The Iliad, Page 9

  He cannot go into battle at once, for he has no armor: his father's panoply has been stripped from the corpse of Patroclus. Hector wears it now. Thetis goes off to have the god Hephaestus make new armor for her son, and when she brings it he summons an assembly of the Achaeans, as he had done at the very beginning of the poem. The wounded kings, Odysseus, Diomedes, Agamemnon, their wounds testimony to Achilles' supremacy in combat, come to hear him. His address is short. He regrets the quarrel with Agamemnon and its results. He is still angry--that emerges clearly from his words--but he will curb his anger: he has a greater cause for anger now. He calls for an immediate general attack on the Trojan ranks, which are still marshaled outside the city walls, on the level ground.

  Agamemnon's reply to Achilles' short, impatient speech is long and elaborate. It is, in fact, an excuse. Achilles has come as close as he ever could to saying that he was wrong, but Agamemnon, even now, tries to justify himself as he addresses not only Achilles but also the army as a whole, which, as he is fully aware, blames him for the Achaean losses. His opening lines are an extraordinary appeal to the assembly for an orderly reception of his speech: "when a man stands up to speak, it's well to listen. / Not to interrupt him, the only courteous thing" (19.91-92). He disclaims responsibility for his action.

  ". . . I am not to blame!

  Zeus and Fate and the Fury stalking through the night,

  they are the ones who drove that savage madness in my heart . . ."

  (19.100-2)

  He is the victim, he claims, of Ate, the madness of self-delusion and the ruin it produces. "I was blinded," he says, "and Zeus stole my wits .. " (19.163). He is talking now to a full assembly of the Achaeans, which includes

  Even those who'd kept to the beached ships till now,

  the helmsmen who handled the heavy steering-oars

  and stewards left on board to deal out rations-- (19.48-50)

  At the council of the kings, when the embassy to Achilles was decided on, he had spoken more frankly: "Mad, blind I was! / Not even I would deny it" (9.138-39). He does not make so honest an admission of responsibility here. And now he promises to deliver the gifts that were offered and refused, and to restore Briseis and swear a great oath that he has not touched her.

  To all this, Achilles is utterly indifferent. He shows no interest in Agamemnon's excuses or in the gifts: clearly he feels that this is all a waste of time. He has only one thing on his mind: Hector. And he urges immediate resumption of the fighting. He is talking of sending back into combat men who are many of them wounded, all of them tired, hungry, thirsty. Odysseus reminds him of the facts of life. "No fighter can battle all day long, cut-and-thrust / till the sun goes down, if he is starved for food" (19.193-94). Odysseus suggests not only time for the army to rest and feed, but also a public ceremony of reconciliation: the acceptance of Agamemnon's gifts, the swearing of the oath about Briseis. Agamemnon approves the advice and gives orders to prepare a feast. But Achilles' reply is brusque and uncompromising. He is not interested in ceremonies of reconciliation which will serve to restore Agamemnon's prestige; he is not interested in Agamemnon's excuses, still less in food; he thinks of one thing and one thing only: Hector. He is for battle now, and food at sunset, after the day's work. The corpse of Patroclus makes it impossible for him to eat or drink before Hector's death avenges Patroclus and reestablishes Achilles' identity as the unchallengeable, unconquerable violence of war personified: "You talk of food?

  I have no taste for food--what I really crave

  is slaughter and blood and the choking groans of menl" (19.253-55)

  Achilles' outburst is inhuman--godlike, in fact. But the others are men, and Odysseus reminds him what it is to be human.

  ". . . We must steel our hearts. Bury our dead,

  with tears for the day they die, not one day more.

  And all those left alive, after the hateful carnage,

  remember food and drink--" (19.271-74)

  Human beings must put limits to their sorrow, their passions; they must recognize the animal need for food and drink. But not Achilles. He will not eat while Hector still lives. And as if to point up the godlike nature of his passionate intensity, Homer has Athena sustain him, without his knowledge, on nectar and ambrosia, the food of the gods.

  When he does go into battle, the Trojans turn and run for the gates; only Hector remains outside. And the two champions come face-to-face at last. Hector offers a pact to Achilles, the same pact he has made before the formal duel with Ajax in Book 7--the winner to take his opponent's armor but give his body to his fellow soldiers for burial. The offer is harshly refused. This is no formal duel, and Achilles is no Ajax; he is hardly even human: he is godlike, both greater and lesser than a man. The contrast between the raw, self-absorbed fury of Achilles and the civilized responsibility and restraint of Hector is maintained to the end. It is of his people, the Trojans, that Hector is thinking as he throws his spear at Achilles: "How much lighter the war would be for Trojans then / if you, their greatest scourge, were dead and gone!" (22.339-40). But it is Hector who dies, and as Achilles exults over his fallen enemy, his words bring home again the fact that he is fighting for himself alone; this is the satisfaction of a personal hatred. The reconciliation with Agamemnon and the Greeks was a mere formality to him, and he is still cut off from humanity, a prisoner of his self-esteem, his obsession with honor--the imposition of his identity on all men and all things.

  "Hector--surely you thought when you stripped Patroclus' armor

  that you, you would be safe! Never a fear of me,

  far from the fighting as I was--you fool!

  Left behind there, down by the beaked ships

  his great avenger waited, a greater man by far--

  that man was I . . . " (22.390-95)

  He taunts Hector with the fate of his body. "The dogs and birds will maul you, shame your corpse / while Achaeans bury my dear friend in glory!" (22.397-98). And in answer to Hector's plea and offer of ransom for his corpse, he reveals the extreme of inhuman hatred and fury he has reached: "Beg no more, you fawning dog--begging me by my parents!

  Would to god my rage, my fury would drive me now

  to hack your flesh away and eat you raw--" (22.407-9)

  This is how the gods hate. His words recall those of Zeus to Hera in Book 4: "Only if you could breach

  their gates and their long walls and devour Priam

  and Priam's sons and the Trojan armies raw--

  then you just might cure your rage at last. " (4.39-42)

  And as Achilles goes on we recognize the tone, the words, the phrases: "No man alive could keep the dog-packs off you,

  not if they haul in ten, twenty times that ransom

  and pile it here before me and promise fortunes more--

  no, not even if Dardan Priam should offer to weigh out

  your bulk in gold! Not even then . . . " (22.411-15)

  We have heard this before, when he refused the gifts of Agamemnon: "Not if he gave me ten times as much, twenty times over, all

  he possesses now, and all that could pour in from the world's end--. . .

  no, not if his gifts outnumbered all the grains of sand

  and dust in the earth--no, not even then . . . " (9.464-71)

  It is the same rage now as then, implacable, unappeasable, like the rage of Hera and Athena--only its object has changed.

  Achilles lashes Hector's body to his chariot and, in full view of the Trojans on the walls, drags it to his tent, where he organizes a magnificent funeral for Patroclus. After the burning of the pyre, the hero's memory is celebrated with funeral games--contests, simulated combat, in honor of a fallen warrior. Such was the origin, the Greeks believed, of all the great games--the Olympian, the Pythian, the Isthmian, the Nemean Games, and in Homer himself we hear of funeral games for Amarynceus of Elis and for Oedipus of Thebes. The honor paid to the dead man is marked by the richness of the prizes and the efforts of the contestants. Here the prizes are offer
ed by Achilles, so he himself does not compete. There are to be many contests: a chariot race (which earns the longest and most elaborate description), a boxing match, wrestling, a foot race; after that a fight in full armor, weight throwing and an archery contest. As the events are described we see all the great Achaean heroes, familiar to us from battle-scenes, locked now not in combat but in the fierce effort of peaceful contest. Homer takes our minds away from the grim work of war and the horror of Achilles' degradation of Hector's corpse to show us a series of brilliant characterizations of his heroes in new situations. But the most striking feature of this account of the games is the behavior of Achilles. This seems to be a different man. It is the great Achilles of the later aristocratic tradition, the man of princely courtesy and innate nobility visible in every aspect of his bearing and conduct, the Achilles who was raised by the centaur Chiron. It is a vision of what Achilles might have been in peace, if peace had been a possibility in the heroic world, or, for that matter, in Homer's world. "The man," says Aristotle in the Politics, "who is incapable of working in common, or who in his self-sufficiency has no need of others, is no part of the community, like a beast, or a god." As far as his fellow Achaeans are concerned, Achilles has broken out of the self-imposed prison of godlike unrelenting fury, reintegrated himself in society, returned to something like human feeling; he is part of the community again.

  All through the games he acts with a tact, diplomacy and generosity that seem to signal the end of his desperate isolation, his godlike self-absorption; we almost forget that Hector's corpse is still lying in the dust, tied to his chariot. But if we had forgotten we are soon reminded. Once the games are over, Achilles, weeping whenever he remembers Patroclus--"his gallant heart--/ What rough campaigns they'd fought to an end together" (24.8-9)--drags Hector's corpse three times around Patroclus' tomb. But Apollo wards off corruption from the body, and on Olympus the gods are filled with compassion for Hector: all the gods, that is, except Hera, Athena and Poseidon--a formidable combination. Apollo (the champion of Troy as the other three are its enemies) speaks up for action to rescue Hector's body. For him, Achilles is the lower extreme of Aristotle's alternatives--a beast: "--like some lion

  going his own barbaric way, giving in to his power,

  his brute force and wild pride . . . " (24.48-50)

  Hera, on the other hand, sees him as closer to the other alternative--a god: "Achilles sprang from a goddess--one I reared myself" (24.71). So Zeus makes a decision designed to satisfy both sides: Thetis is to tell Achilles to surrender Hector's body to Priam, but Priam is to come as suppliant to Achilles' tents, bringing a sign of honor, a rich ransom.

  When Thetis conveys to Achilles the will of Zeus, his attitude is exactly the same as his reaction to Agamemnon's renewed offer of gifts after the death of Patroclus--cold indifference. He agrees to accept the ransom, but his speech shows no relenting; his heart is still of iron. What is needed to break the walls down, to restore him to full humanity, is the arrival in his tent not of the herald, whom he evidently expected to bring the ransom, but of Priam himself, alone, a suppliant in the night. And that unforeseen confrontation is what Zeus now moves to bring about.

  The god Hermes guides Priam safely through the Achaean sentries and through the gate that bars the entrance to Achilles' courtyard; Priam takes Achilles by surprise as he sits at table, his meal just finished. His appearance, unannounced, is a mystery, a thing unprecedented, and Achilles is astonished. Homer expresses that astonishment by means of a simile, one of the most disconcerting of the whole poem: as when the grip of madness seizes one

  who murders a man in his own fatherland and flees

  abroad to foreign shores, to a wealthy, noble host,

  and a sense of marvel runs through all who see him . . . (24.563-66)

  It seems to reverse the situation, as if Priam, not Achilles, were the killer. And yet it is carefully chosen. For Achilles, a child of the quarrelsome, violent society of the Achaeans we know so well from the bitter feuds of the camp, from old Nestor's tales of cattle raids, ambush and border war, from the tales of Achaean suppliants fleeing their homeland with blood on their hands--for Achilles, the appearance of a distinguished stranger and his gesture of supplication evoke the familiar context of the man of violence seeking shelter. Achilles cannot imagine the truth. And now Priam tells him who he is--but not at once. First he invokes the memory of Achilles' father--pining at home for a son he may never see again. And then he reveals his identity and makes his plea. It ends with the tragic and famous lines: "I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before--/ I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son" (24.590-91).

  And Achilles begins to break out at last from the prison of self-absorbed, godlike passion; "like the gods," Priam called him, but that is the last time this line-end formula (exclusive to Achilles) appears. He will move now to man's central position between beast and god. But the change is not sudden. The stages in his return to human feelings are presented with masterly psychological insight. Achilles took the old man's hands and pushed him "gently," says Homer, away, and wept. Not for Priam but for his own aged father, to whose memory Priam had appealed and who will soon, like Priam, lose a son. He raises Priam to his feet and sits him in a chair, and speaks to him in awed admiration: "What daring," he asks, "brought you down to the ships, all alone ... ?" (24.606). It was indeed an action calling for the kind of extraordinary courage that is Achilles' own preeminent quality. He comforts the old man, with what small comfort mortals can take for their lot. From his two urns of good and evil, Zeus dispenses now evil, now evil mixed with good. So it was with Peleus, Achilles' own father, who had great honor and possessions. But then: "only a single son he fathered, doomed at birth,

  cut off in the spring of life--

  and I, I give the man no care as he grows old

  since here I sit in Troy, far from my fatherland,

  a grief to you, a grief to all your children. " (24.630-34)

  That last phrase is a new view of the war; he sees it now from Priam's point of view. And moves on from pity for his own father to pity for the bereaved king of Troy. "And you too, old man, we hear you prospered once ... / But then the gods of heaven brought this agony on you--" (24.635-40). This is a new way of thinking for Achilles; he sees himself as another man must see him--as he must appear to the father of his enemy, Hector.

  He tells Priam to bear up and endure, but the old man, his moment of danger past, his end accomplished, grows impatient and asks for Hector's body at once. Suddenly we are shown that the newfound emotions have only a precarious existence in Achilles' heart; at any moment they may be overwhelmed by a return of his anger, his self-centered rage. He knows this himself and warns Priam not to go too fast; he knows how tenuous a hold his new mood has: "No more, old man, don't tempt my wrath, not now!

  ... Don't stir my raging heart still more.

  Or under my own roof I may not spare your life, old man--

  suppliant that you are . . . " (24.656-69)

  Achilles goes to collect the ransom, and when he orders Hector's body to be washed and anointed, he gives orders to have it done out of Priam's sight: He feared that, overwhelmed by the sight of Hector,

  wild with grief, Priam might let his anger flare

  and Achilles might fly into fresh rage himself,

  cut the old man down... (24.684-87)

  He knows himself. This is a new Achilles, who can feel pity for others, see deep into their hearts and into his own. For the first time he shows self-knowledge and acts to prevent the calamity his violent temper might bring about. It is as near to self-criticism as he ever gets, but it marks the point at which he ceases to be godlike Achilles and becomes a human being in the full sense of the word.

  He tells Priam Hector's body is ready. And offers him food. It will be Priam's first meal since his son's death. And he speaks to Priam as Odysseus had spoken to Achilles before the battle: there must be a limit to mourning for the dead; men
must eat and go on with their lives.

  "Now, at last, let us turn our thoughts to supper.

  Even Niobe with her lustrous hair remembered food,

  though she saw a dozen children killed in her own halls ...

  Nine days they lay in their blood ...

  then on the tenth ...

  ... Niobe, gaunt, worn to the bone with weeping,

  turned her thoughts to food. " (24.707-22)

  It is an admission of mortality, of limitations, of the bond that unites him to Priam, and all men.

  He has a bed made for Priam outside the tent, for any Achaean coming into the tent and seeing Priam would tell Agamemnon. Achilles assumes the role of the old king's protector; even in his newfound humanity he is still a man alone--his sense of honor will not allow him to let Priam fall into the Achaeans' hands. And he promises to hold off the fighting for the twelve days Priam needs for the funeral of Hector. He has come at last to the level of humanity, and humanity at its best; he has forgotten himself and his wrongs in his sympathy for another man. It is late; only just in time, for when the fighting resumes, he will fall in turn, as his mother told him and as Hector prophesied with his dying breath. The poem ends with the funeral of Hector. But this is the signal for the resumption of the fighting. The first line of the poem gave us the name of Achilles, and its last line reminds us of him, for his death will come soon, as the fighting resumes. The poem ends, as it began, on the eve of battle.