The War That Killed Achilles (41 page)

19
“To Demeter,” in West,
Homeric Hymns,
vv. 302ff., 57ff. For an examination of this pattern, see Mary Louise Lord, “Withdrawal and Return: An Epic Story Pattern in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and in the Homeric Poems,”
Classical Journal
62 (1967), 241-48. Hittite texts preserve mythic stories of a “vanishing deity” that tell of the departure of a god—often on account of anger—and the disastrous consequences to mankind of his absence; Harry A. Hoffner Jr. and Gary M. Beckman, eds.,
Hittite Myths,
2nd ed. (Atlanta, 1998), 14ff.

20
P. Chantraine,
Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque,
vol. 3 (Paris, 1974), 696f.

21
P. Considine, “Some Homeric Terms for Anger,”
Acta Classica
9 (1966), 15-25, argues that
mēnis “
is a solemn
epic
term for any wrath, divine or human,” 21, a weaker reading than Watkins, below.

22
Calvert Watkins, “On
μηνις,
”
Indo-European Studies
3 (1977), 686-722; the quote is from 694f.

23
This digressive story tells how Hera tricked Zeus into swearing that a son “‘born of the blood of your generation'” that day would be “‘lord over all those dwelling about him'” (19.105ff). Hera then induced premature labor in one woman and stayed the birth of Herakles; thus the tyrannical and unworthy Eurystheus came to be lord over the hero Herakles. This digressive story enforces “the theme of a superior hero in the service of an inferior king,” so central to the
Iliad.
See Olga Merck Davidson, “Indo-European Dimensions of Herakles in
Iliad
19.95-133,”
Arethusa
13 (1980), 197-202, especially 200.

24
Denys Page rightly sees that “the parable of Meleager loses all its colour and significance if it is addressed
to a man to whom it does not apply
—a man who is going to get the full compensation after all.” Denys L. Page,
History and the Homeric “Iliad”
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959), 312f.; to Page, the disjunction between Phoinix's paradigm and Achilles' actual circumstances is, bizarrely, evidence of multiple authors at work in the
Iliad,
rather than an ironic highlighting of how little stories of men of old apply to godlike Achilles—and to his revelation at the time of the Embassy that life is more precious than all prizes.

25
Ibid., 314.

26
James I. Armstrong, “The Arming Motif in the
Iliad,
”
American Journal of Philology
79, no. 4 (1958), 337-54; the quote appears on p. 350.

27
Xanthos' voice is stopped by the Erinyes, “the Furies,” and this otherwise obscure detail suggests the conflation of different traditions pertaining to Hera and horses, and a prophetic son of Erinys; see Sarah Iles Johnston, “Xanthus, Hera and the Erinyes (
Iliad
19.400-418),”
Transactions of the American Philological Association
122 (1992), 85-98.

28
Flyting or “fliting,” according to the
Oxford English Dictionary,
is “poetical invective; originally a kind of contest practiced by the Scottish poets of the 16th c., in which two persons assailed each other alternately with tirades of abusive verse”; a good epic example is found in
Beowulf
(499-606).

29
On the meeting of the two traditions, see Gregory Nagy,
The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry
(Baltimore, 1979), 265ff.

30
A popular theory holds that the prominence given to Aineias at this key moment in the epic (as also in the “Hymn to Aphrodite”) is evidence that Book Twenty and the “Hymn” “were composed for a court of barbarian princes in the Troad who believed themselves descended from Aineias”; Peter M. Smith, “Aineiadai as Patrons of
Iliad
XX and the Homeric ‘Hymn to Aphrodite,'”
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
85 (1981), 17-58. Smith counters this theory with a close review of the ancient sources relating the story of Aineias after the fall of Troy. This review, however, does not explain Poseidon's statement in the
Iliad
that “ ‘it is destined that he [Aineias] shall be the survivor'” (
Iliad
20.302).

31
Jonathan Shay,
Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character
(New York, 1995), 78f. In more recent conflicts, the rampage by U.S. Marines in the town of Haditha, on the Euphrates River, in which twenty-four Iraqi civilians were killed, was triggered by the death of a lance corporal in the unit; see, for example, Ellen Knickmeyer, “In Haditha, Memories of a Massacre,”
Washington Post,
May 27, 2006.

32
That everything, including Achilles, has changed since Patroklos' death is underscored by a simple refrain that runs through Achilles' speeches from the time of his knowledge of Patroklos' death until the funeral:
nún dé
—“but now”—i.e., in contrast to all previous time; Samuel Eliot Basset, “Achilles' Treatment of Hektor's Body,”
Transactions of the American Philological Association
64 (1933), 41-65, especially 58f.

33
“When human foes are lacking, heroic man fights against powers of nature or monsters”; C. M. Bowra,
Heroic Poetry
(London, 1961), 49, cites examples of such battles, from Gilgamesh to Beowulf. For Near Eastern archetypes, see Trevor Bryce,
Life and Society in the Hittite World
(Oxford, 2004), 216f.

34
All evidence indicates that Apollo's origins lie in the Near East and that he was a late arrival among the Greek Olympians; his name (like Aphrodite's) does not appear in the Linear B tablets. The suggestive name -
appaliuna
(the text is broken), which some scholars read as a reference to Apollo, appears at the end of a long list of divine witnesses invoked to solemnize a late-fourteenth-century-B.C. treaty between the Hittite king and Alaksandu of Wilusa; see “Treaty 13, Between Muwattalli II of Hatti and Alaksandu of Wilusa,” in Gary Beckman,
Hittite Diplomatic Texts,
2nd ed. (Atlanta, 1999), 92. The treaty's possible reference to “Apollo” is discussed in Trevor Bryce,
The Trojans and Their Neighbours
(Abingdon, Oxon, 2006), 119. Manfred Hutter, “Aspects of Luwian Religion,” in H. Craig Melchert, ed.,
The Luwians
(Leiden, 2003), 267, is more cautious: “Whether the fragmentary name of the god ]appaliunas is identical with Apollo known from Greek sources remains to be seen. It is possible, but there is presently neither a real argument to prove this point nor to make this god a Luwian one.” If the association between the names is sound, however, it would be evidence that an Anatolian Apollo was among the guardians of historical Troy, and could account in some part for his malice toward Achilles in the
Iliad.

35
General discussions of Apollo's origins and character are found in Burkert,
Greek Religion,
51f. and 143ff.

36
The earliest reference to the Hyperboreans is in a prose outline of a lost poem by Alcaeus (c. 600) by the fourth-century-A.D. rhetorician Himerius, which describes Apollo's journey to the north in a chariot pulled by swans; Himerius,
Orations
48.10-11, in David A. Campbell,
Greek Lyric I: Sappho. Alcaeus
(Cambridge, MA, 1982), Alcaeus 307(c), 355. For Apollo's withdrawn nature, see Walter F. Otto,
The Homeric Gods,
Moses Hadas, trans. (Boston, 1954), 62ff.

37
Apollo's association with the lyre is given poetic explanation in the Homeric Hymn “To (Delian) Apollo,” vv. 130ff., and “Hymn to Hermes,” vv. 499ff. Hera's words, however, appear to refer to a tradition touched upon in a surviving fragment of a lost tragedy by Aeschylus, in which a heartbroken Thetis recalls how Apollo knew of Achilles' tragically destined short life but, dissembling at her wedding, “sang that I would be blest with a son / who would live a long life, unacquainted with suffering,” as Thetis cries out, in this fragment:

38
Both also share a shadowy and mostly unexamined relationship with wolves. For Apollo's numerous associations with wolves, see Daniel E. Gershenson,
Apollo the Wolf-god
(McLean, VA, 1991). Achilles' association comes through his grandfather Aiakos; for the sources to this obscure tradition, see Gantz, vol. 1, 227.

39
Robert J. Rabel, “Apollo as a Model for Achilles in the
Iliad,
”
American Journal of Philology
111, no. 4, 429-40. The use of the same diction to describe the ability of Apollo and Achilles (and Zeus and Thetis) to dispatch or ward off destruction is examined by Laura M. Slatkin, “The Wrath of Thetis,”
Transactions of the American Philological Association
116 (1986), 1-24, especially 15f.

40
The proem is discussed in G. S. Kirk,
The “Iliad”: A Commentary, Volume I: Books 1-4
(Cambridge, 1985), 52f.

41
Burkert,
Greek Religion,
202. A number of explanations for the hostility between the two have been offered; the ritual antagonism is examined by Nagy,
The Best of the Achaeans,
61ff. and 289ff. The possibility of Achilles' anger having been caused by his murder of Trojan Troilos in a sanctuary of Apollo is raised by Malcolm Davies, “The Judgement of Paris and
Iliad
Book XXIV,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
101 (1981), 56-62, especially 60.

