The War That Killed Achilles (24 page)

The shield that Hephaistos makes for Achilles will be borne into war by the most formidable and man-slaughtering of all mortal heroes—“most terrifying of all men,” as Achilles is called even by the gods; moreover, it will be carried by Achilles into the most climactic and significant
aristeía
of the epic. Yet for all that, Hephaistos eschews the motifs most predictably associated with warfare and furnishes the
Iliad
with its most memorable images of peace. Reapers in the field followed by children picking up cut swaths; a vineyard, with dark-clustered grapes and young men and girls carrying the fruit in woven baskets; a youth who sings to the accompaniment of a lyre; cattle and farmyards; lions stalking the herds; and “a meadow / large and in a lovely valley for the glimmering sheepflocks”; men and maidens in light, long robes dancing—in sum, the shield Hephaistos forges for Achilles carries all of life.

“ ‘And I wish that I could hide him away from death and its sorrow' ”: from Hephaistos' inspired hammer emerge all those things that he knows he cannot give Achilles. Achilles' new shield, like his other divine gifts—the armor, the spear, and the horses he inherited from his father—once again serves less to protect him than to highlight his mortality. The new shield Achilles will bear before him into war underscores the enormity of all he is to lose—which is all of life.

Thetis delivers the armor to her son at dawn, setting it, clattering, on the ground before him, where its terrifying brilliance causes the Myrmidons to look away: “Only Achilles / looked, and as he looked the anger came harder upon him / and his eyes glittered terribly under his lids, like sunflare.”

Running his hands over Hephaistos' immortal handiwork, Achilles “satisfie[s] his heart with looking” and then strides forth to make official his return to his army, and to the war. Proceeding along the shore, he calls his great cry, and from the ships and shelters Achaeans of every rank stream forth to meet him, stewards and helmsmen as well as warriors, some wounded and leaning on their spears; “and last of them came in the lord of men Agamemnon.”

The epic action has returned to where it began, in an assembly in the Achaean camp, at a time of crisis that has taken many lives, and with Achilles assuming de facto command of the listening army. His “unsaying” of his anger is eloquent, unsqueamish, and succinct:

Achilles' return, the unsaying of his wrath or anger, is one of the most dramatic moments of the
Iliad,
the culmination of the theme of wrath with which the epic had begun; it is also the fulfillment of a pattern common to many myths—the withdrawal of the hero from his community, the ensuing devastation, and his return. Phoinix's paradigmatic tale of Meleager is one obvious example of this pattern, as to some extent is the
Odyssey,
which is dedicated to the story of a lonely hero enduring devastating hardships to win his return home.
¹⁸

Of more significance to Achilles, however, are those myths and stories describing the anger and withdrawal not of a hero but of a god. The Homeric “Hymn to Demeter” tells the story of the goddess Demeter's grief and wrath at the loss of her daughter, Persephone, who was abducted and carried to the Underworld. In bitterness and grief, Demeter retreats from the world; as she is the goddess of corn and of the harvest, her departure deprives mankind of her gifts, and a dreadful winter of devastation spreads over the earth. Eventually Persephone is retrieved by the worried gods, Demeter is appeased, and she returns to earth, bringing spring and the harvest with her.
¹⁹

The word used to describe Demeter's baneful, cosmic wrath is
mēnis,
which is also the first word of the
Iliad:
“Wrath, sing goddess, of Peleus' son Achilles,” runs the Greek text. Close studies of the use of this word, in Homer and elsewhere, have yielded tantalizing conclusions.
Mēnis
can be summarized as “enduring anger, justified by a desire for rightful vengeance, said especially of gods, of dead heroes, but also of humans, parents or supplicants, and particularly of Achilles in the
Iliad.
”
²⁰

Mēnis,
then, is a charged word, more solemn and potent than its more mundane counterparts,
chólos,
or
kótos
—“anger,” “rancor.”
²¹
Mēnis
“is a dangerous notion, which one must fear; a sacral, ‘numinous' notion.”
²²
In the
Iliad,
it is used only of gods and of Achilles. Like Demeter, Achilles makes his wrath felt by the withdrawal of his considerable abilities. “Wrath, sing goddess, of Peleus' son Achilles, / and its devastation.” The devastation comes not from what he does do but from what he does not.

As often with Achilles, the distant thunder of the fate he almost had and the god he almost was rumbles behind his words and actions. It is this word—this
mēnis
—that Achilles “unsays” before the assembly, and the renouncement of such anger—divine anger, cosmic anger—is clearly a momentous event. If sacrificial elements can be discerned in the death of Patroklos, it can now be seen that the sacrifice was effective; the death of Patroklos broke the baneful spell of wrath and has reunited the hero with his community.

