The Anger of Achilles: Homer's Iliad

  Greek traditional story-cycles contained elements taken not only from the south-eastern Mediterranean—Corinthian myths, for example, often parallel the Book of Genesis—but, like the ancient Irish tales, from Indo-European legend recorded in the Sanscrit epics. Sometimes the similarity of Greek and Irish myths tempts us to reconstruct a lost Indo-European original. Thus the Irish War of the Bulls describes the hero Cuchulain’s divine chariot-team, named ‘The Grey of Macha’ and ‘Black Sanglain’, which correspond to Achilles’ horses Xanthus and Balius and, like them, shed tears of grief. Cuchulain and Achilles both have a charmed spear, each mourns for the death of a blood-brother and fights desperately at a ford; but Cuchulain kills his blood-brother, who has been enrolled by fate among the enemy. The War of the Bulls being far earlier in sentiment and style than the Iliad (though consigned to writing a thousand years later), their common Indo-European original may have been the Mahabharata, before it was heavily and clumsily rewritten, where Karna, son of the Sun-god, possessed a similar weapon and fought his own brother. I make this suggestion because, on the battlefield, Cuchulain and Achilles share the unusual characteristic of shining with a ‘hero light’ compared to the Sun; and because Cuchulain is held to be a reincarnation of the Sun-god Lugh. When the River-god Xanthus attacks Achilles at the ford, Hephaestus, God of the Forge, rescues him by scorching the riverbanks and making the waters boil. Since the Greek Sun Titan Hyperion never intervened in human affairs, and since Hephaestus’ use of coals from his furnace has an artificial ring, we may presume an earlier version of the legend in which the Sun-god came to the hero’s rescue.

  The weeping of Cuchulain’s horses reads far more tragically than that of Achilles’ team. The Grey of Macha, who matches Xanthus, defends her master with hooves and teeth; whereas Xanthus does nothing except protest, in a human voice, against Achilles’ unjust accusations and foretell his death. Achilles, not at all surprised, returns a harsh answer, ordering the beast to mind his manners; which introduces a comic element, heightened by the appearance of a Fury who stops Xanthus’ mouth before he can defend himself.

  Another borrowed element in the Iliad, pointed out by Professor Webster, confirms Achilles’ close relation with the Sun-god:

  In the Iliad the relationship of Achilles and Patroklos may be compared with the relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu; and the relationship of Achilles and Thetis with the relationship of Gilgamesh and his mother, the goddess Ninsun. The two passages in the Iliad which come closest to the Gilgamesh epic are both in the eighteenth book. When Gilgamesh visited Ninsun to tell her of his resolve to seek out Huwawa, Ninsun raised her hands to the sun god Shamash and said: ‘Why, having given me Gilgamesh for a son, with a restless heart didst thou endow him? And now thou didst affect him to go on a far journey to the place of Huwawa, to face an uncertain battle, to travel an uncertain road.’ This is surely the tone of Thetis in the Iliad (18, 54): ‘Ah! wretched me, who have born a hero to misery, I bore a son who was blameless and strong… as long as he lives and sees the light of the sun, he is grieved.’ When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh lamented him: ‘like a lion he raises up his voice, like a lioness deprived of her whelps. He paces back and forth before the couch’; and later, like Achilles, he prepared an elaborate burial for his friend. In the Iliad (18, 316) the Achaeans lamented Patroklos all night; Achilles began the lamentation, laying his murderous hands on the breast of his friend, groaning deeply like a bearded lion, whose whelps had been stolen by a hunter. The parallel between the two similes is Striking, but the parallel between the double relationships is more striking.’

  Now we come to the question of how Homer understood divine intervention in human battle. It is one thing to ascribe natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, pestilence, deaths in childbirth, men or houses struck by lightning, to respectively Poseidon, Apollo, Artemis, and Zeus; or to regard birds as messengers of the gods. It is quite another when these gods adopt human guise—as when Apollo pretends to be Hector’s brother Helenus and gives him tactical advice; or when Hermes disguises himself as Achilles’ squire and guides Priam safely into the Greek camp. This is a graphic way of saying that the human hero was inspired, though he kept his familiar appearance; the divine kings of Mycenae and the Middle East were constantly represented by epic-writers and on monuments as being so favoured by their deities. When, however, a god stands at the side of a chosen champion, other than a divine king, and helps him to victory—as Athene did for Diomedes and Ajax, or as Apollo did for Paris when he killed Achilles (a deed, by the way, only prophesied, not performed in the Iliad), this seems more like divine possession than divine inspiration. Though by Homer’s time, such a possession had evidently ceased to be an everyday occurrence, he has preserved occasional details which make it recognizable.

  Both divine inspiration and divine possession occur in West African cultures of Libyan origin; and the Libyan element in pre-Hellenic Greek myth is large: Athene herself, whom Herodotus identifies with the Libyan Goddess Neith, was born on the shores of Lake Triton, near Gades. A mortal inspired by a god’s or a goddess’ kra (soul), is unchanged in appearance, though he may be speaking and acting as the deity dictates. Possession by a divine sunsum (personality), on the other hand, leads to behaviour peculiar to the god or goddess concerned. Each god has his well-known character and mannerisms. In Dahomey, for instance, the local Hermes is sly, smooth, eloquent, amusing, dishonest, sympathetic, hating personal violence; the local Aphrodite is amorous, coquettish, bountiful, soft-hearted, shrewd, subtle, and unsporting. When at a festival, under the excitement of drums and dancing, some member of the tribe becomes possessed by a divine sunsum, he or she loses consciousness, adopts the character of that particular god, and is temporarily granted divine honours. An authoritative account of the same phenomenon, transplanted from Dahomey to Haiti, is given in Maya Daren’s Divine Horseman.

  The sunsums of the Olympians had been established by ancient Greek myth; so that, if a hero were possessed, it would be at once apparent which deity was riding him. Ares, the War-god, a great, tough, swaggering warrior, relied on main force, heavy spear-thrusts and crushing sword-swings; perhaps heroes mentioned in the Iliad as ‘Ares’ favourites’, or ‘descendants of Ares’, were susceptible to his possession. Diomedes, in Book 5, fears to face Hector because Ares is with him; but on another occasion, Diomedes has been himself possessed by the Goddess Athene, and Hector prudently avoids an encounter. Among the ancient Greeks, as among the pagan West Africans and loa-worshipping Haitians, a man could be possessed by a goddess, or a woman by a god. The Pythoness at Delphi, or the Sybil at Cumae, who were possessed, not merely inspired, by the God Apollo, assumed his voice and demeanour. Athene, the Amazonian goddess, evidently had a more and deadly battle technique than Ares because, whenever two warriors met, one inspired by Athene, one by Ares, Athene always won; two combats between these deities—or their chosen incarnations—are given in the Iliad. Hector remarks that fighters have their off-days or their days of triumph, according as Heaven wills. Thus Aeneas, possessed by Aphrodite, is easily defeated by Athene’s incarnation Diomedes, after apparently suffering the hand wound which Homer attributes to Aphrodite herself; but makes good his escape. Later, the strong God Apollo possesses him, and he lops down his opponents like pines. But the Greek gods never became bisexual, as their West African counterparts did.

  The most interesting case of possession in the Iliad is that of Paris, Aphrodite’s favourite. When he fights Menelaus, then aided by Athene, he only just manages to extricate himself with Aphrodite’s adroit help and escape to Troy. Afterwards, Hector visits him at his house and calls him back to fight, saying sarcastically: ‘I cannot regard your grudge against Troy as a very decent one; it is for you alone that our people are dying to defend these walls.’ Paris, still under Aphrodite’s influence, gives a characteristic answer: ‘Sharp words, but not unreasonably so. Allow me to explain that I bear no particular grudge against Troy, but feeling a little sad, I wanted to enjoy a good cr
y on the chair in this bedroom. My wife has just suggested that I should fight again, and I am taking her advice; because one never knows who will win the next round, does one?’ That same day, Paris saves the situation, not by some tremendous lunge with a spear, or cast with a boulder, but by an unsporting arrow-shot, from behind cover, that pins Diomedes’ foot to the ground and disables him for the rest of the battle. Paris’ laugh is the merry laugh of Aphrodite, and Diomedes’ answer carries all the venom proper to Athene.

  Homer clearly disbelieves the legends of gods taking part in human affairs, but is always ready to extemporize divine machinery. Since a ‘tomb of Sarpedon’ was shown in Lycia, whereas the Trojan cycle made him fall in battle, Homer obligingly arranges an aerial transfer of the corpse back to Lycia, at Zeus’ own orders. It is reasonable to suppose that he has also altered the ancient account of how Paris killed Achilles. Aphrodite, rather than Apollo, will have guided the arrow that pierced the famous heel since, according to most mythographers, Achilles fell not at the Scaean Gate, but in Apollo’s temple, where Deiphobus had lured him—after posting Paris behind a pillar. Apollo would hardly have so defiled his own shrine. Aphrodite seems to have been a far more important character in the original story-cycle than in the Iliad. The Homeric Returns of the Heroes, clearly based on Mycenaean tradition, makes every Greek leader of note either return home to find his wife unfaithful, or be shipwrecked.1 Before Poseidon, fairly late in religious history, converted his thunderbolt into a trident and exchanged sweet waters for salt, Aphrodite ruled the Sea as well as human passions; and her alternate forms of revenge for the destruction of Troy yield far better sense than Poseidon’s idle spite, to which, though he championed the Greek cause at Troy, these disasters are implausibly ascribed.

  ***

  Students (lamentably few, nowadays) who read Homer in the original have several competent cribs to guide them. Professor Richard Lattimore’s The Iliad of Homer is the latest; he and Professor Webster make a reliable team. I approve of cribs, but dislike all the translations I have yet read. Translations are made for the general, non-Classical public, yet their authors seldom consider what will be immediately intelligible, and therefore readable, and what will not. Homer is a difficult writer. He was breaking new ground, and often failed to express a complex idea adequately in hexameters; he also omitted many vital pieces of information, or inserted them too late. Few translators save Homer’s face by remedying these defects, or soften the wearisome formality of phrase which slows down the action:

  ‘So said the White-armed Goddess Hera, and the Owl-eyed Goddess Athene disregarded not. So Hera the Goddess-queen, daughter of Great Cronus, went her way.’

  Is it necessary for Hera to be called ‘White-Armed, Queen, Daughter of Great Cronus’, or Athene ‘the Owl-Eyed Virgin Daughter of Zeus’ more than once or twice in every book? Surely; ‘Athene took Hera’s advice’ is enough? And what can the uninstructed reader make of ‘Alalcomenean Athene’? Should he not be told that Zeus, who gave her this title, was teasing, and that she resented having been put under the charge of a human tutor named Alalcomenes the Boeotian?

  Paradoxically the more accurate a rendering, the less justice it does Homer. Here is a typical passage from Book 6 of Professor Lattimore’s version:

  Bellerophontes went to Lykia in the blameless convoy of the gods; when he came to the running stream of Xanthos, and Lykia, the lord of wide Lykia tendered him full-hearted honour. Nine days he entertained him with sacrifice of nine oxen, but afterwards when the rose fingers of the tenth dawn showed, then he began to question him, and asked to be shown the symbols, whatever he might be carrying from his son-in-law, Proitos. Then after he had been given his son-in-law’s wicked symbols first he sent him away with orders to kill the Chimaira…

  In other words:

  The Olympians brought Bellerophon safe to the mouth of the Lycian River Xanthus, where Iobates received him splendidly: the feasting lasted nine days, and every day they slaughtered a fresh ox. At dawn, on the tenth day, the time came for Iobates to inquire: ‘My lord, what news do you bring from my esteemed son-in-law Proetus?’ Bellerophon innocently produced the sealed package, and Iobates, having read the tablets, ordered him to kill the Chimaera.

  ***

  A few years ago, before translating The Golden Ass from Apuleius’ over-ornate Latin, I decided to give it a new lease of life by using a staid but simple English prose. I cannot do quite the same here, because Homer wrote in hexameter verse, and though perhaps nine tenths of it is historic narrative, there remain certain dramatic and lyrical occasions. A solemn prayer, a divine message, a dirge, or a country song disguised as a simile—they sound all wrong when turned into English prose: just as wrong as when muster-rolls and long, detailed accounts of cooking a meal or harnessing a mule are kept in verse. Modern audiences are sharp-witted and more easily bored than Homer’s; and since the printing press has almost abolished illiteracy in the West, novels or histories need no longer be clothed in regular metre to make them easily memorized; nor do English versions of the Iliad. Broken metre, which some recent translators adopt, seems to me an unfortunate compromise between verse and prose. I have therefore followed the example of the ancient Irish and Welsh bards by, as it were, taking up my harp and singing only where prose will not suffice. This, I hope, avoids the pitfalls of either an all-prose or an all-verse translation, and restores something of the Iliad’s value as mixed entertainment. But so primitive a setting forbids present-day colloquialisms, and I have kept the diction a little old-fashioned. At times, I incorporate footnotes into the text, but only when the sense is deficient without them; and shall now pour a libation of clear red wine to Homer’s shade, imploring pardon for the many small liberties I have taken. He will perhaps grant my plea, despite protests from his loyal grammarians.

  Deyá,

  Majorca,

  Spain R.G.

  Book One:

  The Quarrel

  INVOCATION OF THE MUSE

  Sing, MOUNTAIN GODDESS, sing through me

  That anger which most ruinously

  Inflamed Achilles, Peleus’ son,

  And which, before the tale was done,

  Had glutted Hell with champions—bold,

  Stern spirits by the thousandfold;

  Ravens and dogs their corpses ate.

  For thus did ZEUS, who watched their fate,

  See his resolve, first taken when

  Proud Agamemnon, King of men,

  An insult on Achilles cast,

  Achieve accomplishment at last.

  You wish to know which of the gods originated the quarrel between these Greek princes, and how this happened? I can tell you: it was Phoebus Apollo, the son of Almighty Zeus and Leto the Fair-Haired, who sent a fearful pestilence among the Greeks, by way of punishing Agamemnon, their High King. The trouble began with Agamemnon’s insult of Apollo’s priest Chryses, when he came to the Greek camp before Troy, armed with the Archer-god’s sacred woollen headband bound on a golden wand. He was offering a remarkably high ransom for his daughter Chryseis, whom the Greeks held as a prisoner of war.

  In an address to the entire army, but especially their two leaders, Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus, Chryses said: ‘Royal sons of Atreus, and all you other distinguished warriors! I sincerely pray that the Olympians will permit you to sack King Priam’s citadel yonder, and to sail safe home: but only if you honour Zeus’ son Apollo, whom I serve, by setting my daughter free.’

  The men uttered a generous roar of approval, yet Agamemnon sent Chryses about his business. ‘Let me catch you here again, old man,’ he shouted, ‘among these ships of war, either now or later, and no wand nor priestly headband will protect you! Understand this: I shall never release Chryseis. She must spend her life as a royal concubine and weaver of tapestries in my palace at distant Argos. Begone, and not another word, or you can expect the worst!’

  The venerable Chryses, scared into obedience, walked silently away beside the rough sea, until he
found himself alone. He then offered a prayer to Apollo:

  ‘God with the bow of silver,

  You that take your stand

  At Chryse and holy Cilia,

  Protector of our land,

  ‘Great Lord of Mice, whose sceptre

  Holds Tenedos in fee:

  Listen to my petition,

  Consider well my plea!

  ‘If ever I built a temple

  Agreeable to your eyes,

  Or cut from goats or bullocks

  The fat about their thighs,

  ‘To burn as a costly offering

  At KING APOLLO’S shrine:

  Let the Greeks pay with your arrows

  These burning tears of mine!’

  Phoebus Apollo heard Chryses’ prayer, and his face grew darker than night. Shouldering the silver bow, he hurried down from Olympus. The arrows rattled in their quiver, as he alighted at some distance from the ships, and his bow clanged dreadfully when he let fly. His first victims were mules and hounds; next, he shot their masters, whose pyres were presently seen burning everywhere. For nine days his lethal arrows riddled the Greeks, and on the tenth, inspired by the White-Armed Goddess Hera, who felt compassion for her dying wards, Achilles the Swift-Footed called a General Assembly.

  As soon as it met, Achilles stood up and addressed Agamemnon: ‘Royal son of Atreus, I am convinced that we shall be driven from the camp—those of us who survive—by this combination of pestilence with war, if we do not at once ask some prophet or priest, or even an interpreter of dreams—dreams, too, are sent by Zeus—the reason for Phoebus Apollo’s anger. Could we have failed to keep a vow, or omitted a hundred-beast sacrifice due to him? If so, the odour of prime lambs and goats roasting on his altars should placate him, and thus end the pestilence.’