The Iliad and the Odyssey (Classics of World Literature) (3 page)

Attempts to resolve the issues underlying the war – Paris’s flouting of the sacred bond of guest-friendship and the taking of Helen and her treasures as ‘spoil’ – continue when the Trojan council proposes to give both back. Paris refuses to return Helen but will return the possessions with interest. The Greeks refuse. A truce is arranged to allow for the burial of the dead, and the Greeks build a defensive wall, which offends the gods; Zeus comforts Poseidon by foretelling the time when it will be obliterated by the sea. The physical survival of landmarks is, from the gods’ perspective, a fragile thing.

Book 8

Book 7 ends with Zeus’s threatening thunder over the Greek camp. Book 8 starts with his terrifying threats to the immortals: he is the strongest of the gods, and his strength will be terrible to anyone who interferes with his newly-resumed plan to allow the Trojans to dominate. Gracious when obeyed, he smiles at Athene and sits in triumph overlooking Troy.

The fighting in the previous books has been reported, either from the combatants’ point of view or from the gods’, as individual charges and combats. Now there is a new sense of the overall geography of the battlefield, with three zones. The first is the city of Troy, with the non-combatants and dependants – the Greek goal; the second the plain in front of the walls where the day’s fighting goes on, which the Trojans are now encouraged by the gods to dominate; the third the area behind the new Greek earth wall and ditch, the camp and the Greek ships in the harbour – the Trojan goal. Zeus’s will (decided in Book 1 when, at Thetis’ request, he nodded his ambrosial head, and now activated) is expressed by the golden scales which turn against the Greeks; the thunderclaps are perceived by the two sides as deterring or encouraging. Now Zeus’s will is in operation, the still-continuing Greek successes are marked as a tragic flouting of the gods. This marking out of the territory into permitted and forbidden areas also applies to the Trojans, because Zeus’s will operates in partnership with the fates. Since they have decreed that Troy will fall, the new-found Trojan confidence is also ironised as heedless of the eventual tragedy ahead: Hector’s words ring rashly:

‘I know benevolent Jupiter did by his beck profess

Conquest and high renown to me, and to the Greeks distress.

O fools, to raise such silly forts, not worth the least account,

Nor able to resist our force! With ease our horse may mount

Quite over all their hollow dyke; but when their fleet I reach,

Let Memory to all the world a famous bonfire teach:

For I will all their ships inflame, with whose infestive smoke

(Fear-shrunk, and hidden near their keels) the conquer’d Greeks shall choke.’

Hector’s derision of the Greeks’ dyke is ironised (as often, with Hector) by the audience’s knowledge that Troy, not the Greek ships, will finally be destroyed. So the Trojans, despite their god-assisted advance, have a no-go area, a zone which it is now overweening and hubristic to occupy: the camp and ships beyond the dyke.

This tragic ‘charging’ of the geography of Troy with danger zones changes the perspective from which fights are seen: from now on, individuals seem not so much to go out to fight as to meet their fate.

Book 9

Zeus’s plan has the immediate effect of depressing Agamemnon; he again proposes returning home. Diomedes and Nestor dissuade him, instead persuading him to try to undo his spurning of the Greeks’ best fighter. Agamemnon acknowledges his folly and sends them, with Odysseus, as envoys to Achilles, to offer generous restitution and recompense. The envoys are warmly greeted by Achilles and Patroclus as Achilles’ ‘best esteemed friends’. In the name of that affection, Odysseus appeals to Achilles to save the Greek ships from Hector – out of pity for their plight even if he cannot bring himself to relent towards Agamemnon and accept the recompense offered. He tempts him with winning ‘triumphant glory’ for himself by killing Hector. Achilles however is impervious. The whole basis on which he has been exerting and endangering himself has, he says, been destroyed:

‘With equal honour cowards die, and men most valiant,

The much performer, and the man that can of nothing vaunt.’

The destiny, the reward of the best and the worst, have been equalised; the reciprocity in the relations between Agamemnon and those he leads has gone; none of the respect for bonds that underpinned the summoning of the army remains; there is therefore no reason left to fight the Trojans. No amount of material recompense can wipe out the outrage inflicted by Agamemnon. Material possessions cannot be weighed against a man’s life, especially not against Achilles’ life. He has a uniquely definite, unchancy, choice-dependent fate: either a short life with glory but no homecoming or a long life without glory.

‘The one, that if I here remain t’assist our victory,

My safe return shall never live, my fame shall never die:

If my return obtain success, much of my fame decays,

But death shall linger his approach, and I live many days.’

Achilles’ speech is overpowering; only Phoenix, his old tutor, can respond. He tells a long tale of restitution refused until it was withdrawn and the work done for no reward. This elicits the blunt statement that Achilles no longer needs the honour granted by human society, and that someone who loves him should therefore hate those whom he hates, sharing affections and honours alike.

Ajax sees that Achilles is not to be moved even by his friends, that he clings to his anger – though society provides recompense even for the killing of a brother or child, let alone the abduction of a slave girl. Achilles assents with his reason but cannot tolerate the outrage. His reply is that until he himself and his men are affected, he will not fight: a slight shift in position which shows that he feels, even while rejecting, the force of his friends’ need for him (a sensitivity that Patroclus will appeal to in Book 16, with tragic results). Odysseus takes the answer back, while Phoenix stays the night. Diomedes outspokenly condemns Agamemnon for pleading with Achilles, as it has only made him more obdurate and full of pride. Achilles will fight again, he predicts, when his fighting spirit and the god drive him to.

Book 10

Book 10 is a night interlude with a different atmosphere to other books. It is darker and more antiquarian in its interest in ancient arms. Because of this, and because its events are not referred to in other books, it has been thought an addition.

Agamemnon, Menelaus and Nestor all awake in the middle of the night and rouse the Greek leaders. Nestor senses that the Greek position is at a critical point and proposes a reconnaissance of the Trojan intentions; those who undertake it are to be richly rewarded with ‘fame of all men canopied with heaven’ and a choice gift. Diomedes chooses Odysseus as the best companion once Agamemnon, almost comically protective of his brother in this dangerous exploit, has hastily stipulated that Diomedes should not take rank into account. Odysseus puts on his Mycenaean boar’s tusk helmet, and with a prayer to Athene they set out.

Meanwhile Hector also calls for a scout to win honour and Achilles’ horses by establishing the Greeks’ position and morale. Dolon volunteers, but runs straight into Odysseus and Diomedes. He offers a ransom for his release; Odysseus reassures him and asks him for information. Dolon gives it; when they have what they need, despite a ritual plea for mercy, they kill him out of hand. They capture the wonderful horses of Rhesus while indulging in a blood bath. They return in triumph with the horses which, strangely, are never again mentioned.

Book 11

Books 11 to 18 cover the grim and bloody fighting on a single day, a day when Zeus’s promise to Thetis to show the Greeks how much they need her son is dreadfully fulfilled.

The battle starts with the sides facing each other like two lines of reapers who:

Bear down the furrows speedily, and thick their handfuls fall:

So at the joining of the hosts ran slaughter through them all.

Agamemnon has his
aristeia
, his time of preeminence, killing two sons of Priam whom Achilles had previously captured and ransomed:

And as a lion having found the furrow of a hind,

Where she had calv’d two little twins, at will and ease doth grind

The joints snatch’d in his solid jaws, and crusheth into mist

Their tender lives, their dam, though near, not able to resist,

But shook with vehement fear herself, flies through the oaken chase

From that fell savage, drown’d in sweat, and seeks some covert place:

So when with most unmatched strength the Grecian general bent

’Gainst these two princes, none durst aid their native king’s descent.

Other victims include two sons of an opponent of Menelaus, despite their ritual plea for mercy, and Iphidamas, who ‘straight his bridal chamber left’ on his wedding night to win glory at Troy.

Hector, on the watch, waits until Agamemnon is wounded: as Zeus told him, it is now his turn to be preeminent. Odysseus and Diomedes perceive that the tide is with the Trojans but fight hard until they too are wounded. Ajax fights valiantly until he has to retreat ‘As when a dull mill ass comes near a goodly field of corn’ but is slowly driven back by children guarding the crop. In this simile, as in others, the point of similarity – stubbornness, strength, imperturbability when threatened by lesser foes, the insensibility and dignity of the movement – is embroidered into an evocative picture of real life in the non-heroic world, so that the initial comparison is only the starting point of the interest of the scene.

Achilles, who has not returned home as he threatened but is watching from the stern of his ship, sends Patroclus to establish who is wounded; it is the invaluable healer, Machaon. He goes to Nestor, who is drinking from a cup similar to one actually found at Mycenae (‘Nestor’s cup’), but Patroclus refuses to sit down because he must get back to Achilles. Nestor regales him with a long tale about his exploits when he was young, with the implication that glory is enjoyed when it is won among companions and celebrated in public, not privately dwelt on. Nestor reminds Patroclus, presumably still standing, of their fathers’ advice – Achilles’ that he be always preeminent in battle, Patroclus’ that as the elder he should counsel Achilles. Nestor suggests that he reason with him or, fatally, that he at least stand in for Achilles to help the losing Greeks. Patroclus, moved by Nestor’s words, then sees for himself the crisis among the Greeks. He is appealed to by the wounded Eurypylus, whom he tends; he does not get back to Achilles until Book 16.

Book 12

The wall around the Greek camp that offended the gods is attacked by the Trojans, although the poet reveals that it will not fall until after the taking of Troy, when Apollo and Poseidon will turn the rivers on it. Hector, his triumphs ironised as always by the sense that he is bringing his own doom down on himself, follows the advice of the cautious Polydamas to attack on foot, but quarrels recklessly with him over whether to follow an omen. The two Ajaxes meanwhile encourage all the different ranks of Greek fighters, drawn together in this emergency.

Sarpedon encourages his friend Glaucus to join him in making a full assault on the wall. He reminds him that the preeminent position they enjoy at home comes from their being preeminent in battle. (Sarpedon has several times reminded Hector that he has no common cause with him: he has left his wife and child to be an ally to take part in the ‘glory-giving battle’.) He continues, surprisingly to modern ears, to say that if they were immortal the last thing he would ask of his friend would be to undergo the pain and risk of battle; but as death will come the only option is to stake and risk their mortality to gain immortal glory. This central statement of what drives the hero is remarkably free of aggression or delight in battle for its own sake:

‘Glaucus, say, why are we honour’d more

Than other men of Lycia in place, with greater store

Of meats and cups, with goodlier roofs, delightsome gardens, walks,

More lands and better, so much wealth that court and country talks

Of us and our possessions . . . Come, be we great in deed

As well as look; shine not in gold, but in the flames of fight,

That so our neat-arm’d Lycians may say: “See, these are right

Our kings, our rulers; these deserve to eat and drink the best;

These govern not ingloriously: these thus exceed the rest,

Do more than they command to do.” O friend, if keeping back

Would keep back age from us, and death, and that we might not wrack

In this life’s human sea at all, but that deferring now

We shunn’d death ever, nor would I half this vain valour show,

Nor glorify a folly so, to wish thee to advance:

But since we must go, though not here, and that, besides the chance

Propos’d now, there are infinite fates of other sort in death,

Which (neither to be fled nor ’scaped) a man must sink beneath,

Come, try we if this sort be ours: and either render thus

Glory to others, or make them resign the like to us.’

Sarpedon and Glaucus on the Trojan side and Ajax and Teucer on the Greek side of the wall all do valiant deeds; the contest is evenly matched, like neighbours disputing a field boundary. Zeus’s scales, likened to those of a poor spinster weighing her day’s work of weaving, are evenly balanced until gradually they turn in favour of Hector, who breaks through the wall.

Book 13

Zeus’s attention elsewhere, Poseidon rallies the two Ajaxes and the Greeks, the more so after his grandson is killed by Hector. As a contrast to the god-inspired delight in battle voiced by the Ajaxes there is an interchange between Meriones and Idomeneus. These, catching each other unawares away from the fighting, loudly declare their valour and distance themselves from the signs and wounds of a coward; they then put their declarations into bloody practice. Idomeneus is preeminent until he comes up against Aeneas; the fighting is evenly matched thereafter, until Hector and the two Ajaxes confront each other. In this long and bloody book, men who are winning their bride-price, are beloved sons-in-law, have been hospitable, are caring or sweetly graceful, who are lovers of innocent pursuits, beloved of their parents, all die, bloodily and graphically – or like trees, felled and left.