The War That Killed Achilles (8 page)

When Agamemnon has finished his sacrifice and prayers to Zeus, Nestor reminds him of his duty, urging him to muster the Achaeans for battle. As the heralds are duly summoned and the men marshaled with their proclamations and cries, Athene, the warrior goddess, sweeps through the great throng, holding her aegis, “ageless, immortal,” and urges them on:

The same great host which, provoked by Agamemnon's trial, had risen as a man to flee to the ships intent on home is now intent on action. The change of heart was brought about in part by the rallying words of Odysseus and Nestor, but mostly by the sinister shadow of Athene's great aegis. Like the goddess herself, the aegis is invisible to the men, its terror-inducing powers being transmitted to them in some mystical way. In statues and painted art, the aegis is depicted as a short mantle of goat-skin (
aígeios
) worn over the shoulders or carried on the arm, its scalloped edges bordered with serpents. Elsewhere in the
Iliad,
it is described as “the betasselled, terrible / aegis, all about which Terror hangs like a garland, / and Hatred is there, and Battle Strength, and heart-freezing Onslaught / and thereon is set the head of the grim gigantic Gorgon, / a thing of fear and horror.” Associated with Zeus, his warrior daughter Athene, and Apollo, all of whom appear to have their own, an aegis is used to incite outright terror or, in Zeus' case, fearful storm clouds.
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This, then, is the object that ensures that battle for the Achaeans becomes “sweeter to them than to go back . . . to the beloved land of their fathers.” The descent of Athene to the field and the shadow of her terrifying aegis—like the rousing speeches of Nestor and Odysseus—are part of Zeus' plan to honor his vow to Thetis. The Achaean host must be reassembled and the men's spirits aroused for war so that they can die at the hands of their enemy and by their great losses bring Achilles honor.

With bronze armor seemingly ablaze, the tumultuous host marches in all their confident, shouting magnificence into Zeus' trap. The cascade of extraordinary similes drawn from the natural world, as often in the
Iliad,
is double-edged, underscoring both the sheer spectacle of a great army on the move and the inherent poignancy of its deadly march. Linguistic evidence shows that the
Iliad
's similes are generally “late,” meaning that they were introduced toward the end of the poetic tradition.
³
Often they undercut the very martial scenes they so vividly evoke with the sudden flare of a vision from the world of peace; here the apocalyptic image of blazing fire on the mountain heights swiftly gives way to that of a meadow full of migrating birds, a scene of teeming, clamorous life.

This second invocation, far more expansive than the invocation that announces the
Iliad
itself, intrudes abruptly into this majestic flow of images. Its purpose is to introduce a long list of 226 verses naming each of the twenty-nine contingents that make up the Achaean army. “The Catalogue of Ships,” as it is dubbed, has been variously interpreted as an authentic survival from the Mycenaean age to a pseudo document postdating Homer; several medieval manuscripts omit the list entirely or place it at epic's end, as a kind of appendix.
⁵

Of the 175 named places, a significant number can be identified with mostly late Mycenaean (circa 1250-1200 B.C.) sites, bolstering the claim that the Catalogue is a surviving relic from the Bronze Age.
⁶
On the other hand, late linguistic forms—the critical, much-repeated word for “ship” is a striking example
⁷
—along with certain geographical oddities, such as the omission of important Bronze Age place-names, also indicate that while the main contents of the Catalogue may possibly date to Mycenaean times, the list as a composition does not; this is not, in other words, an authentic muster roll lifted from the late Bronze Age.
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The Catalogue's strangely qualified prelude—“For you, who are goddesses, are there, and you know all things, / and we have heard only the rumour of it and know nothing”—may point to the fact that the origin of the list was unclear even to the epic poet.
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According to all surviving traditions about the Trojan War, the Achaean armada was first launched for Troy from Aulis, in Boiotia, which, significantly, is where the Catalogue begins its circuit. Its original
poetic
purpose, then, was surely to describe the mustering of forces for the Trojan campaign. Like many other favorite events of the Trojan War that fall outside the parameters of the
Iliad
's chosen time frame, the muster has been opportunistically relocated here, in different guise.
¹⁰

Tedious as it can be to modern audiences, the Catalogue with its grave roll call of long-deserted places was undoubtedly warmly received by audiences who knew these names from folk and family lore, an anticipated feature, perhaps, of performances relating the saga of bygone times—and one that a professional singer of tales would omit only at his peril.
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Striking, too, is the epic's apologetic disclaimer of not being able to cite the names of “the multitude,” or the troops—possibly a hint that this set piece received its final shape at a late stage, when the audience's sympathetic interest in a huge military venture extended beyond the top tier of kings to the common soldier.
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Relocated here, as a prelude to the
Iliad
's first specifically martial action, the Catalogue magnificently evokes the massed and varied army and the high cost in manpower of commitment to this cause:

One thousand one hundred and eighty-six ships, under the guidance of forty-four named leaders, are cited. With the average complement of a ship estimated at fifty, the Achaean force was at a minimum approximately sixty thousand men strong. Together with a more abbreviated list of Trojan allies, emphasizing the many languages spoken among them, the Catalogue conjures the epic nature of this almighty war; all the gods in heaven will be involved, and many, many nations of men. This, the
Iliad
asserts, was not some backwater campaign between undistinguished peoples; this was the war of wars.

The list of horses that the invocation seems to promise concludes abruptly, begging the question whether there was at one time a Catalogue of Horses; traditional songs in praise of domestic animals are attested in other cultures.
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As it is, the brief citation of the two perfectly matched mares is followed awkwardly by the notice that “among the men far the best was Telamonian Aias / while Achilles stayed angry,” which in turn leads by association to the observation that Achilles' own horses are now as unoccupied as he is: “standing each beside his chariot, / champed their clover and the parsley that grows in wet places, / resting, while the chariots of their lords stood covered / in the shelters”; it is a pleasant image. One ancient commentator notes that this marshland parsley (
sélinon
) differs from parsley that grows in rocks, an insight into how zealously Homer's works have been scoured and fathomed since ancient times.
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Curtailed and clumsily placed as the “list” of horses is, it and its aftermath draw attention away from the ships that have been so thoroughly cataloged, back down to the plain of the “horse taming” (
hippódamos
) Trojans, where so much of the
Iliad
's action will take place.

The Trojan plain and its surroundings are a landscape that commentators, past and present, agree that the poets of the epic tradition, if not Homer himself, knew at first hand. Writing in the early first century B.C., Strabo declared Homer to be “the first geographer” based upon his descriptions of the Troad, which Strabo himself had traveled (erratically; he was led by a local authority to misplace the actual site of Troy).
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“As much as Lesbos . . . out to sea holds within its bounds / and Phrygia inland, and the boundless Hellespont” is the characterization Achilles gives of the territory of the Trojans. Possibly “the boundless Hellespont” referred not only to what is in fact the narrow modern Dardanelle Straits but to the entire surrounding sea—off Thrace to the north, off the Trojan plain to the south.
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As the Hellespont, or Dardanelles, accounts for the northwest border, Mount Ida inland anchors the Troad's southeast corner. These and other landmarks, such as the hulking outlines of the islands of Tenedos and Lesbos and, on a very good day, Samothrace in the blue distance, are all as the
Iliad
describes. Below and around the actual city of Troy extends the level floodplain of the Skamandros and the Simoeis rivers, edged with rushes. While the
Iliad
's grasp of the geography of Greece is hazy, notwithstanding the confident Catalogue of Ships, in both grand overview and telling detail, its acquaintance with “Troy land,” and the northern Troad in particular, is secure.

So as to hasten the reengagement of the armies, Iris, the messenger of the gods, is sent from Olympos “with the dark message from Zeus of the aegis” to the Trojans. She finds them in assembly “gathered together in one place, the elders and the young men” in the city, and in the likeness of one of the many sons of Troy's King Priam she announces that the Achaeans are on the march and urges the Trojan hero Hektor to rouse his company:

And so we meet the enemy. Surging onto the plain, the Trojans and their many foreign allies are mustered not far from the city, by “the Hill of the Thicket.”
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“ ‘Hektor, on you beyond all I urge this, to do as I tell you' ”: the words of Zeus' messenger serve as the best possible introduction to the Trojan hero who will be Achilles' greatest antagonist.
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His name is Greek, at least as old as the Linear B tablets, where it appears as
e-ko-to,
derived from
échein
—“to hold,” “to hold together,” “to hold back,” “to hold ground.”
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While it is his brother, Paris, who is responsible for causing the war, and his father, Priam, who rules the Trojans, it is on Hektor that the burden of the war falls most squarely—“on you beyond all,” as Iris salutes him.

Hektor's Greek name and the fact that he features in no stories except the
Iliad
have led to the speculation that his character was Homer's own brilliant invention. But the role of the heroic defender is a traditional one and wholly necessary to a story of a besieged city. Moreover, in keeping with his status as an Asiatic king, Priam has, by many concubines, many sons: “ ‘Fifty were my sons, when the sons of the Achaeans came here,' ” Priam says later in the epic. “ ‘Nineteen were born to me from the womb of a single mother, / and other women bore the rest in my palace.' ” The establishment of so many warrior princes opens dramatic possibilities, as there is now scope, if not necessity, for them to play opposing roles. “ ‘I have had the noblest / of sons in Troy,' ” Priam declares, but also “ ‘the disgraces, / the liars and the dancers, champions of the chorus, the plunderers / of their own people in their land of lambs and kids.' ” The motif of paired brothers, one shining and one dark (like Abel and Cain), is also a common one in folklore and mythology.
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It is possible that Priam's traditionally established, sprawling household provided both the inspiration and the latitude to expand the roles of different ones of his many sons. “ ‘You said once / that without companions and without people you could hold this city / alone, with only your brothers and the lords of your sisters,' ” a Trojan ally reminds Hektor, and the exchange suggests that there may have been an older tradition in which the sons of Priam formed a fighting band of brothers. Hektor is probably not a Homeric invention, then, but a brilliant Homeric development.
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