The War That Killed Achilles (38 page)

17
Gantz, vol. 1, 229f., for both literary and artistic attestations.

18
Cypria,
respectively, fragment 4, 85; and argument 1, 69, in West,
Greek Epic Fragments
. Hera's words appear at
Iliad
24.61-62.

19
Most,
Hesiod: The Shield,
fragment 237, 309. The burning by fire is described, obscurely, in Lykophron,
Alexandra,
177-79.

20
The tradition of Achilles' being dipped into the Styx by his heel is directly attested only in the works of the first-century-A.D. Roman writer Statius; Statius,
Achilleid
1.133-34, 1.268-70, and 1.480-81, but see chapter “Everlasting Glory,” note 41.

21
For the story of Demeter, see “Hymn to Demeter,” vv. 231ff., in West,
Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives of Homer,
51f. For the story of Meleager, see Bacchylides 5.136ff., in David A. Campbell,
Greek Lyric IV: Bacchylides, Corinna, and Others
(Cambridge, MA, 2006), 149. In an examination of Hittite rites of divine appeasement, Calvin Watkins demonstrates that fire and firebrands are associated with divine anger and that these ritual elements can be discerned behind the story of Meleager. If this is true, it also has bearing on the attempts to appease the anger of Achilles: Calvin Watkins, “L'Anatolie et la Grèce: Résonances culturelles, linguistiques et poé tiques,” Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres,
Comptes rendus des séances
3 (2000), 1143-58; see especially 1146ff.

22
Of Peleus per se, the
Iliad
knows of two offspring: his son, Achilles, and a daughter, Polydore: “One battalion was led by Menesthios of the shining / corselet, son of Spercheios, the river swelled from the bright sky, / born of the daughter of Peleus, Polydore the lovely, / to unremitting Spercheios, when a woman lay with an immortal; / but born in name to Perieres' son, Boros, who married / Polydore formally (16.173-78). The elaborate explanation of the family circumstances—i.e., divine union and human marriage for the sake of appearances—also suggests other now lost traditions about her. One ancient commentator identifies Polydore as the daughter of another Peleus, not the son of Aiakos, although the reference to Spercheios, the landmark river of Peleus' kingdom, belies this. Later writers held her to be the daughter of Peleus' union not with Thetis but with an earlier wife: Polydore “is surely a child of Peleus' first marriage, which Homer suppresses in favor of his union with Thetis; [Achilles] must remain, for him, an isolated figure.” Richard Janko,
The “Iliad”: A Commentary, Volume IV: Books 13-16
(Cambridge, 1992), sub. vv. 173-78, 341.

23
M. Ventris and J. Chadwick,
Documents in Mycenaean Greek,
2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1973), 101 and 103f.

24
Both interpretations are advanced in, respectively, L. R. Palmer,
The Interpretation of Mycenaean Texts
(Oxford, 1963), 79; and expanded by Gregory Nagy, “The Name of Achilles: Etymology and Epic,” in
Studies in Greek, Italic, and Indo-European Linguistics,
Anna Morpurgo Davies and Wolfgang Meid, eds. (Innsbruck, 1976), 209-37; and Gary B. Holland, “The Name of Achilles: A Revised Etymology,”
Glotta
71 (1993), 17-27.

25
Richard John Cunliffe,
A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect
(Norman, OK, 1963), 271.

26
Others have regarded Peleus' shadowy presence, evoked only as a reminder of the day Achaeans mustered for the war, as evidence that “Peleus emerges as a kind of communal conscience, who spurs the Achaeans to live up to their warrior ideals”: Kevin Crotty,
The Poetics of Supplication: Homer's “Iliad” and “Odyssey”
(Ithaca, NY, 1994), 28.

27
Later in the
Iliad,
an extended description is given of Achilles' great spear hewn from an ash tree grown on the Pelion Mountains, “the Pelian ash spear which Cheiron had brought to his father / from high on Pelion to be death for fighters” (16.143-44). According to the
Cypria,
Cheiron gave this spear to Peleus as a wedding gift:
Cypria,
fragment 4, in West,
Greek Epic Fragments,
85.

28
“The Precepts of Chiron,” fragment 218, Glenn W. Most, ed. and trans.,
Hesiod: The Shield. Catalogue of Women. Other Fragments
(Cambridge, MA, 2007), 297.

