Literary Latitude

Homer’s Iliad (composed in oral tradition around the eighth century BCE) is one of the two great epic poems of ancient Greece, the other being the Odyssey. The poem is written in dactylic hexameter (a poetic metre of six feet per line) and is divided into twenty four books. Although the Iliad is set during the tenth and final year of the Trojan War, it does not narrate the whole war. It does not describe the judgement of Paris, the abduction of Helen, the gathering of the Greek fleet, the wooden horse, or the fall of Troy. Instead, the poem concentrates on a period of about fifty days near the end of the war, and its true subject, announced in the very first line, is the anger of Achilles. In the old public domain translation of Samuel Butler (1898), the opening runs, “Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus”, and everything that happens in the poem flows from this anger, its causes, its terrible consequences, and its final softening into pity. Scholars such as Jasper Griffin, in Homer on Life and Death (1980), and Seth Schein, in The Mortal Hero (1984), have stressed that the Iliad is less a war chronicle than a meditation on mortality, honour, and human suffering. 

Before the story begins, a little background is necessary, because Homer assumes that his audience already knows it. Paris, a prince of Troy and son of King Priam, visited Sparta and took away Helen, the wife of the Spartan king Menelaus. Helen was famed as the most beautiful woman in the world. To recover her, Menelaus and his elder brother Agamemnon, the powerful king of Mycenae, gathered a vast army drawn from all the Greek kingdoms. Homer calls the Greeks by the names “Achaeans”, “Argives”, and “Danaans”. The Greek host sailed across the Aegean Sea and laid siege to Troy, a wealthy walled city in Asia Minor ruled by the aged Priam. The siege lasted nine long years without a decision. Among the Greek fighters the greatest was Achilles, son of the mortal king Peleus and the sea goddess Thetis. Among the Trojans the greatest was Hector, the eldest son of Priam and the chief defender of the city. The gods of Olympus watch the war closely and take sides. Hera, Athena, and Poseidon support the Greeks; Apollo, Aphrodite, and Ares support the Trojans; Zeus, the king of the gods, tries to hold the balance, though he too is drawn into the struggle. With this background in mind, the poem opens in the Greek camp on the shore near Troy.

Book One begins with a plague and a quarrel. Chryses, an old priest of the god Apollo, comes to the Greek camp carrying rich ransom and begs Agamemnon to release his daughter Chryseis, who has been taken as a war prize. Agamemnon rudely refuses and threatens the old man. Chryses prays to Apollo, and the god, angered at the insult to his priest, shoots arrows of plague into the Greek camp for nine days, killing animals and men. On the tenth day Achilles calls an assembly and asks the prophet Calchas to explain the god’s anger. Calchas, after being promised protection by Achilles, declares that Agamemnon must return Chryseis without ransom. Agamemnon is furious. He agrees to give the girl back for the good of the army, but he insists on taking a replacement prize, and in a burst of wounded pride he announces that he will take Briseis, the captive woman who is Achilles’ own prize of honour. For Achilles this is an unbearable public insult, because in the heroic world a warrior’s prize (called “geras” in Greek, meaning a gift of honour) is the visible sign of his worth. Achilles nearly draws his sword to kill Agamemnon on the spot, but the goddess Athena, sent by Hera, appears to him alone and checks his hand, promising that he will one day receive threefold gifts for this outrage. Achilles then swears a great oath: he will withdraw from the fighting, and the Greeks will miss him bitterly when they fall in heaps before Hector. The old counsellor Nestor tries to make peace between the two men, but fails. Agamemnon’s heralds take Briseis away from Achilles’ tent. Achilles, weeping, goes to the seashore and calls on his divine mother Thetis. He asks her to go to Zeus and beg him to help the Trojans, so that the Greeks will suffer and Agamemnon will learn how much he needs Achilles. Thetis rises from the sea, comforts her son, and later ascends to Olympus, where she clasps the knees of Zeus in supplication. Zeus, though worried about the anger of his wife Hera, who hates Troy, bows his head in consent, and his nod shakes great Olympus. The book ends with a quarrel among the gods that is smoothed over by the lame craftsman god Hephaestus, and the gods feast while Zeus ponders how to honour Achilles by bringing ruin on the Greeks.

Book Two shows Zeus setting his plan in motion. He sends a deceitful Dream to Agamemnon, telling him that if he attacks now he will capture Troy. Agamemnon wakes full of false hope, but instead of ordering an immediate assault he first decides, strangely, to test the spirit of his army. He tells the assembled soldiers that the war is hopeless and that they should sail home. The test backfires badly. The war weary men rush joyfully to the ships, and the whole expedition nearly collapses. Hera and Athena intervene, and Athena prompts the clever Odysseus to stop the flight. Odysseus takes Agamemnon’s sceptre and moves through the army, persuading the chiefs with gentle words and beating the common soldiers back into the assembly. One common soldier, the ugly and sharp tongued Thersites, stands up and abuses Agamemnon, repeating, in a coarser form, many of the complaints that Achilles had made. Odysseus silences Thersites by striking him with the sceptre, and the army laughs. Odysseus and Nestor then restore the men’s fighting spirit by reminding them of the prophecy of Calchas, who years before interpreted an omen of a serpent devouring nine sparrows as a sign that Troy would fall in the tenth year. The army arms for battle. At this point Homer inserts the famous “Catalogue of Ships”, a long formal list of the Greek contingents, their leaders, their home regions, and the numbers of their ships, followed by a shorter catalogue of the Trojan forces and their allies. Geoffrey Kirk, in the first volume of The Iliad: A Commentary (1985), notes that this catalogue preserves very old traditional material about the geography of Greece. The book closes with the Trojans, warned by the messenger goddess Iris, marching out of the city under Hector’s command to meet the Greek advance.

Book Three brings the two armies face to face, and the war narrows, for a moment, to the two men whose quarrel caused it. As the armies approach each other, Paris (also called Alexandros) struts out in front of the Trojan lines, but when he sees Menelaus, the husband he wronged, he shrinks back in fear. Hector rebukes his brother with stinging words, calling him a handsome coward who has brought shame on Troy. Stung by the rebuke, Paris proposes a formal duel: he and Menelaus will fight in single combat for Helen and all her possessions, and the war will end whoever wins. Both sides gladly agree and swear solemn oaths. Meanwhile, on the walls of Troy, the goddess Iris summons Helen, who comes to the ramparts weaving a great web that pictures the battles fought for her sake. In a beautiful scene often called the “Teichoscopia” (a Greek term meaning the viewing from the wall), Helen stands beside old King Priam and identifies for him the Greek leaders on the plain below: Agamemnon, Odysseus, and the giant Ajax. Priam treats Helen with unfailing kindness, blaming the gods rather than her for the war. The duel then takes place. Menelaus clearly has the better of it; his sword shatters on Paris’ helmet, and he seizes Paris by the helmet crest and begins to drag him away. But Aphrodite, the goddess of love who protects Paris, snaps the chin strap, hides Paris in a mist, and carries him back to his perfumed bedchamber in Troy. She then summons Helen to him. Helen, full of disgust and self reproach, at first refuses and even mocks the goddess, but Aphrodite frightens her into obedience. Helen reproaches Paris for his cowardice, yet ends by sharing his bed. Outside, Menelaus rages up and down looking for his vanished opponent, and Agamemnon proclaims that Menelaus has won and demands that the Trojans return Helen. The war might have ended here, but the gods will not allow it.

Book Four opens on Olympus, where the gods debate the outcome. Zeus teases Hera by suggesting that the war might now end with Troy still standing. Hera, whose hatred of Troy is bottomless, will not accept this, and Zeus yields, sending Athena down to make the Trojans break the truce. Athena, disguised as a Trojan soldier, persuades the archer Pandarus to shoot an arrow at Menelaus, promising him glory. Pandarus shoots, and although Athena herself deflects the arrow so that it only wounds Menelaus, the sacred oaths are now broken and the Trojans are guilty of treachery. Agamemnon is horrified at his brother’s wound, but the physician Machaon treats it, and Agamemnon then strides through the army rousing the chiefs for battle, praising some and scolding others, including Odysseus and Diomedes, in a passage known as the “Epipolesis” (the marshalling review). The two armies crash together, and Homer gives his first great battle scene, full of individual killings described with vivid, sometimes gruesome detail. The gods Ares and Athena drive the two sides on, and Strife walks among the men. The book establishes a pattern that runs through the poem: the death of each minor warrior is dignified by a brief mention of his home, his parents, or his history, so that, as Jasper Griffin (1980) observes, the poem never lets the audience forget the human cost of every single death.

Book Five belongs to Diomedes, the young king of Argos. Athena breathes strength into him, and he blazes across the battlefield in what is called his “aristeia” (a Greek term for a hero’s episode of supreme excellence in battle). Diomedes kills Trojan after Trojan. Pandarus, the oath breaker, wounds him with an arrow, but Diomedes prays to Athena, who renews his strength and even grants him the power to recognise gods on the battlefield, warning him to fight no god except Aphrodite. Diomedes then kills Pandarus and crushes the hip of Aeneas, the son of Aphrodite, with a huge stone. When Aphrodite herself swoops down to save her son, Diomedes chases her and wounds her wrist with his spear, so that the goddess drops Aeneas and flees to Olympus in tears, where her mother Dione comforts her and Zeus gently tells her to keep to marriage and love, and to leave war to Ares and Athena. Apollo rescues Aeneas, making a phantom of him while the real Aeneas is healed in Apollo’s temple. Apollo also calls the savage war god Ares into the battle to help the Trojans, and under Ares and Hector the Trojans push the Greeks back. Hera and Athena then obtain Zeus’ permission to intervene. Athena mounts Diomedes’ chariot herself, and with her guiding his spear Diomedes wounds Ares in the belly. The war god bellows with the voice of ten thousand men and flies up to Olympus to complain, where Zeus tells him bluntly that he is the most hateful of all the gods. The book is a dazzling display of battlefield poetry, and it also shows the strange, almost comic vulnerability of the gods when they mingle in human war.

Book Six moves from the battlefield into the doomed city of Troy, and it contains some of the most tender scenes in ancient literature. With the gods withdrawn, the Greeks press hard, and the Trojan prophet Helenus advises Hector to return to the city and arrange for the Trojan women to offer a robe and prayers to Athena, begging her to pity the town. Before Hector leaves, the poem pauses for a remarkable meeting: the Greek Diomedes and the Lycian Glaucus, an ally of Troy, face each other for combat, but when they exchange genealogies they discover that their grandfathers were bound by guest friendship (called “xenia”, the sacred bond of hospitality). Instead of fighting, they exchange armour, and Glaucus, his wits taken by Zeus, gives golden armour for bronze. In this scene Glaucus also speaks the famous simile that the generations of men are like the generations of leaves, which the wind scatters and the spring renews. In Troy, Hector meets his mother Hecuba, who offers him wine, and he arranges the offering to Athena, which the goddess coldly refuses. He then finds Paris still lingering in his bedroom with Helen and shames him back to battle, while Helen speaks to Hector with sad self knowledge, wishing she had died on the day she was born. Finally Hector seeks his own wife, Andromache, and finds her on the great tower with their infant son Astyanax. Andromache begs Hector not to return to the battle, reminding him that Achilles killed her father and her seven brothers, so that Hector is now father, mother, and brother to her, as well as husband. Hector answers that he would feel deep shame before the Trojans if he shrank from war, though he knows in his heart that Troy will one day fall. He reaches for his son, but the baby cries in fear at his father’s bronze helmet with its horsehair crest, and both parents laugh. Hector removes the helmet, kisses his boy, and prays that the child may one day be called a better man than his father. He then comforts Andromache, telling her that no man will kill him before his fated day, and sends her home to her weaving. James Redfield, in Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (1975), reads this scene as the emotional centre of Hector’s tragedy, for Hector is the defender of family and city who must leave both in order to defend them. Paris rejoins Hector, and the two brothers go out together to battle.

Book Seven brings a second formal duel. Apollo and Athena, meeting by the oak tree, agree to stop the general fighting for the day by arranging single combat between Hector and a Greek champion. Hector issues the challenge. At first the Greek chiefs sit silent in fear, until Menelaus shamefacedly rises, but Agamemnon holds his brother back, for Hector is too strong for him. Nestor rebukes the Greeks with a story of his own youthful bravery, and then nine champions volunteer. Lots are cast, and the lot of great Ajax, son of Telamon, leaps out. Ajax, the huge defensive fighter who carries a towering shield like a wall, delights the Greeks and frightens Hector, though Hector stands his ground. The two men fight with spears, stones, and swords. Ajax has slightly the better of it, wounding Hector’s neck and knocking him down with a stone, but Apollo raises Hector up, and as evening falls the heralds part them. The duel ends in a draw with an exchange of gifts: Hector gives Ajax his silver studded sword, and Ajax gives Hector a purple war belt. Homer’s ancient audience would remember with a shiver that later, outside the poem, Ajax will kill himself with that very sword, and Hector’s corpse will be dragged behind the chariot of Achilles. That evening both sides hold councils. On the Trojan side, the elder Antenor proposes giving Helen back, but Paris refuses, offering only to return the treasures he took with her, plus more of his own. The Greeks reject this offer with contempt, but both sides agree to a truce to burn their dead. The Greeks also, on Nestor’s advice, build a great defensive wall and ditch around their ships, an act that annoys the god Poseidon, since they built it without sacrifice. Zeus reassures Poseidon that he may destroy the wall after the war, and the book ends with feasting, ill omened thunder, and uneasy sleep.

Book Eight is sometimes called the “Interrupted Battle”, and it marks the point where Zeus begins seriously to fulfil his promise to Thetis. At dawn Zeus summons all the gods and forbids them, with terrifying threats, to interfere on either side. He boasts that if all the gods pulled on a golden chain from earth, he alone could haul them up together with the earth and sea. He then travels to Mount Ida, overlooking Troy, and watches the battle. At midday he holds up his golden scales, placing the fates of the two armies in the balance, and the doom of the Greeks sinks down. Zeus thunders and hurls lightning at the Greek army, and panic seizes them. Even Diomedes must retreat, though he does so unwillingly, turning three times to face Hector while Zeus thunders him back. Hector rages in triumph, driving the Greeks behind their new wall and boasting that he will burn their ships. Hera and Athena, unable to bear the sight, arm themselves and set out to help the Greeks in defiance of Zeus, but Zeus sends Iris to warn them back with dreadful threats, and they yield sulkily. Zeus tells them plainly what is to come: Hector will not stop until Achilles rises again, on the day when the Greeks fight desperately over the body of Patroclus. This prophecy gives the audience the map of the rest of the poem. Only nightfall saves the Greek army. The book ends with one of the most admired night pieces in Homer: the Trojans, for the first time in ten years, camp confidently outside their walls on the open plain, and their thousand watch fires burn before Troy like stars around the shining moon, while the horses stand beside the chariots waiting for dawn.

Book Nine, the “Embassy to Achilles”, is often regarded as the moral heart of the poem. Agamemnon, in despair at the Greek defeat, again proposes going home, and this time he means it. Diomedes rebukes him boldly, and Nestor advises him to admit his fault and win Achilles back with gifts. Agamemnon confesses that he was blinded by “ate” (a Greek word meaning ruinous folly or delusion) and offers an enormous list of gifts: seven tripods, ten talents of gold, twelve prize horses, seven skilled women, the return of Briseis untouched, twenty Trojan women when Troy falls, one of his own daughters in marriage without bride price, and seven cities. Yet he adds one fatal condition: Achilles must submit to him as the greater king. Three envoys are chosen: Odysseus the persuader, old Phoenix, who helped raise Achilles from childhood, and great Ajax, whom Achilles loves. They find Achilles in his shelter playing the lyre and singing of the famous deeds of heroes, with his dear companion Patroclus sitting opposite him. Achilles welcomes them warmly and feasts them, for they are his friends even if their errand is Agamemnon’s. Odysseus speaks first, describing the Greek peril and reciting the catalogue of gifts, though he wisely omits Agamemnon’s demand for submission. Achilles’ reply is one of the greatest speeches in Greek literature. He declares that he hates like the gates of Death a man who says one thing and hides another in his heart. He asks why the Greeks fight at all: why did Agamemnon gather the army, if not for Helen? Are the sons of Atreus the only men who love their wives? He loved Briseis from his heart, though she was won by his spear. He then reveals the choice his mother told him: if he stays and fights at Troy, he will die young but win imperishable glory (the Greek phrase is “kleos aphthiton”, meaning fame that does not decay); if he sails home, he will live long but without glory. For the first time in his life, he says, he is minded to choose life, and he advises the other Greeks to sail home too, for all the wealth of Troy is not worth his life, since cattle and tripods can be won again, but a man’s life, once it passes the barrier of his teeth, can never be brought back. Old Phoenix then speaks, telling the story of his own life and the parable of the Prayers (the “Litai”), daughters of Zeus who follow after Ruin to heal the harm she does; a man who rejects the Prayers when they come to him will himself be ruined. He also tells the cautionary tale of the hero Meleager, who withdrew from battle in anger and returned too late to receive the gifts he had been offered. Achilles softens slightly: he tells Phoenix to stay the night, and says he will decide in the morning whether to sail. Finally blunt Ajax speaks a few soldierly words, accusing Achilles of hardness of heart over one girl when men accept compensation even for a slain brother or son. This touches Achilles most of all. He answers that everything Ajax says is after his own heart, but his anger still swells when he remembers the insult, and he now declares that he will not fight until Hector comes with fire to the ships of his own Myrmidons. The envoys return with this bleak answer, and Diomedes tells the Greeks to forget Achilles and fight on. Seth Schein (1984) argues that in this book Achilles begins to question the entire heroic value system, asking whether honour measured in gifts can ever be worth a life, and this questioning gives the Iliad its tragic depth.

Book Ten, known as the “Doloneia”, is a night episode that many ancient and modern scholars, including G. S. Kirk, consider a later addition to the poem, though it has always been transmitted as part of it. Sleepless with worry, Agamemnon and Menelaus wake the chiefs, and Nestor proposes sending spies into the Trojan camp. Diomedes volunteers and chooses Odysseus as his partner. Meanwhile Hector sends his own spy toward the Greek ships, a swift footed but foolish man named Dolon, who asks as his reward the immortal horses of Achilles. Odysseus and Diomedes catch Dolon in the dark. He begs for his life and, hoping to save himself, tells them everything about the Trojan camp, including the arrival of the Thracian king Rhesus with his marvellous white horses. Diomedes kills Dolon anyway, and the two Greeks creep to the Thracian camp, where Diomedes slaughters Rhesus and twelve of his men in their sleep while Odysseus drives off the shining horses. Athena warns them away before the alarm rises, and they return to the Greek camp with their prizes, wash in the sea, and feast. The episode is dark, ruthless, and unlike the open daylight fighting of the rest of the poem, which is one reason for the old doubts about its origin.

Book Eleven begins the longest day of battle in the Iliad, a day that lasts from Book Eleven to Book Eighteen. Zeus sends Strife to the ships, and Agamemnon arms in splendour for his own aristeia. In the morning the Greeks, led by Agamemnon, have the better of the fighting, and Agamemnon kills many Trojans, including two sons of Priam. But the tide turns as Zeus wills. Agamemnon is wounded in the arm and must withdraw. Hector then attacks fiercely, and one by one the Greek champions are disabled: Diomedes is shot in the foot by an arrow from Paris, Odysseus is wounded by a spear and barely rescued by Ajax and Menelaus, and the physician Machaon is wounded and carried off in Nestor’s chariot. Great Ajax alone covers the Greek retreat, falling back stubbornly like a lion driven from a farmyard, or, in one of Homer’s most homely similes, like a slow donkey in a cornfield that boys beat with sticks in vain. Achilles, watching the rout from his ship, feels a stir of interest and sends Patroclus to ask Nestor which wounded man he saw. This small errand is the beginning of the end, for as Homer says, it was the beginning of evil for Patroclus. Old Nestor makes a long speech recalling his youthful wars and then plants the fatal idea: if Achilles will not fight, let him at least send Patroclus out wearing Achilles’ own armour, so that the Trojans may mistake him for Achilles and give the exhausted Greeks breathing space. On his way back Patroclus meets the wounded Eurypylus and stays to treat his wound, his kindness delaying him while the battle worsens.

Book Twelve narrates the assault on the Greek wall. The Trojans reach the great ditch, and on the advice of Polydamas, a wise Trojan who serves throughout the poem as Hector’s cautious counterpart, they leave their chariots and attack on foot in five companies. An omen appears: an eagle flying with a live serpent in its talons is bitten and drops the snake among the Trojans. Polydamas reads it as a warning to stop the attack, but Hector dismisses it with the famous declaration that one omen is best, to fight in defence of one’s country. The Lycian allies, led by Sarpedon, a son of Zeus, and his companion Glaucus, storm part of the wall, and Sarpedon speaks to Glaucus the classic statement of the heroic code: since they receive the best seats, meat, and wine, and broad lands in Lycia, they must fight in the front rank; and since death waits for men in ten thousand shapes and no mortal can escape it, let them go forward and win glory or yield it to others. Sarpedon tears down part of the battlement with his hands. Finally Hector lifts a gigantic stone that two ordinary men of the poet’s own day could hardly lever onto a cart, and Zeus makes it light for him. He smashes the gate, leaps inside with a face like sudden night, and calls the Trojans over the wall. The Greeks flee to the ships.

