, where he harnesses “his bronze-shod horses, / flying-footed, with long manes streaming of gold.” Driving these across the waves, “about him the sea beasts came up / from their deep places and played in his path, and acknowledged their master, / and the sea stood apart before him, rejoicing. The horses winged on / delicately, and the bronze axle beneath was not wetted.” Reaching the field of battle, Poseidon, in disguise, whirls through the demoralized Achaeans, inspiring them. The action of Book Thirteen is largely devoted to the brief respite the Achaeans win with Poseidon at their side.

Soaring above the many memorable images—of the god of the sea in all his sweeping, glittering, exuberant glory, of the Achaeans weeping with weariness, of the mutilated and the dying—is the single transfixing moment when Zeus looks away from the plain of Troy, and

Zeus is bored with events on the Trojan plain. His attention has drifted; there are other mortals to watch, the Mysians, for example, who, it seems, are also fighters, or the Hippomolgoi, nomadic Scythian “Mare milkers.”
²
His initial interest had been held by his vigilant concern that other gods stay out of the fray and that Hektor reach the ships; but with these events past, as he believes, his attention simply wanders.

As an epic, the
Iliad,
by definition, narrates “the deeds of heroic or legendary figures”—in other words, the actions and events of men, and the emotional weight of the poem is borne by its mortal heroes and its few, but potent, heroines. Yet there is no action in the
Iliad
that does not have divine prompting. The epic opens with the “plan of Zeus,” pitting Achilles against Agamemnon, and other divine initiatives follow quickly: the plague sent by Apollo, the delusive dream sent by Zeus to Agamemnon, and the crisis to which the Achaeans have now arrived, with Hektor and the Trojans at their gates, in accordance with Zeus' strategy to honor his pledge to Thetis. In this manner, it is possible to reduce the entire story of the
Iliad
to a series of divine actions.
³

The
Iliad,
moreover, is not only the definitive telling of the iconographic Trojan War but also the most important seminal religious text of ancient Greece. “Homer and Hesiod are the poets who composed theogonies,” wrote Herodotus in his
Histories,
in the mid-fifth century B.C., “and described the gods for the Greeks, giving them all their appropriate titles, offices, and powers.”
⁴
While Hesiod's
Theogony
—literally, “the generations of the gods”—is a poetic list of deities, including the many outlandish creatures from the murky age before the establishment of Zeus, Homer's pantheon comprised convincingly realized characters. Compelling enough to survive millennia of changing religious and artistic mores, the
Iliad
's portraits of the Olympian divinities drew from a variety of sources, in Greece and abroad, as well as Homer's genius for characterization. The names of Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Ares, and Dionysos appear in the Linear B tablets among a list of deities receiving offerings of honey, olive oil, perfume, gold vessels, wine, grains, animals, and human slaves: “to Zeus”; “to the Poseidon sanctuary”; “to the Zeus sanctuary”; “for Zeus, Hera, Drimios the son of Zeus . . .” This last, otherwise unknown son of Zeus is edited out by passing generations, along with the Great Mistress, the Divine Mother, and the cult to the Winds, all similarly lost. Nor is it known if the familiar names that do appear in the tablets correspond with the deities of Homer. The tablets refer to a “spreading of the bed” in a ceremony for Poseidon, for example, which seems to imply some kind of marriage, or fertility rite, difficult to correlate with the Poseidon who appears in epic as lord of the sea and earthquakes.
⁵

The
Iliad
's epithet for Zeus' wife and sister, Hera—
bo-ōpis,
literally “cow-eyed” or “ox-eyed,” sometimes translated less literally as “having large, dark, soft eyes”—may derive from an Indo-European tradition associating the Sky God with cows and bulls: in Greek mythology specifically, Zeus couples with various partners while either he or they are in bovine form.
⁶
The origins of Ares, god of war, are writ large in his name—
arē, áros
—“ruin,” “damage.”
⁷
Despite the centrality of war in both myth and history, shrines and cult centers to Ares were rare in Greece. “ ‘Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar' ” were Zeus' dark words to his son at the end of Book Five. “ ‘To me you are most hateful of all gods who hold Olympos.' ” Shunned in heaven as well as on earth, Ares is credited in the
Iliad
with not a single act of dignity; he is even disgraced by the goddess Athene in the physical contests in which, as the god of war, he ought to have been supreme.

The prototype of Athene may possibly lie in Mycenaean depictions of helmeted and shield-bearing goddesses, and warrior goddesses, such as Ishtar and Anat, are also found in the Near East.
⁸
Traditionally the pro tectress of favored heroes and especially cities, Athene is warlike, but rarely savage;
⁹
the goddess's vanquishing of Ares, in Book Five, is proof of her contempt toward this truly brutal bully. Athene is also the goddess of handiwork and craftsmanship, both male and female, and her patronage of domestic work such as weaving is further evidence of her essentially civilized sympathies; Athene is above all a friend to mankind. In the poetry of Hesiod, she is born full-grown from Zeus' own head, owl-eyed and wearing armor.
¹⁰
She is the closest to Zeus of all his many children, distinguished by her
mētis,
or “skill in counsel, . . . astuteness, shrewdness.” She is
glaukōpis,
“bright-eyed,” like the wise-seeming, all-discerning owl.
¹¹

Appropriately, the lineage of the Father of Gods and men is of all the gods the most secure: He is
Zeus pater
—Zeus the father—
Diespiter
in Indo-European, eventually becoming the Latin
Jupiter.
¹²
His name means “the Bright One” and has cognates in a variety of Indo-European languages with words for “day” and “sky”;
¹³
the God of the Bright Sky, he later appropriates the attributes of a storm god, analogous to the Hittite Weather God.
¹⁴
Echoes of his original nature reverberate throughout the
Iliad.
“ ‘Father of the shining bolt, dark-misted,' ” Athene addresses him. He sits on the loftiest summits, close to the sky; he is “Zeus who delights in the thunder” and “Zeus who gathers the clouds.” Such epithets and associations are very old; Zeus the cloud-gatherer may have inherited an Ugaritic epithet for Ba'al, the “cloud-gatherer or cloud-rider.”
¹⁵
God of the sky, he is the all-seeing god, privy to all activities of men below.

The individual deities in the
Iliad
are characterized not only by their unique attributes—power, wisdom, warfare—but also by their well-drawn personalities. Athene may “represent” wisdom, but there is nothing abstract about her compelling characterization. The contradictory range of attributes assigned to her—warfare and weaving—survive intact into later centuries because they work so well within the vivid personality created by Homer. Characterized in wholly human terms, the Olympians indulge in the pleasures, troubles, and pursuits of man. They can be wounded, scolded, punished, thwarted; they are loving, indulgent, petty, and jealous; they are just like man—except that the consequences of their actions are never terminal. They will survive their travails because unlike mortals they are one and all
athánatos kaì agērōs
—“deathless and unaging.”

The epic tradition anointed Olympos, a 9,570-foot-high peak of a remote Macedonian range, to be the gods' home. Here, above the world of men, they live lives of untroubled ease and luxury in their splendid houses crafted by Hephaistos. Yet, as the
Iliad
makes clear, notwithstanding the attractions of their abode above the clouds, the gods cannot tear themselves from the world of men. This is not only because mortals provide the savory burnt offerings and sacrifice they find so gratifying but because the lives and deeds of men are objects of endless fascination to them. The war at Troy provides the gods with excitement and stimulation. Seemingly, they cannot get their fill of watching it, arguing about it, and participating in it; the Trojan War is the best show playing.