The War That Killed Achilles (31 page)

When the body of Hektor has been washed, anointed, and decently clad, it is Achilles himself who lifts it and lays it on a litter and with his companions bears it to the wagon. Returning to his shelter, he reports to Priam, “ ‘Your son is given back to you, aged sir, as you asked it.' ” Still the deferential host, he urges Priam to join him in a meal, offering an unexpected paradigm from legends of old to illustrate the necessity of eating in the face of grief: even Niobe “ ‘remembered / to eat,' ” Achilles says, and recounts at some length the infamous story of the death of Niobe's twelve children at the hands of the children of Leto.
³¹
A great deal has been written about this incident, which is curious in many regards. In the first instance, the use of anything as conventional as a traditional paradigm, or “old saw,” to validate his opinion is highly uncharacteristic of Achilles, who typically speaks his meaning bluntly, stating what he himself knows and he feels: more expected would have been for him to have counseled Priam to eat “as I myself have eaten although worn out with sorrow,” or words to this effect. The salient point—that Niobe ate—is not found in any known version of this well-attested myth, and is almost certainly a Homeric adaptation. And if the point—the eating—was not intrinsic, but tacked on—why should Achilles have chosen this particular story?
³²

The essence of Niobe's tragedy, as related by poets from Homer to the lyric poets to the tragedians, is that Niobe, a mortal, compared herself favorably to the goddess Leto, boasting that she had twelve children and Leto only two—Apollo and Artemis. In revenge for this hubris against their mother, the children of Leto slew the children of Niobe, Apollo killing the boys, Artemis the girls. The children did not die gently, but “ ‘nine days long they lay in their blood, nor was there anyone / to bury them, for the son of Kronos made stones out of / the people.' ” Niobe herself was turned to stone, and, petrified, she still mourns, in the form of the rock face of Mount Sipylos in Lydia, over which running water courses like tears.
³³

The usual explanation for Achilles' choice of paradigm is that Priam, like Niobe, lost many children, one of whom also lay unburied for many days. Yet the paradigm has meaning for Achilles as well. In both her excessive pride in her offspring and her eternal grieving for their brutal and early deaths, Niobe evokes no one so much as Thetis.
³⁴
The agent of the untimely deaths of both mothers' children is Apollo. One must wonder if lurking behind Apollo's otherwise inexplicable malevolence toward Achilles lies a tradition that Thetis had sung her beloved son's praises somewhat too keenly. The paradigm from Achilles' lips becomes poignant, then, as yet another reminder of his own fast-approaching death.

As he did for the Embassy, so Achilles now prepares dinner for his guest, and he and Priam eat watching each other across the table with mutual wonderment. Priam marvels at the young warrior's “size and beauty, . . . like an outright vision / of gods.” Achilles wonders at Priam's brave looks “and listened to him talking.” This last is a pregnant, tantalizing line. Of what, one must wonder in turn, could Priam have possibly spoken?

When the meal is completed, Achilles prepares a bed for Priam in the porch of his shelter; this is the second aged visitor to sleep over, the first being Phoinix, following the failed Embassy. It is perhaps mindful of that Embassy that Achilles lets fly a last shot at Agamemnon. “ ‘Sleep outside, aged sir and good friend,' ” he says, “sarcastic,” noting that if one of the Achaeans came during the night, “ ‘he would go straight and tell Agamemnon, shepherd of the people, / and there would be delay in the ransoming of the body.' ”

Before the two men turn in, Achilles puts one last question, practical and generous, to Priam: How many days will he need to accomplish Hektor's funeral? Priam's answer as, thinking out loud, he carefully counts on trembling fingers the remaining crushing duties required in the disposal of his son represents a last, masterful touch of characterization of the old king, broken but bound to see this fearful business through. There is wood to be gathered for the pyre, he tells Achilles, adding without irony or anger, “ ‘for you know surely how we are penned in our city' ”:

Priam and Achilles meet in the very twilight of their lives. Their extinction is certain and there will be no reward for behaving well, and yet, in the face of implacable fate and an indifferent universe, they mutually assert the highest ideals of their humanity. Like all cease-fires, the truce that Achilles pledges for Priam floats the specter of a wistful opportunity.

“Since about tea time yesterday I don't think there's been a shot fired on either side up to now,” wrote an anonymous British soldier on Christmas Day 1914, recording the almost surreal suspension of all action early in the Great War that came to be known as the Christmas Truce. Across the trench lines, British and German soldiers spontaneously sang carols, lit candles, and played impromptu soccer games in No-Man's-Land. “We can hardly believe that we've been firing at them for the last week or two—it all seems so strange.”
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“ ‘I for my part did not come here for the sake of the Trojan / spearmen to fight against them, since to me they have done nothing,' ” Achilles declared passionately in the very opening of the
Iliad.
Ten years into the war, the death of Patroklos finally made the stakes of this conflict personal. But by surrendering Hektor, Achilles also surrenders the only shred of real animosity he ever harbored against the enemy. Had Achilles been commander in chief of the Achaean alliance, where, one wonders, would events have gone from here? Perhaps an abrupt recall of troops and the slow exodus back to Greece, and Phthia . . . As it is, the last we see of the
Iliad
's hero is of him sleeping “in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and at his side lay Briseis of the fair colouring.” After the extravagance of bloodshed and anguish, matters are more or less back to where they were when the epic quarrel began.

Agamemnon's craven character and the greed that underpins Mycenae's wealth of gold are as well known to the gods as they are to Achilles. Stepping into Priam's dreams, Hermes reappears with a warning, urging the old man to leave the camp before the dawn. As rich as was the ransom Priam paid for Hektor, Hermes says, his remaining sons at Troy “ ‘would give three times as much ransom / for you, who are alive, were Atreus' son Agamemnon / to recognize you.' ”

In short order, Hermes has Priam and Idaios on their way to Troy, taking final leave at the river Xanthos, as “dawn, she of the yellow robe, scattered over all earth.” In a brilliant stroke of dramatic pacing, Homer cuts the action suddenly to Troy, where from the height of the citadel Hektor's sister Kassandra sees the small team trudging homeward and cries out to the sleeping city:

At the gates of the city, the grieving populace besieges Hektor's bier. One by one, the three women most central to Hektor's life approach to mourn him: Andromache; his mother, Hekabe; and Helen. Calling to the people, King Priam gives orders for the funeral, urging the men not to fear ambush as they range far and wide collecting timber for the pyre, since “ ‘Achilles / promised me, as he sent me on my way from the black ships, / that none should do us injury until the twelfth dawn comes.' ” Trusting to Achilles' word—and to his authority to uphold it—the Trojans over the many days undertake the funeral. Again the pyre, the gleaming wine and dampened ashes, again a gathering of bones, wrapped this time in robes of purple and laid in a golden casket; and then the last lines of the
Iliad:

Epic, some may claim, is limited by its genre; nonheroic subjects, such as the lives of women and children, cannot be accommodated within its heroic mandate, and tragedy, for example, picks up where epic must leave off. Yet no subsequent work of literature of any genre has ever made the fate of the entirety of any people more vividly and tragically unambiguous. In the epic's finale, the import of its title becomes clear: the
Iliad
relates the fate of the soon-to-be-extinct city of Ilion. Through the speeches of Andromache and Priam, Homer conjures the individual destructions that will accompany the catastrophic fall of Troy: the Trojan War represents Total War.

The ruins of Troy were still visible in Homer's day, in the mid-eighth century B.C., and perhaps minimally inhabited by local squatters. Around 700 B.C.—conceivably still in Homer's lifetime—Aeolian Greeks migrated over from the nearby island of Lesbos and established a colony amid the ruins. Now settled at Troy, the Greek newcomers possibly supplemented their own traditions of the war with novel local stories.
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In this regard, a scrap of Luwian, the language of the Trojans, embedded in a thirteenth-century Hittite ritual text is particularly tantalizing:

A common Homeric epithet for Ilios—
Wilios
—is
aipeinē, aipús,
“sheer,” “steep.” Was it possible—and why should it not be?—that there was once a
Trojan
epic about the war?

As ages passed, new generations of colonizers came and went, as well as squatters and conquerors, leaving levels of habitation on the already legendary site. A traveler to Troy in the second century B.C. recalled that “when as a lad he visited the city, . . . he found the settlement so neglected that the buildings did not so much as have tiled roofs.”
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Still, through all these ages, the mystique of old Troy—Homer's Troy—persisted, and according to the third-century-A.D. writer Philostratus, the site was haunted by the ghosts of its dead heroes.
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The fates of these heroes and the
Iliad
's few heroines were to be the stuff of later legends. Poets of the epic cycle strode roughshod over the
Iliad
's chosen time frame to chronicle remorselessly the full and complete events of the remainder of the war. Arctinus of Miletus, working around 650 B.C. and according to unsubstantiated legend a pupil of Homer's, is credited with the
Iliad
's immediate sequel, the
Aethiopis.
An ancient commentary on the last line of the
Iliad
also records what may have been the first, lost, transitional lines of the
Aethiopis:

In this sequel, Achilles falls in love with the queen of the Amazons, Penthesilea, a Trojan ally, at the moment that he kills her. He himself meets his death when an arrow shot by Paris, but apparently guided by Apollo, strikes him in the ankle. This unlikely mortal wound must surely reflect the folk tradition that Achilles was invulnerable everywhere except for his foot.
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The fall of Troy itself was the subject of two later epics in the Trojan Cycle, the
Little Iliad
and the
Ilias Persis,
or
The Sack of Ilion,
both of which related the stratagem of the Trojan Horse; it is possible that the “horse” reflects a memory from the Bronze Age of Assyrian siege machines, battering rams surmounted by a boxlike casing that protected the men inside as they advanced against a city.
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This famous decoy was built by one Epeios from wood felled on Mount Ida,
⁴³
and—a pleasing detail recorded by one scholiast—“Arctinus says that it was 100 feet long and 50 feet wide, and that its tail and knees could move.”
⁴⁴
Proclus' summary of the
Sack of Ilion
tells that: