The War That Killed Achilles (7 page)

During the night, Zeus ponders the promise he has made to Thetis. How best to make the Achaeans feel Achilles' absence? How best to turn the tide of battle against the Achaeans in favor of the Trojans? The strategy he eventually devises is one of breathtaking cynicism: the most straightforward way to undo a great army, he decides, is to send a delusional dream of victory to its leader. Accordingly, Zeus dispatches “evil Dream” to Agamemnon's bedside, who whispers in the king's ear that Troy is his for the taking. “He thought that on that very day he would take Priam's city,” Homer says of Agamemnon, in a rare editorializing aside; “fool, who knew nothing of all the things Zeus planned to accomplish.”
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Relieved by Dream, Agamemnon wakes and dons his tunic, “beautiful, fresh woven,” takes up his “sword with the nails of silver”—in Greek
xíphos arguróēlon,
a true relic of both Mycenaean language and equipment
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—along with the “sceptre of his fathers, immortal forever,” on which his status depends, and goes forth to summon the heralds to call an assembly.

While the rank and file are mustered, Agamemnon holds a preliminary council with the princes and shares with them the splendid vision of his dream: Significantly, evil Dream had appeared to Agamemnon in the likeness of his most trusted adviser, the perhaps too-aged Nestor. Nestor's own reaction to Agamemnon's description of this landmark apparition—Troy to be taken on this very day!—is curious: “ ‘had it been any other Achaean who told of this dream / we should have called it a lie and we might rather have turned from it,' ” he says, with diplomatic caution. Having faithfully recounted the dream, Agamemnon adds a complicating twist. At some point as events were swiftly unfolding, he devised his own astonishing plan—he will test his men, a spur-of-the-moment ploy that he has apparently dreamed up alone:

To the place of assembly, the thousands of troops swarm, so many that the earth groans beneath them. Here, leaning upon his father's scepter, Agamemnon delivers a speech to this grand host in one of the more bizarre episodes in the
Iliad.
He has had a dream, Agamemnon tells his men, and proceeds to relate the exact opposite of the dream he actually received. There is nothing to be done, he concludes, except to go home:

What Agamemnon hoped to achieve by his “test” is never stated; presumably he expected the army to rise as a man and declare they would never cut and run, that Troy could be won, that success was just around the corner.
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The actual results of the speech, in any event, are disastrous:

At the height of the crisis, there arises another outspoken critic: Thersites, said to be “the ugliest man who came beneath Ilion,” bandy-legged and hunch-shouldered. “Beyond all others Achilles hated him, and Odysseus. / These two he was forever abusing, but now at brilliant / Agamemnon he clashed the shrill noise of his abuse.”
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Alone of the epic's major, speaking characters, Thersites has no patronymic, or name that identifies him by his father (“son of Atreus,” “son of Peleus”), an absence indicating his unseemliness, if not low birth. His character may have been invented to serve the single purpose of being an attack dog; his name, Thersites, is derived from
thérsos,
an Aeolic word meaning “overbold” or “audacious,” well suited to his confrontation here with Agamemnon:
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The mass desertion advocated by Thersites is averted only by Odysseus, who turns upon the little man, threatening to strip away his clothing and send him “ ‘howling back to the fast ships,' ” and then beats him with the royal scepter, which he has snatched from the impotent hands of Agamemnon. “Frightened, / in pain, and looking helplessly about,” Thersites wipes away his tears, while the diverted host “laughed over him happily.” After this scapegoating, order is restored. Odysseus bolsters morale with a long, eloquent speech, reminding the army of an earlier omen, made ten years previously, that promised eventual success. Nestor steps in with saber-rattling words, urging, among other things, that the Achaeans not go home until each man “ ‘has lain in bed with the wife of a Trojan' ” to avenge Helen. Finally Agamemnon reappears, rueful and shaken, and credited with not a single word or action to dispel the disaster he has caused:

Thus ends Agamemnon's test of his army. That this was only a test is never explained to the bewildered men, and the episode remains strangely open-ended. Over the years, many subtle theories have been floated to explain the intent and effect of the astounding act of idiocy represented by Agamemnon's trial of the army: by “wisely . . . diminishing his soldiers' own reserves of honor,” Agamemnon “increases their need for battle” is one such example.
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The most straightforward explanation, however, is that as illogical and disastrous as the trial may be, it is entirely consistent with the
Iliad
's carefully drawn depictions of Agamemnon in action. His rough handling of Chryses caused the catastrophic plague in the first place, and his tactless pride caused the withdrawal of his most valuable warrior. In Zeus' judgment, Agamemnon and his delusions were the most effective instrument to turn the course of war against his own army. In fact, Agamemnon's every word and action in these first, important, stage-setting episodes of the epic has been disastrous. The trial scene is simply one more example—starker and uncomplicated by any other agency—of Agamemnon's unfitness to command. Is this not the point?
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The political world the poem purports to evoke is, of course, Bronze Age Mycenaean Greece, when strong rulers controlled centralized bases of wealth and power from palace-citadels such as Mycenae; but the end of the poetic tradition, in Homer's time, occurred in the late eighth century B.C., on the threshold of an age of extraordinary social innovation that included the establishment of citizen-ruled city-states and of colonies abroad by enterprising individuals and clans. Already, in the last phase of the
Iliad
's evolution, questions concerning the nature of authority and power, of individual rights and duties had to have been in the air.
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Those men who, like Achilles, found themselves constrained by the unreasonable authority of lesser men over them or disaffected rabble rousers like Thersites would have been prime candidates to pick up their tent pegs and start their own colony elsewhere.

There is no way of knowing how an audience of Homer's time viewed this pointed portrayal of a traditional king who is unworthy of command, but it is unlikely that they had no memory of a real-life analogy to color the portrait, for the realization that a god-sent leader may not be up to the job cycles through many ages of many people, up to the present time; undoubtedly the last wave of Tommies to head dutifully over the top at the Somme had realized that the authority of king and country did not equate with military acumen. The articulated awareness that the authority above may be inferior to the individual soldier below is the beginning of a dangerous wisdom. Achilles' contempt for Agamemnon is expressed in the words of the highborn hero; Thersites' in the words of the people, the men in the trenches. Dangerously, both views coincide.

Behind the straightforward narration of events, from Agamemnon's first appearance through to the conclusion of his failed trial—the third crisis of his manufacture—is a warning rumble of a not-so-distant political storm. The undisguised ineptness of the king, a shrill but eloquent rabble-rouser in the person of Thersites, a demoralized army, and a charismatic warrior whose outstanding strength and prowess are matched by a dangerous, unconventional independent-mindedness—in the cluster of these disjointed elements lurks the specter of a coup.

That Agamemnon is threatened by Achilles is manifest from his first reactions in their confrontation. What the king does not know, however, is that the usurpation he fears has in effect already taken place: Achilles controls the army's fate and will continue to do so, present or absent, as Achilles controls the epic. In the rebellion of Achilles, two powerful thematic lines have converged, one historical, one mythic: the historic reas- sessment of an individual's unquestioned duty to his ruler and the playing out of Achilles' inherently subversive destiny.

 

 

Using the traditional set piece of
éris
between heroes, the
Iliad
deliberately probes the consequences of unexamined leadership; the kind of prosaic narrative line hinted at in the summaries of the quarrels of the other, lost epics that fell by the wayside has thus been elevated to cosmic heights. When the
Iliad
opens, the son of Thetis, who was almost lord of heaven, is taking orders from an ineffectual king. Agamemnon, for whom rank and power, authority and honor are equated with a careful calibration of wealth and prizes, can have no idea of the monstrous scale of real, absolute power, authority, and honor. By taking back a prize of war, he has broken the rules that, had he been wise enough to perceive them, both afforded him his status and were all that kept Achilles' terrible strength in check. “ ‘Zeus, exalted and mightiest, sky-dwelling in the dark mist,' ” Agamemnon prays at the conclusion of his disastrous trial, offering accompanying sacrifice:

The king cannot know how wholly he is outranked, that it is Achilles' prayers, not his, that are heard in heaven. The honor Achilles seeks now will be absolute, such as is demanded by the gods. “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilles” are the words of the proem. Achilles will bring his king and the mortal comrades who did not follow him to their knees.

To the epic's deliberate, painstaking portrayal of Agamemnon's ineptness are juxtaposed Achilles' most pointedly damaging words:

As any audience familiar with the story of the Trojan War would have known, this charge—that Achilles and the Achaeans are at Troy solely on behalf of Agamemnon and his brother—is wholly true. Thus, from the
Iliad
's first scenes, Homer has unambiguously established that the demoralized Achaean army fights under failed leadership for a questionable cause and wants to go home. It is, to say the least, a remarkable way to introduce a great war epic.

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