i. Even Great Ajax was forced to yield ground; and Achilles, when he saw flames swirling from the stern of Protesilaus’s ship, set on fire by the Trojans, so far forgot his grudge as to marshal the Myrmidons and hurry them to Patroclus’s assistance. Patroclus had flung a spear into the mass of Trojans gathered around Protesilaus’s ship and transfixed Puraechmes, king of the Paeonians. At this the Trojans, mistaking him for Achilles, fled; and Patroclus extinguished the fire, saving the bows of the ship at least, and cut down Sarpedon. Though Glaucus tried to rally his Lycians and so protect Sarpedon’s body from despoilment, Zeus let Patroclus chase the whole Trojan army towards the city; Hector being the first to retire, wounded severely by Ajax.
j. The Greeks stripped Sarpedon of his armour, but at Zeus’s orders Apollo rescued the body, which he prepared for burial, whereupon Sleep and Death bore it away to Lycia. Patroclus meanwhile pressed on the rout, and would have taken Troy single-handed, had not Apollo hastily mounted the wall, and thrice thrust him back with a shield as he attempted to scale it. Fighting continued until nightfall, when Apollo, wrapped in a thick mist, came up behind Patroclus and buffeted him smartly between the shoulderblades. Patroclus’s eyes started from his head; his helmet flew off; his spear was shattered into splinters; his shield fell to the ground; and Apollo grimly unlaced his corslet. Euphorbus son of Panthous, observing Patroclus’s plight, wounded him without fear of retaliation, and as he staggered away, Hector, who had returned to the battle, despatched him with a single blow.12
k. Up ran Menelaus and killed Euphorbus – who is said, by the way, to have been reincarnate centuries later in the philosopher Pythagoras – and strutted off to his hut with the spoils; leaving Hector to strip Patroclus of his borrowed armour. Menelaus and Great Ajax then reappeared and together defended Patroclus’s body until dusk, when they contrived to carry it back to the ships. But Achilles, on hearing the news, rolled in the dust, and yielded to an ecstasy of grief.13
l. Thetis entered her son’s hut carrying a new suit of armour, which included a pair of valuable tin greaves, hurriedly forged by Hephaestus. Achilles put the suit on, made peace with Agamemnon (who delivered Briseis to him inviolate, swearing that he had taken her in anger, not lust) and set out to avenge Patroclus.14 None could stand against his wrath. The Trojans broke and fled to the Scamander, where he split them into two bodies, driving one across the plain towards the city, and penning the other in a bend of the river. Furiously, the River-god rushed at him, but Hephaestus took Achilles’s part and dried up the waters with a scorching flame. The Trojan survivors regained the city, like a herd of frightened deer.15
m. When Achilles at last met Hector and engaged him in single combat, both sides drew back and stood watching amazed. Hector turned and began to run around the city walls. He hoped by this manoeuvre to weary Achilles, who had long been inactive and should therefore have been short of breath. But he was mistaken. Achilles chased him thrice around the walls, and whenever he made for the shelter of a gate, counting on the help of his brothers, always headed him off. Finally Hector halted and stood his ground, but Achilles ran him through the breast, and refused his dying plea that his body might be ransomed for burial. After possessing himself of the armour, Achilles slit the flesh behind the tendons of Hector’s heels. He then passed leather thongs through the slits, secured them to his chariot and, whipping up Balius, Xanthus, and Pedasus, dragged the body towards the ships at an easy canter. Hector’s head, its black locks streaming on either side, churned up a cloud of dust behind him. But some say that Achilles dragged the corpse three times around the city walls, by the baldric which Ajax had given him.16
n. Achilles now buried Patroclus. Five Greek princes were sent to Mount Ida in search of timber for the funeral pyre, upon which Achilles sacrificed not only horses, and two of Patroclus’s own pack of nine hounds, but twelve noble Trojan captives, several sons of Priam among them, by cutting their throats. He even threatened to throw Hector’s corpse to the remaining hounds; Aphrodite, however, restrained him. At Patroclus’s funeral games Diomedes won the chariot race, and Epeius, despite his cowardice, the boxing-match; Ajax and Odysseus tied in the wrestling match.17
o. Still consumed by grief, Achilles rose every day at dawn to drag Hector’s body three times around Patroclus’s tomb. Yet Apollo protected it from corruption and laceration and, eventually, at the command of Zeus, Hermes led Priam to the Greek camp under cover of night, and persuaded Achilles to accept a ransom.18 On this occasion Priam showed great magnanimity towards Achilles whom he had found asleep in his hut and might easily have murdered. The ransom agreed upon was Hector’s weight in gold. Accordingly, the Greeks set up a pair of scales outside the city walls, laid the corpse on one pan, and invited the Trojans to heap gold in the other. When Priam’s treasury had been ransacked of ingots and jewels, and Hector’s huge bulk still depressed the pan, Polyxena, watching from the wall, threw down her bracelets to supply the missing weight. Overcome by admiration, Achilles told Priam: ‘I will cheerfully barter Hector against Polyxena. Keep your gold; marry her to me; and if you then restore Helen to Menelaus, I undertake to make peace between your people and ours.’ Priam, for the moment, was content to ransom Hector at the agreed price in gold; but promised to give Polyxena to Achilles freely if he persuaded the Greeks to depart without Helen. Achilles replied that he would do what he could, and Priam then took away the corpse for burial. So great an uproar arose at Hector’s funeral – the Trojans lamenting, the Greeks trying to drown their dirges with boos and cat-calls – that birds flying overhead fell down stunned by the noise.19
p. At the command of an oracle, Hector’s bones were eventually taken to Boeotian Thebes, where his grave is still shown beside the fountain of Oedipus. Some quote the Oracle as follows:
‘Hearken, ye men of Thebes, who dwell in the city of Cadmus, Should you desire your land to be prosperous, wealthy and blameless,
Carry the bones of Hector, Priam’s son, to your city.
Asia holds them now; there Zeus will attend to his worship.’
Others say that when a plague ravaged Greece, Apollo ordered the reburial of Hector’s bones in a famous Greek city which had taken no part in the Trojan War.20
q. A wholly different tradition makes Hector a son of Apollo, whom Penthesileia the Amazon killed.21
1. Dictys Cretensis: iii. 1–3.
2. Ptolemy Hephaestionos: vi.; Dictys Cretensis: iii. 6; Cypria, quoted by Proclus: Chrestomathy 1.
3. Homer: Iliad i; Dictys Cretensis: ii. 30; First Vatican Mythographer: 211.
4. Homer: Iliad iii.; iv. 1–129; v. 1–417 and vi. 119–236.
5. Athenaeus: i. 8; Rawlinson: Excidum Troiae; Homer: Iliad vii. 66–132; Hyginus: Fabula 112.
6. Homer: Iliad vii. 436–50 and viii.
7. Dictys Cretensis: ii. 47; Hyginus: Fabula 121; Homer: Iliad ix.
8. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 473; Apollodorus: i. 3. 4; Homer: Iliad x.
9. Servius: loc. cit.; Dictys Cretensis: ii. 45–6.
10. Homer: Iliad xi and xii.
11. Homer: Iliad xii-xiv.
12. Dictys Cretensis: ii. 43; Homer: Iliad xvi.
13. Hyginus: Fabula 112; Philostratus: Life of Apollonius of Tyana i. 1 and Heroica 19. 4; Pausanias: ii. 17. 3; Homer: Iliad xvii.
14. Dictys Cretensis: ii. 48–52; Homer: Iliad xviii–xix
15. Homer: Iliad xxi.
16. Homer: Iliad xxii.
17. Hyginus: loc. cit.; Virgil: Aeneid i. 487; Dictys Cretensis: iii. 12–14; Homer: Iliad xxiii.
18. Homer: Iliad xxiv.
19. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid i. 491; Rawlinson: Excidium Troiae; Dares: 27; Dictys Cretensis: iii. 16 and 27.
20. Pausanias: ix. 18. 4; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1194.
21. Stesichorus, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 266; Ptolemy Hephaestionos: vi., quoted by Photius p. 487.
1. According to Proclus (Chrestomathy xcix. 19–20), Homerus means ‘blind’ rather than ‘hostage’, which is the
usual translation; minstrelsy was a natural vocation for the blind, since blindness and inspiration often went together (see 105. h). The identity of the original Homer has been debated for some two thousand five hundred years. In the earliest tradition he is plausibly called an Ionian from Chios. A clan of Homeridae, or ‘Sons of the Blind Man’, who recited the traditional Homeric poems and eventually became a guild (Scholiast on Pindar’s Nemean Odes ii. 1), had their headquarters at Delos, the centre of the Ionian world, where Homer himself was said to have recited (Homeric Hymn iii. 165–73). Parts of the Iliad date from the tenth century B.C.; the subject matter is three centuries older. By the sixth century unauthorized recitals of the Iliad were slowly corrupting the text; Peisistratus, tyrant of Athens, therefore ordered an official recension, which he entrusted to four leading scholars. They seem to have done the task well but, since Homer had come to be regarded as a prime authority in disputes between cities, Peisistratus’s enemies accused him of interpolating verses for political ends (Strabo: ix. 1.10).