42
Other predictions of his death specifically at the hands of Apollo are given at 19.416f. by Xanthos (who refers to the agents as “ ‘a god and a mortal' ”), and at 22.359f. by Hektor. In one tradition, Apollo is also the slayer of Meleager, hero of Phoinix's endlessly tactless paradigm; see Hesiod,
Catalogue of Women or EHOIAI,
in Most, fragment 22.10ff., 75.

43
Achilles' chase under the walls of Troy closely parallels the circumstances of his own death: “Achilles puts the Trojans to flight and chases them into the city, but is killed by Paris and Apollo,” records the blunt summary of the lost
Aethiopis;
West,
Greek Epic Fragments,
argument 3, 113.

44
Lord Moran,
The Anatomy of Courage
(London, 2007), 67.

1
Walter Burkert,
Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical,
John Raffan, trans. (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 60.

2
Indirectly, it has been evoked in the pathetically beautiful words that describe the moment death descends upon both Patroklos and Hektor, when the “soul flew from his limbs and started for Hades, / lamenting her fate, abandoning manhood and all its young vigor” (16.855ff. and 22.362). These verses are also noteworthy for containing a notable archaism: the phrase
lipous' androtēta kaì hēbēn
—“leaving manhood and its young vigor”—does not scan, or fit the hexameter meter, as it stands but was shaped for the Mycenaean or possibly even earlier form
*an.rtāta,
suggesting that poets were singing of dying warriors from very ancient times. See Richard Janko,
The “Iliad”: A Commentary, Volume IV: Books 13-16
(Cambridge, 1992), sub. vv. 855-58, 420f.

3
Archaeology shows that at the end of the Dark Ages, hero-cult worship spread throughout Greece, into the emerging city-states. The many later descriptions given in surviving literature show that worship at these hero cults was essentially chthonic, or relating to the Underworld—rites that involved the sacrifice of black animals and libations of blood, enacted at dusk around a low hearth. Sometimes the heroes worshipped by the cults were the inventions of a later age, pragmatically calculated to suit a particular location or need, or revered historical personages awarded this ultimate honor; but the most common cults were those for heroes named in epic. For the appearance of hero cult at the end of the Iron Age, see Peter G. Calligas, “Hero-cult in Early Iron Age Greece,” in Robin Hägg, Nanno Marinatos, and Gullög C. Nordquist, eds.,
Early Greek Cult Practice
(Stockholm, 1988), 229-34; Calligas believes that the contemporary emergence of both hero cult and epic may represent parallel developments rather than be causal. The complexities of different types of cults are reviewed through the archaeological record by A. Mazarakis Ainian, “Reflections on Hero Cults in Early Iron Age Greece,” in Robin Hägg, ed.,
Ancient Greek Hero Cult
(Stockholm, 1999), 9-36, who argues for epic as the shaping force. For the argument that hero cults arose under the influence of epic but were also related to local burial practices, see J. N. Coldstream, “Hero-Cults in the Age of Homer,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
96 (1976), 8-17. For discussion of different types of such cults, see Lewis Richard Farnell,
Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality
(Oxford, 1921); a list of cults named in ancient sources is at 403ff. An examination of the evidence for blood offerings at hero cults suggests that the offering was made as an extension and modification of the common
thysia,
or sacrifice of a burnt offering; “In those cases, the blood may have functioned as a reference both to the battlefield
sphagia
[sacrificial slaughter] and to the fact that the hero had died, and thus acquired his heroic status, as a consequence of war”; G. Ekroth, “Offerings of Blood in Greek Hero-cults,” in V. Pirenne-Delforge and E. Suárez de la Torre, eds.,
Héros et héroïnes dans les myths et les cultes grecs: actes du Colloque organisé à l'Université de Valladolid du 26 au 29 mai 1999
(Liège, 2000), (
Kernos;
supplement 10), 263-80; quoted passage is on p. 279. As discussed, some scholars have seen evidence of cult ritual in the description of the death of Sarpedon and the transference of his body to his homeland (16.456f.); see chapter “Man Down,” note 22.