29
Comparisons have long been drawn between the approximately 1700 B.C. Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh and the
Iliad,
which share certain broad themes, a pair of heroic friends, and an evocation of the hero's tragic and futile strategies to thwart mortality. In such comparisons, it is usually supposed that Achilles, the hero of the
Iliad,
is the counterpart of Gilgamesh, the hero of the Akkadian epic. In fact, Achilles' wild and strangely innocent upbringing in the mountains is more suggestive of Enkidu, Gilgamesh's comrade.

30
For the suitors' wooing of Helen and oath to her father, see Hesiod,
Catalogue of Women or EHOIAI,
in Most, fragment 155 (continued), 231ff.; and Stesichorus, fragment 190, in David A. Campbell,
Greek Lyric III: Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides, and Others
(Cambridge, MA, 2001), fragment 190, 91. The
Cypria
relates how Thetis arranged a rendezvous between Achilles and Helen at an early stage of the war;
Cypria,
argument 11, in West,
Greek Epic Fragments,
79.

31
Emily Vermeule,
Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry
(Berkeley, 1979), 190f. Thetis' father, Nereus, is famously prophetic.

32
Reference is made to Achilles' son at
Iliad
19.326-27.

33
Cypria,
fragment 19, in West,
Greek Epic Fragments,
97ff.

34
Achilles “vixdum exuta pueritia”—“pueritia,” or “boyhood,” usually ending at age seventeen. J. van Leeuwen,
Commentationes Homericae
(Leiden, 1911), 112.

35
Rhys Carpenter,
Folk Tale, Fiction, Saga in the Homeric Epics
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1958), 72 and, for Peleus in general, 71ff.

36
Interestingly, in the
Aethiopis,
Achilles is absent from the war not on account of a quarrel with Agamemnon but because he killed Thersites in anger and had to leave Troy to be purified in Lesbos;
Aethiopis,
fragment 1, in West,
Greek Epic Fragments,
111. For one reason or another, Achilles in epic, then, is characteristically absent. The story with Thersites also recalls Peleus' striking association with murder and purification.

37
For a summation of distinctive late features in Achilles' characterization, see also M. L. West, “Greek Poetry 2000-700 B.C.,”
Classical Quarterly,
n.s. 23 (1973), no. 2, 179-92.

38
M. L. West,
Indo-European Poetry and Myth
(Oxford, 2007), 402ff.

39
Homer “confronted traditional epic with his own new work—the realization of a fundamentally and completely different conception of epic poetry”: Alfred Heubeck, “Homeric Studies Today,” in Bernard C. Fenik, ed.,
Homer: Tradition and Invention
(Leiden, 1978), 13.

40
Paraphrased from Dale S. Sinos,
Achilles, Patroklos and the Meaning of
“Philos” (Innsbruck, 1980), 19f.

41
For the childhood deeds of Herakles, see, for example, Pindar,
Nemean
1.35f.; and Gantz, vol. 1, 377ff. The deeds of young Achilles are described by Pindar,
Nemean
3.45ff.

42
For the widely held view that Phoinix was a Homeric invention, see, for example, Frederick E. Brenk, S.J., “Dear Child: The Speech of Phoinix and the Tragedy of Achilleus in the Ninth Book of the
Iliad,
”
Eranos
84 (1986), 77-86, and especially 82; Bruce Karl Braswell, “Mythological Innovation in the
Iliad,
”
Classical Quarterly,
n.s., 21, no. 1 (1971), 16-26, especially 22f. On Phoinix's reshaping of the Meleager story, see Lowell Edmunds, “Myth in Homer,” in Ian Morris and Barry Powell, eds.,
A New Companion to Homer
(Leiden, 1997), 425ff.

43
Phoinix's parable is also wildly tactless. We have met Meleager in passing once before; he is the hero of legend who, as Homer's audience would undoubtedly have known, shared certain fateful circumstances with Achilles. In the well-known story Phoinix does not tell, Meleager's mother had custody of a firebrand, or log, to which her son's life was magically attached; angered with her son, the mother threw the brand on the fire, and Meleager died (see note 21 of this chapter). Meleager's story is a variation on the same theme that has Achilles' mother attempting to render the children of Peleus immortal by laying them in the fire—a deed that in fact killed them. In short, Phoinix's story serves to underscore the thought now uppermost in Achilles' mind—his mortality. The parallels between the story of Achilles' anger and the earlier story of the anger of Meleager are explored in a classic work by Johannes Th. Kakridis,
Homeric Researches
(Lund, 1949), 18ff.

44
See Jasper Griffin, “Homeric Words and Speakers,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
106 (1986), 36-57; the quote appears on p. 53.

45
On
phthíō,
see Gregory Nagy,
The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry
(Baltimore, 1979), 185ff.

46
For the geographical kingdom of Peleus and Achilles, see R. Hope Simpson and J. F. Lazenby, “The Kingdom of Peleus and Achilles,”
Antiquity
33 (1959), 102-5.

1
Following the Embassy of Book Nine is Book Ten, by convention called “the Doloneia,” which was widely held even in antiquity to represent a very skillful non-Iliadic (but possibly Homeric) addition to the
Iliad.
Its subject is a nocturnal, covert mission by Odysseus and Diomedes to the Trojan camp to gain information on the disposition of the enemy, who intercept a Trojan spy, Dolon, on his way to spy out the Greek camp. The night ambush; the “weapons of fear” carried by the two Greeks; the cold-blooded murder of Dolon, whom they had tricked into believing he could save his life by cooperating with them; and the subsequent slaughter of newly arrived Trojan allies under King Rhesos, whose fabulous horses Diomedes drives back to the Achaean camp, conjure a decidedly nonheroic sequence of events, more characteristic of the
Odyssey
than the
Iliad.
Much has been written about this episode; see, for example, Georg Danek,
Studien zur Dolonie
(Vienna, 1988); and Bernard Fenik,
“Iliad X” and the “Rhesus”: The Myth
(Brussels, 1964). For the escapade's resemblance to certain warrior and initiation rites, see Olga Merck Davidson, “Dolon and Rhesus in the
Iliad,
”
Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica
30 (1979), 61-66; and for the episode as an echo of Odysseus' role in the sack of Troy, see Adele J. Haft, “ ‘The City-Sacker Odysseus' in
Iliad
2 and 10,”
Transactions of the American Philological Association
120 (1990), 37-56.

2
For the identification of the tribes, see Richard Janko,
The “Iliad”: A Commentary, Volume IV: Books 13-16
(Cambridge, 1992), sub. vv. 4-7, 42f.

3
As was done by Mary Lefkowitz,
Greek Gods, Human Lives
(New Haven, CT, 2003), 53ff.

4
Histories,
2. 53, Aubrey de Sélincourt, trans.,
Herodotus: The Histories
(London, 2003), 117.

5
For the evidence of the Linear B tablets, see Walter Burkert,
Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical,
John Raffan, trans. (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 43ff. On the offerings to Poseidon, see John Chadwick,
The Mycenaean World
(Cambridge, 1976), 96ff.

6
On Hera and her association with cows, by way of Zeus, see M. L. West,
Indo-European Poetry and Myth
(Oxford, 2007), 184f.; also Simon Pulleyn,
Homer: “Iliad” I
(Oxford, 2000), sub. v. 551, 260.

7
West,
Indo-European Poetry and Myth,
136.

8
Burkert, 140; for parallels with the Ugaritic/West Semitic war goddess Anat, see Bruce Louden,
The “Iliad”: Structure, Myth, and Meaning
(Baltimore, 2006), 245-85.

9
Athene's skinning of a man named Pallas, in some traditions her father, and wearing of his skin is rare evidence of her darker nature: Burkert, 140, and note 21 on p. 404, for citation of (obscure) sources.

10
For the birth of Athene, see Hesiod,
Theogony,
886ff., in Glenn W. Most, ed. and trans.,
Hesiod: Theogony. Works and Days. Testimonia
(Cambridge, MA, 2006), 75ff.; “Homeric Hymn to Athena” (28 in West), 4f.; and Pindar,
Olympian
7.35ff., in C. M. Bowra, trans.,
The Odes of Pindar
(London, 1969), 165.

11
Athene's other common epithet,
Tritogéneia,
remains obscure. See G. S. Kirk,
The “Iliad”: A Commentary, Volume I: Books 1-4
(Cambridge, 1985), sub. vv. 513-16, 394, for a review of attempted explanations.

12
Burkert,
Greek Religion,
17.

13
West,
Indo-European Poetry and Myth,
166ff.

14
For the tension between Zeus' original character and the assumed functions of a storm god, see M. L. West,
The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth
(Oxford, 1997), 114ff.

15
For Ugaritic origin, see Janko, sub. vv. 292-93, 198; and M. L. West, “The Rise of the Greek Epic,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
108 (1988), 170.