Books Thirteen, Fourteen, and Fifteen form a long, swaying middle battle in which the gods deceive one another. In Book Thirteen, Zeus, satisfied that the Trojans are winning, turns his eyes away from Troy, and the sea god Poseidon seizes the chance to help the Greeks secretly. Taking the shape of the prophet Calchas and other men, he breathes courage into the two Ajaxes and rallies the Greek resistance, in which the Cretan king Idomeneus enjoys his own aristeia, killing several Trojan champions. The fighting is fierce and even, and Polydamas again advises Hector to regroup. In Book Fourteen, the Greek situation is still desperate enough that the wounded kings, Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Diomedes, come to view the fighting, and Agamemnon once again proposes flight by sea, for which Odysseus scorches him with rebuke. Then Homer turns to comedy on the divine level in the episode traditionally called the “Deception of Zeus” (the “Dios apate”). Hera, wishing to help the Greeks behind her husband’s back, dresses and perfumes herself irresistibly, borrows from Aphrodite an embroidered band containing all the charms of love, and bribes the god Sleep to attend her. She then presents herself to Zeus on Mount Ida. Zeus, seized with desire greater than he ever felt, in a speech that comically lists his many past loves, draws her into his arms within a golden cloud, and afterwards falls asleep. While Zeus sleeps, Poseidon openly leads the Greeks, and great Ajax knocks Hector senseless with a stone, so that the Trojans are driven back over the ditch. In Book Fifteen, Zeus wakes, sees Hector lying dazed and the Trojans routed, and turns on Hera in fury. He spells out the whole future course of the war: Apollo will heal Hector, the Greeks will be driven back on the ships, Patroclus will come out and be killed by Hector after killing Sarpedon, and Achilles in anger will kill Hector, after which the Greeks will take Troy through the counsels of Athena. Order is restored among the gods; Poseidon withdraws grumbling; Apollo revives Hector and, holding the aegis (the terrifying storm shield of Zeus), leads the Trojan charge, kicking down the banks of the ditch and toppling the Greek wall as easily as a boy kicks over a sandcastle on the beach. The Trojans reach the ships themselves. Great Ajax, striding along the decks with an enormous ship pike, holds off the fire almost alone, while Hector grips the stern of a ship and calls for fire. The book ends at the utmost crisis of the Greek fortunes, with Ajax exhausted, driven slowly back, and the first flames near the ships.

Book Sixteen, the “Patrocleia”, is the tragic hinge of the whole epic. Patroclus returns to Achilles weeping like a dark spring trickling down a rock face, and Achilles gently mocks him for crying like a little girl pulling at her mother’s skirt. Patroclus reproaches Achilles for his pitiless anger, saying that the sea and cliffs, not Peleus and Thetis, must have borne him, and he asks to be sent out in Achilles’ armour with the Myrmidon troops, exactly as Nestor suggested. Achilles agrees, but sets a strict limit: Patroclus must only drive the Trojans from the ships and then come back at once; he must not push on toward Troy, both because a god, especially Apollo, may confront him, and because a complete victory without Achilles would diminish Achilles’ own honour. At that very moment fire catches the ship of Protesilaus, and Achilles hurries Patroclus into the armour and leads out the Myrmidons, praying to Zeus that Patroclus may win glory and return safe. Homer notes that Zeus granted the first prayer and refused the second. The Trojans, seeing what they think is Achilles, waver in terror, and Patroclus sweeps them from the ships, quenches the fire, and drives them back across the ditch in rout. Carried away by success, he forgets Achilles’ command and pursues toward Troy. He meets Sarpedon, the son of Zeus, and Zeus, watching, weeps tears of blood and wonders aloud whether to snatch his son alive out of the battle. Hera reminds him that all the gods have mortal children and that fate must stand, and Zeus yields. Patroclus kills Sarpedon, and a huge battle boils over his body until Zeus commands Apollo to wash the corpse and give it to Sleep and Death, who carry Sarpedon home to Lycia for burial. Patroclus then storms three times against the very wall of Troy, and three times Apollo thrusts him back; at the fourth attempt the god warns him off with a terrible cry. But Patroclus’ doom is set. In the press of battle Apollo comes on him unseen from behind, strikes his back with the flat of his hand, knocks the helmet of Achilles rolling in the dust, shatters his spear, and strips off his corselet. Dazed and defenceless, Patroclus is speared in the back by a Trojan named Euphorbus, and then Hector finishes him with a spear thrust to the belly. Hector boasts over him, but the dying Patroclus answers with a prophecy: Hector himself has not long to live, for death stands near him at the hands of Achilles. Hector scoffs, asking who knows whether Achilles may not fall first, and pulls out his spear.

Book Seventeen is the long battle over the body of Patroclus. Menelaus is the first to stand over the corpse, killing Euphorbus, but he must give ground when Hector comes up with the Trojans. Hector strips the immortal armour of Achilles from Patroclus’ body and puts it on himself, an act that Zeus, watching, judges unseemly, granting Hector great strength for the present but confirming that he will never come home from battle to Andromache. The fight over the naked body sways back and forth for hours under a mist that Zeus spreads over the field. Great Ajax and Menelaus anchor the Greek defence, while Hector, Aeneas, and Glaucus press them. In the middle of the slaughter Homer gives a scene of strange stillness: the immortal horses of Achilles, which drew the chariot of Patroclus, stand apart from the battle and weep for the dead man, their manes trailing in the dust, and Zeus, seeing them, pities them and asks himself why the gods ever gave deathless horses to mortal men, for of all creatures that breathe and creep on the earth, none is more miserable than man. He breathes strength into the horses, and they carry the charioteer Automedon out of danger. At last, as the Trojans nearly win the corpse, Ajax and Menelaus send the runner Antilochus, son of Nestor, to carry the terrible news to Achilles, and Menelaus and Meriones lift the body and carry it toward the ships while the two Ajaxes hold off the pursuit like a wooded ridge holding back a flood.

Book Eighteen brings the news to Achilles and the making of his new armour. When Antilochus tells him that Patroclus is dead and that Hector has his armour, a black cloud of grief covers Achilles. He pours dust and ashes over his head and face, tears his hair, and lies stretched in the dirt, and his cry is so terrible that Antilochus holds his hands for fear he will cut his own throat. Thetis hears him in the depths of the sea and comes with her sister nymphs to mourn with him. Achilles tells her that he no longer wishes to live unless Hector dies first. Thetis reminds him of the fate she has told him before: his own death is appointed to come soon after Hector’s. Achilles accepts this fully and without hesitation, saying let me die at once, since I could not protect my friend, and he curses the quarrel and the anger that set him apart, wishing that strife could vanish from among gods and men. From this moment the theme of the poem changes: the anger against Agamemnon dies, and a new and darker anger against Hector takes its place. Thetis tells him to wait one day, for she will bring him new armour made by the god Hephaestus. Meanwhile the battle over Patroclus’ body reaches the ships again, and at Hera’s prompting Achilles, unarmed, goes to the ditch, where Athena wraps his head in a golden cloud and kindles a flame above him. He shouts three times, and the sound alone throws the Trojans into panic; twelve men die in the confusion of their own chariots and spears, and the Greeks draw Patroclus’ body away at last. That night the Trojans hold an assembly on the plain. Polydamas, the wise counsellor, urges them to withdraw into the city now that Achilles is rising again, but Hector angrily rejects the advice, insisting on camping in the open and fighting by the ships, and the Trojans, their wits taken by Athena, applaud Hector’s bad counsel and reject Polydamas’ good counsel, a decision that seals the doom of Troy’s army. In the Greek camp Achilles leads the night long mourning over Patroclus and vows to bring back the head and armour of Hector and to cut the throats of twelve Trojan youths on the pyre. On Olympus, Thetis comes to the house of Hephaestus, who owes her an old debt of kindness, and the lame god forges a marvellous set of armour, above all the great Shield of Achilles, on which he pictures the whole world: the earth, sky, sea, sun, moon, and stars; a city at peace, with weddings, dances, and a lawsuit being judged in the market place; a city at war, besieged and ambushed; ploughing, harvest, and vintage; herds, lions, sheep, and a dancing floor; and around the rim the great stream of Ocean. Oliver Taplin and other critics have seen in this shield an image of the whole human world of peace and war for which, and outside of which, the heroes fight, and Michael Edwards discusses its artistry at length in Homer: Poet of the Iliad (1987).

Book Nineteen is the formal reconciliation. At dawn Thetis brings the divine armour, and its terrible glitter frightens the Myrmidons, though Achilles’ eyes blaze with joy at the sight. Thetis preserves Patroclus’ body from decay with ambrosia. Achilles calls a full assembly of the Greeks, to which even the wounded kings limp, and there he formally renounces his anger against Agamemnon, wishing Briseis had died before ever causing the quarrel, and calls for immediate battle. Agamemnon replies with a long, awkward speech of self excuse, blaming Zeus, Fate, and the Fury who put wild folly (“ate”) in his mind, and telling the story of how even Zeus was once deceived. He repeats the offer of the gifts. Achilles is indifferent to the gifts; he cares only to fight at once. Odysseus, ever practical, insists that the army must first eat, and that the gifts must be brought out publicly and Agamemnon must swear an oath that he never touched Briseis. All this is done. Briseis, returning, mourns over the body of Patroclus, remembering his gentleness, and the captive women lament with her, each, as Homer says in a piercing line, weeping outwardly for Patroclus but each for her own sorrows. Achilles refuses all food until he has avenged his friend, so Zeus sends Athena to strengthen him secretly with nectar and ambrosia. Achilles then arms in the new armour, lifts his father’s great Pelian ash spear that no other Greek can wield, and mounts his chariot. In an eerie closing scene he reproaches his immortal horses for leaving Patroclus dead on the field, and Hera gives the horse Xanthus a human voice: the horse answers that a god and fate killed Patroclus, and that Achilles himself is destined soon to be killed by a god and a man. Achilles replies that he knows well he will die at Troy, far from his father and mother, but that he will not stop until he has driven the Trojans to the full measure of war, and he drives forward with a cry.

Books Twenty and Twenty One narrate the rampage of Achilles, the most terrifying fighting of the poem. In Book Twenty, Zeus lifts his ban and lets all the gods join the battle on whichever side they please, fearing that otherwise Achilles will take Troy before its fated day. Gods clash with gods, and nature itself shakes; Hades, lord of the dead, leaps from his throne in fear that the earth will split open and expose his mouldering kingdom to the light. Apollo stirs Aeneas to face Achilles. Their duel is grand but is cut short when Poseidon, although a friend of the Greeks, rescues Aeneas by casting mist over Achilles and lifting Aeneas over the ranks, because Aeneas is fated to survive and continue the Trojan royal line. Achilles then cuts through the Trojans like fire through a dry mountain forest. He kills Polydorus, the youngest son of Priam, before Hector’s eyes, and Hector, disregarding Apollo’s warning, faces Achilles, but Apollo wraps Hector in mist and saves him, for his hour has not yet come. Achilles rages on, and his chariot axle is sprayed with blood. In Book Twenty One he drives half the Trojan army into the river Scamander (also called Xanthus by the gods), where he slaughters them in the water like fish fleeing a great dolphin, taking twelve youths alive for the promised sacrifice on Patroclus’ pyre. Among his victims is Lycaon, a young son of Priam whom Achilles had once captured and sold into slavery, and who has been home only twelve days. Lycaon clasps his knees and begs for mercy, but Achilles answers in a speech of dreadful calm: before Patroclus died he liked to spare Trojans, but now no Trojan shall escape death, and least of all a son of Priam. Then he adds the strange consolation that is one of the keys to the whole poem: die, friend, you also; Patroclus died, who was far better than you; and Achilles himself, beautiful and strong as he is, the son of a goddess, will also be killed by a spear or arrow one dawn or noon or evening. He kills Lycaon and throws him to the eels and fish. The river itself, choked with corpses, rises against Achilles in monstrous waves and nearly drowns him, until Hera sends Hephaestus with fire to boil the river back into its banks. Then the gods fight one another in earnest and half comic battle: Athena flattens Ares with a boundary stone and knocks down Aphrodite; Hera boxes the ears of the archer goddess Artemis, who flees weeping to Zeus; Apollo declines to fight his uncle Poseidon over mere mortals, who flourish and wither like leaves. Apollo then saves the fleeing Trojan army by taking the shape of a Trojan prince and leading Achilles on a false chase across the plain, while the real Trojans pour through the city gates like frightened deer. All are safe inside except one man: Hector, who remains standing before the Scaean Gates.

Book Twenty Two, the killing of Hector, is the climax of the Iliad. From the walls old Priam and Hecuba beg their son to come inside. Priam pleads with terrible images of the fall of the city and of his own death, an old man torn by his own dogs at his door, and Hecuba bares the breast that nursed him. But Hector, ashamed to face Polydamas and the Trojans after his fatal decision to camp on the plain, stands his ground, debating with himself whether to offer terms or to fight, and concluding that there is no way now to talk with Achilles softly, like a young man and a girl chatting together; better to fight and see to whom Zeus gives glory. Yet when Achilles finally rushes upon him with his ash spear, shining like fire or the rising sun, Hector’s nerve breaks and he runs. Achilles chases him three times around the walls of Troy, past the lookout place and the wind blown fig tree and the two springs of Scamander, where the Trojan women used to wash their clothes in the days of peace before the Greeks came, and Homer says that a great man fled, but a far greater pursued him, and that they ran not for a sacrificial beast or an ox hide, the usual prizes of foot races, but for the life of Hector, breaker of horses. The gods watch, and Zeus, pitying Hector, wonders whether to save him, but Athena protests, and Zeus again yields to fate. As the two men come round the fourth time to the springs, Zeus lifts his golden scales, and Hector’s death sinks. Apollo abandons him. Athena now deceives Hector, taking the form of his brother Deiphobus and promising to stand by him. Trusting the false brother, Hector stops and faces Achilles. He proposes a pact that whoever wins will return the other’s body for burial, but Achilles refuses all pacts, saying there are no oaths between lions and men or wolves and lambs. They fight. Hector’s spear rebounds from the divine shield, and when he turns for a second spear from Deiphobus, no one is there, and he understands that the gods have called him to death; yet he resolves not to die without a struggle and a deed for future men to hear of, and he draws his sword and swoops like an eagle. Achilles, knowing the armour Hector wears (his own old armour, stripped from Patroclus), drives his spear through the one gap at the collarbone, into Hector’s throat. Dying, Hector begs that his body be given back to his parents for ransom, but Achilles, in the most savage speech of the poem, answers that he wishes his own fury would drive him to carve and eat Hector’s flesh raw, and swears that dogs and birds will have him. With his last breath Hector prophesies Achilles’ own death at the Scaean Gates at the hands of Paris and Apollo. Achilles strips the body, and the other Greeks run up to stab it, joking that Hector is softer to handle now than when he burned the ships. Achilles then pierces Hector’s ankles, ties him behind his chariot, and drags him head down in the dust before the walls. On the ramparts Priam and Hecuba wail, and the sound reaches Andromache at home, weaving and heating a bath for Hector’s return, who runs to the wall like a madwoman, sees her husband being dragged, and faints, casting off the veil that Aphrodite gave her on her wedding day. Reviving, she laments for herself and for her son Astyanax, now doomed to a bitter orphaned life or worse. Redfield (1975) treats this book as the tragedy of Hector completed, the death of the man of the city at the hands of the man of solitary wrath.

Book Twenty Three turns from vengeance to mourning and ritual. That night the ghost of Patroclus visits the sleeping Achilles, complaining that he cannot pass the gates of Hades until he is buried, asking that their bones be laid together in one urn, and reminding Achilles that he too is fated to die beneath the walls of Troy. Achilles tries to embrace the spirit, but it slips through his hands like smoke and vanishes gibbering under the earth, and Achilles wakes marvelling that something of a man does survive in the house of Hades, an image but with no real strength in it. The next day the Greeks build a great pyre. Achilles cuts the long hair he had been growing for the river god of his homeland and places it in Patroclus’ hands, sacrifices sheep, cattle, horses, two of Patroclus’ own dogs, and, grimly, the twelve Trojan youths, and burns the body through the night, quenching the pyre with wine at dawn and gathering the bones. Then, in a striking change of tone, Achilles holds magnificent funeral games in honour of Patroclus, giving prizes for a chariot race, boxing, wrestling, a foot race, an armed duel, weight throwing, archery, and javelin. The games are full of human colour: the young Antilochus wins second place in the chariot race by reckless driving and then gracefully yields his prize when Menelaus protests; Achilles courteously gives old Nestor a consolation prize, and the old man responds with fond reminiscences of his athletic youth; Ajax and Odysseus wrestle to a draw; Odysseus wins the foot race when Athena makes Ajax the Lesser slip in cattle dung. Throughout the games Achilles appears as a gracious, generous host and judge, the civilised man he might have been, which makes the continuing savagery toward Hector’s corpse the more striking.

Book Twenty Four, the ransom of Hector, brings the poem to its profound close. For eleven days Achilles cannot sleep or rest; he drags Hector’s body three times around Patroclus’ tomb at each dawn, yet Apollo protects the corpse from all disfigurement, keeping it fresh with his golden aegis. The gods are troubled, and Apollo rebukes the others for allowing Achilles to outrage senseless clay, saying that Achilles has lost all pity and shame, and that mortals are meant to endure grief and let it go, for the Fates gave men an enduring heart. Zeus arranges the resolution: Thetis is summoned and sent to tell her son that the gods are angry and that he must accept ransom and give Hector back, while Iris is sent to Priam to bid him go by night to the Greek camp with a ransom, promising that Hermes will guide him and that Achilles will not kill a suppliant. Priam, against the desperate protests of Hecuba, loads a wagon with treasure and drives out of Troy at night with only one old herald, Idaeus. Zeus sends an eagle as a favourable omen, and the god Hermes, disguised as a young Myrmidon, meets the old king on the plain, charms the guards asleep, and brings him unseen into the very shelter of Achilles. Then comes the most astonishing moment in the poem: the old king slips in unnoticed, clasps the knees of Achilles, and kisses the terrible man’s slaying hands that have killed so many of his sons. Priam asks Achilles to remember his own father Peleus, an old man of like age, who at least may hope to see his son again, whereas Priam has endured what no mortal on earth has yet endured, to draw to his lips the hands of the man who killed his child. Achilles weeps, now for his father, now for Patroclus, and Priam weeps for Hector, and the sound of their mourning fills the shelter. Achilles then raises the old man by the hand, pitying his grey head, and speaks the great consolation of the poem: the gods have woven sorrow into the life of wretched mortals, while they themselves are free of care; two urns stand on the floor of Zeus, one of evils and one of blessings, and Zeus gives to some men a mixture and to others only evil; Peleus received splendid gifts, wealth, kingship, and a goddess wife, yet also a single doomed son who cannot care for him in old age; Priam too was once blessed above all men in wealth and sons, and heaven has brought him this sorrow; therefore he must endure, for grieving will not raise the dead. Achilles accepts the ransom, has Hector’s body washed and clothed out of Priam’s sight (fearing his own rage if provoked), lifts it onto the wagon with his own hands, and asks Patroclus’ spirit not to be angry with him for releasing it. He gives Priam supper, reminding him that even Niobe, who lost twelve children, remembered to eat, and the two enemies gaze at each other in wonder, Priam admiring Achilles’ godlike beauty and Achilles admiring Priam’s noble face and speech. Achilles grants a truce of eleven days for Hector’s funeral, and Priam sleeps in the porch until Hermes wakes him before dawn and leads him safely home. In Troy, Cassandra sees the wagon first, and the whole city pours out in mourning. Three women lead the laments over Hector: Andromache, mourning her husband and foreseeing slavery for herself and death for her child; Hecuba, mourning her dearest son; and, last and most movingly, Helen, who mourns the one man in Troy, besides Priam, who never spoke a harsh word to her in twenty years, so that in mourning Hector she mourns her only friend. The Trojans gather wood for nine days, burn the body, and bury the bones in a golden chest under a mound of stones, and the poem ends with a quiet, monumental line stating that thus they held the funeral of Hector, breaker of horses.

Seen as a whole, the storyline of the Iliad traces a single moral and emotional arc. It begins with anger over wounded honour, when Agamemnon takes Briseis and Achilles withdraws; it deepens into catastrophe, when Achilles’ refusal of the embassy leads to the death of Patroclus; it turns into a second and more terrible anger, when Achilles returns to battle and kills Hector; and it ends, not with the fall of Troy, which lies outside the poem, but with an act of shared humanity, when Achilles and Priam weep together and the body of Hector is returned for burial. The poem holds in balance the glory of heroic achievement and the waste and grief that such achievement costs. As Jasper Griffin (1980) argues, Homer dignifies death rather than glorifying killing, and as Seth Schein (1984) shows, Achilles is “the mortal hero” precisely because he chooses a short life with meaning over a long life without it, and then discovers, through loss, what that choice truly costs. The Iliad thus remains, after nearly three thousand years, the foundational tragedy of Western literature: a war poem whose final scenes are about pity, endurance, and the burial of an enemy.

References

Edwards, M. W. (1987). Homer: Poet Of The Iliad. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Griffin, J. (1980). Homer On Life And Death. Oxford University Press.

Homer. (1898). The Iliad Of Homer (S. Butler, Trans.). Longmans, Green and Co.

Homer. (1951). The Iliad Of Homer (R. Lattimore, Trans.). University Of Chicago Press.

Homer. (1990). The Iliad (R. Fagles, Trans.). Penguin Books.

Kirk, G. S. (1985). The Iliad: A Commentary, Volume I: Books 1-4. Cambridge University Press.

Redfield, J. M. (1975). Nature And Culture In The Iliad: The Tragedy Of Hector. University Of Chicago Press.

Schein, S. L. (1984). The Mortal Hero: An Introduction To Homer’s Iliad. University Of California Press.

Taplin, O. (1992). Homeric Soundings: The Shaping Of The Iliad. Oxford University Press.