2. The twenty-four books of the Iliad have grown out of a poem called ‘The Wrath of Achilles’ – which could perhaps have been recited in a single night, and which dealt with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over the possession of a captured princess. It is unlikely that the text of the central events has been radically edited since the first Iliad of about 750 B.C. Yet the quarrels are so unedifying, and all the Greek leaders behave so murderously, deceitfully, and shamelessly, while the Trojans by contrast behave so well, that it is obvious on whose side the author’s sympathy lay. As a legatee of the Minoan court bards he found his spiritual home among the departed glories of Cnossus and Mycenae, not beside the camp fires of the barbarous invaders from the North.
Homer faithfully describes the lives of his new overlords, who have usurped ancient religious titles by marrying tribal heiresses and, though calling them godlike, wise, and noble, holds them in deep disgust. They live by the sword and perish by the sword, disdaining love, friendship, faith, or the arts of peace. They care so little for the divine names by which they swear that he dares jest in their presence about the greedy, sly, quarrelsome, lecherous, cowardly Olympians who have turned the world upside down. One would dismiss him as an irreligious wretch, were he not clearly a secret worshipper of the Great Goddess of Asia (whom the Greeks had humiliated in this war); and did not glints of his warm and honourable nature appear whenever he is describing family life in Priam’s palace. Homer has drawn on the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic for the Achilles story; with Achilles as Gilgamesh, Thetis as Ninsun, Patroclus as Enkidu.
3. Achilles’s hysterical behaviour when he heard that Patroclus was dead must have shocked Homer, but he has clothed the barbarities of the funeral in mock-heroic language, confident that his overlords will not recognize the sharpness of the satire – Homer may be said, in a sense, to have anticipated Goya, whose caricature-portraits of the Spanish royal family were so splendidly painted that they could be accepted by the victims as honest likenesses. But the point of the Iliad as satire has been somewhat blunted by the Homeridae’s need to placate their divine hosts at Delos; Apollo and Artemis must support the Trojans and display dignity and discretion, in contrast at least with the vicious deities of the Hellenic camp. One result of the Iliad’s acceptance by Greek city authorities as a national epic was that no one ever again took the Olympian religion seriously, and Greek morals always remained barbarous – except in places where Cretan mystery cults survived and the mystagogues required a good-conduct certificate from their initiates. The Great Goddess, though now officially subordinate to Zeus, continued to exert a strong spiritual influence at Eleusis, Corinth and Samothrace, until the suppression of her mysteries by early Byzantine emperors. Lucian, who loved his Homer and succeeded him as the prime satirist of the Olympians, also worshipped the Goddess, to whom he had sacrificed his first hair-clippings at Hierapolis.
4. Hector’s bones were said to have been brought to Thebes from Troy, yet ‘Hector’ was a title of the Theban sacred king before the Trojan War took place; and he suffered the same fate when his reign ended – which was to be dragged in the wreck of a circling chariot, like Glaucus (see 71. a), Hippolytus (see 101. g), Oenomaus (see 109. g), and Abderus (see 130. b). Since ‘Achilles’ was also a title rather than a name, the combat may have been borrowed from the lost Theban saga of ‘Oedipus’s Sheep’, in which co-kings fought for the throne (see 106. 2).
164
THE DEATH OF ACHILLES
THE Amazon Queen Penthesileia, daughter of Otrere and Ares, had sought refuge in Troy from the Erinnyes of her sister Hippolyte (also called Glauce, or Melanippe), whom she had accidentally shot, either while out hunting or, according to the Athenians, in the fight which followed Theseus’s wedding with Phaedra. Purified by Priam, she greatly distinguished herself in battle, accounting for many Greeks, among them (it is said) Machaon, though the commoner account makes him fall by the hand of Eurypylus, son of Telephus.1 She drove Achilles from the field on several occasions – some even claim that she killed him and that Zeus, at the plea of Thetis, restored him to life but at last he ran her through, fell in love with her dead body, and committed necrophily upon it there and then.2 When he later called for volunteers to bury Penthesileia, Thersites, a son of Aetolian Agrius, and the ugliest Greek at Troy, who had gouged out her eyes with his spear as she lay dying, jeeringly accused Achilles of filthy and unnatural lust. Achilles turned and struck Thersites so hard that he broke every tooth in his head and sent his ghost scurrying down to Tartarus.3
b. This caused high indignation among the Greeks, and Diomedes, who was a cousin of Thersites and wished to show his disdain for Achilles, dragged Penthesileia’s body along by the foot and threw it into the Scamander; whence, however, it was rescued and buried on the bank with great honour – some say by Achilles; others, by the Trojans. Achilles then set sail for Lesbos, where he sacrificed to Apollo, Artemis, and Leto; and Odysseus, a sworn enemy to Thersites, purified him of the murder. The dying Penthesileia, supported by Achilles, is carved on the throne of Zeus at Olympia.4 Her nurse, the Amazon Clete, hearing that she had fled to Troy after the death of Hippolyte, set out to search for her, but was driven by contrary winds to Italy, where she settled and founded the city of Clete.5
c. Priam had by now persuaded his half-brother, Tithonus of Assyria, to send his son Memnon the Ethiopian to Troy; the bribe he offered was a golden vine.6 A so-called palace of Memnon is shown in Ethiopia, although when Tithonus emigrated to Assyria and founded Susa, Memnon, then only a child, had gone with him. Susa is now commonly known as the City of Memnon; and its inhabitants as Cissians, after Memnon’s mother Cissia. His palace on the Acropolis was standing until the time of the Persians.7
d. Tithonus governed the province of Persia for the Assyrian king Teutamus, Priam’s overlord, who put Memnon in command of a thousand Ethiopians, a thousand Susians, and two hundred chariots. The Phrygians still show the rough, straight road, with camp-sites every fifteen miles or so, by which Memnon, after he had subjugated all the intervening nations, marched to Troy. He was black as ebony, but the handsomest man alive, and like Achilles wore armour forged by Hephaestus.8 Some say that he led a large army of Ethiopians and Indians to Troy by way of Armenia, and that another expedition sailed from Phoenicia at his orders under a Sidonian named Phalas. Landing on Rhodes, the inhabitants of which favoured the Greek cause, Phalas was asked in public: ‘Are you not ashamed, sir, to assist Paris the Trojan and other declared enemies of your native city?’ The Phoenician sailors, who now heard for the first time where they were bound, stoned Phalas to death as a traitor and settled in Ialysus and Cameirus, after dividing among themselves the treasure and munitions of war which Phalas had brought with him.9
e. Meanwhile, at Troy, Memnon killed several leading Greeks, including Antilochus, son of Nestor, when he came to his father’s rescue: for Paris had shot one of Nestor’s chariot horses and terror made its team-mate unmanageable.10 This Antilochus had
been exposed as a child on Mount Ida by his mother Anaxibia, or Eurydice, and there suckled by a bitch. Though too young to sail from Aulis at the beginning of the war, he followed some years later and begged Achilles to soothe Nestor’s anger at his unexpected arrival. Achilles, delighted with Antilochus’s warlike spirit, undertook to mediate between them and, at his desire, Nestor introduced him to Agamemnon.11 Antilochus was one of the youngest, handsomest, swiftest and most courageous Greeks who fought at Troy and Nestor, having been warned by an oracle to protect him against an Ethiopian, appointed Chalion as his guardian; but in vain.12 The bones of Antilochus were laid beside those of his friends, Achilles and Patroclus, whose ghosts he accompanied to the Asphodel Fields.13
f. That day, with the help of Memnon’s Ethiopians, the Trojans nearly succeeded in burning the Greek ships, but darkness fell and they retired. After burying their dead, the Greeks chose Great Ajax to engage Memnon; and next morning the single combat had already begun, when Thetis sought out Achilles, who was absent from the camp, and broke the news of Antilochus’s death. Achilles hastened back to take vengeance, and while Zeus, calling for a pair of scales, weighed his fate against that of Memnon,14 he brushed Ajax aside and made the combat his own. The pan containing Memnon’s fate sank in Jove’s hand, Achilles dealt the death-blow, and presently black head and bright armour crowned the flaming pyre of Antilochus.15