Against this profound and consequential background, Agamemnon makes his now almost irrelevant appearance. He speaks to the assembly “from the place where he was sitting, and did not stand up among them,” and in his confused first words it seems he has to shout for attention over the noise of an indifferent crowd: “ ‘it is well to listen to the speaker, it is not becoming / to break in on him. This will be hard for him, though he be able. / How among the great murmur of people shall anyone listen / or speak either?' ”

Unlike Achilles' forthright declaration of a mutual mistake, Agamemnon must obfuscate; he knows that his own people have faulted him for his treatment of Achilles—this much he allows—but his actions were not his own doing: “ ‘yet I am not responsible / but Zeus is, and Destiny. . . . Yet what could I do? It is the god who accomplishes all things. / Delusion is the elder daughter of Zeus.' ”

A long story ensues, illustrating that even Zeus is prey to
Átē,
or Delusion.
²³
Then abruptly, comically, Agamemnon wraps up:

“ ‘Son of Atreus,' ” says Achilles, and Agamemnon's string of stately epithets has never sounded more ironic, “ ‘most lordly and king of men, Agamemnon, / the gifts are yours to give if you wish, and as it is proper, / or to keep with yourself. But now let us remember our joy in warcraft, / immediately.' ”

So much for the riches by which Agamemnon defines his authority. Agamemnon's offer also gives the lie to Phoinix's cautionary paradigm in the Embassy; there, it will be recalled, by way of moral example to Achilles, Phoinix had outlined the fate of Meleager, a hero of old, who, having earlier rejected all offers of reconciliation, was eventually compelled to return to fighting without gifts and without honor.
²⁴
Dismissive as Achilles is of the gifts, or any talk of gifts, Agamemnon is insistent upon this transaction, and so the tired parade of wealth, cataloged twice before in the Embassy, is now carried forth and duly deposited in the assembly. Coming on the heels of Achilles' divine armor, the many cauldrons and talents of gold do not bedazzle as they once might. Now Agamemnon does arise and before the entire army swears the solemn oath, sanctified by sacrifice, that he “ ‘never laid a hand on the girl Briseis / on pretext to go to bed with her, or for any other / reason, but she remained, not singled out, in my shelter' ”; and so Agamemnon's unmanning before his army is perfected.

Briseis, who was last seen when led unwillingly from Achilles' shelter, now makes a startling reappearance. Confronted with Patroklos' torn body, she cries aloud and tears her face in mourning:

This is the last that will be seen of Briseis, the innocent cause of so much destruction. The devastation unleashed by her abduction is also of a pattern, like the plague instigated by the abduction of Chryseis at the opening of the
Iliad,
and the Trojan War itself, instigated by the abduction of Helen. In its recitation of the loss of all her protective kin, Briseis' speech recalls that of Andromache to Hektor. Now the fate of Briseis, bereft of her champions and among strange men, presages that of Hektor's wife.

From the moment of his speech of reconciliation, Achilles is intent only on war and urges immediate action. This prompts a fussy and much-criticized interlude, introduced by Odysseus, dedicated to the dangers of fighting on an empty stomach. Later, also at some length, Odysseus repeats his concern. Possibly there is some inside joke at play, concerning this ever-practical hero's attention to his belly. Achilles' own needs are met by Athene, who drops “delicate / ambrosia and the nectar” inside his breast, so that his strength will not fail. These belabored, anxious explanations about food and, to a lesser extent, earlier concerns about the state of Patroklos' body, which Thetis has promised to preserve, evoke a tin-eared copy editor's fretting over all the wrong details: How did the men keep their strength? Please explain. What about the flies on Patroklos' body? Various dutiful explanations have been mounted over centuries to justify this rare stretch where Homer “nods,” but it is fair to say that most readers could do without it: “More than 180 lines have now passed since luncheon stole the limelight, and nothing has been achieved,” as one commentator remarked dryly.
²⁵

At length, however, the moment for which Achilles has been agitating arrives, and as the newly invigorated Achaeans muster amid the gleam of bronze helmets and shields, Achilles, his heart filled with “sorrow beyond endurance” and “raging at the Trojans,” arms for war. This is the last and most magnificent of the
Iliad
's four, thematically similar but psychologically distinct arming scenes; “Paris arms for shame, Agamemnon for security, Patroclus for loyalty and friendship, but Achilles arms in anger and grief,” as one commentator observed:
²⁶

* * *

Mounting his chariot, beside his charioteer, Achilles cries out, scolding his immortal horses: “ ‘Take care to bring in another way your charioteer back,' ” he says sarcastically, and “ ‘not leave him to lie fallen there, as you did to Patroklos.' ” Achilles was not present to witness the impenetrable, silent grief of the horses at the death of Patroklos. As has been seen, Homer eschews the magical and fantastic elements known to other traditions, and never more scrupulously than in his presentation of Achilles. But now there appears one of the most nakedly outlandish events of the epic: Hera puts a voice in Xanthos, so that the horse can speak, and once again the divine gifts of Peleus to his son serve as a haunting reminder of the cost to him of this war: