The War That Killed Achilles (14 page)

Oblivious that he labors under outcomes already determined by fate, Hektor orders his men to keep a vigil through the night, fearful that the panicked enemy might flee in their ships under cover of darkness. As the men settle down for their long duty, the multitude of their watch fires across the dark plain mirrors the stars in the night sky above Ilion.

As the Trojans while away the night in high spirits, “Panic, companion of cold Terror,” takes hold of the Achaeans, and of all the Achaeans the most stricken is the son of Atreus. Calling an emergency assembly, Agamemnon stands before his men in tears. Groaning aloud, he concedes that Zeus has deceived him: there is no victory for the Achaeans anywhere on the horizon. He then broaches his solution: the army should “ ‘run away with our ships to the beloved land of our fathers.' ” A stunned silence follows this suggestion, broken at length by Diomedes. Displaying admirable restraint, he takes issue with his leader, concluding his remarks with a stinging observation: “ ‘The son of devious-devising Kronos has given you / gifts in two ways: with the sceptre he gave you honour beyond all, / but he did not give you a heart, and of all power this is the greatest.' ”

 

 

In a pattern repeated in the epic, the Achaeans are once again assembled in time of crisis, making public rebuke of their king. Once again Nestor steps forward, now offering a cautious rebuke to Diomedes, along with the suggestion that Agamemnon convene an emergency council of the princes: “ ‘Here is the night that will break our army, or else will preserve it,' ” he grimly concludes.

With sentries set, the lords file into Agamemnon's shelter, where, away from the rank and file, Nestor speaks more bluntly. Things have gone badly from the day that Agamemnon took Briseis from Achilles by force; Achilles must be placated: “ ‘let us / even now think how we can make this good and persuade him / with words of supplication and with the gifts of friendship.' ”

Agamemnon's response to Nestor's words is unqualified acquiescence and relief; he has been led onto terrain he understands. “Gifts”—of course, Achilles will be won back with gifts. With almost abject eagerness, Agamemnon enumerates the personal treasure he is willing to surrender: seven unfired tripods, ten talents' weight of gold,
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prizewinning horses, seven women from Lesbos “ ‘who in their beauty surpassed the races of women,' ” and Briseis, the “prize” who caused the costly rift with his best warrior and whose bed Agamemnon now swears he never entered. All of this, as well as future prizes from plunder still to come, and, as a crowning offer, Achilles' choice of one of Agamemnon's own three daughters to be his wife, along with a glittering dowry.

“ ‘All this I will bring to pass for him,' ” Agamemnon concludes, and then demonstrates that his ordeal has wrought no real change in his character: “ ‘And let him yield place to me, inasmuch as I am the kinglier.' ”

The ensuing Embassy to Achilles—the account of the small delegation of chosen men bearing Agamemnon's offer of gifts—is one of the most remarkable and innovative scenes in the
Iliad.
Briefly, the carefully appointed delegates—Odysseus and Aias, led by a previously unmen tioned character called Phoinix—make their way along the beach to Achilles' tent, bearing the fate of the entire Achaean army in their diplomatic hands.

In the camp of the Myrmidons, the delegation comes abruptly upon Achilles, “delighting his heart in a lyre, clear-sounding, / splendid and carefully wrought, with a bridge of silver upon it” and taken from spoils won during the sack of Andromache's city. With this lyre, Achilles is pleasuring his heart—
áeide d' ára kléa andrōn
—“singing of men's fame.”
Kléa
is the plural of
kléos,
meaning “rumor,” “report,” “news.” The reports made about a hero constitute his renown, his fame and glory. Desire to win
kléos
motivates a hero to fight rather than to flee, for he knows that the report of his actions will outlive him. The great heroes—the “men of old”—are the subject of songs that commemorate their deeds. Yet, Achilles, the hero of the
Iliad,
is now found, after a considerable absence, contentedly playing the role of a bard—a singer of the glorious deeds of other men, not the performer of his own.
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Alone, watching in ambiguous silence, is Achilles' closest companion, Patroklos, the son of Menoitios. As the Embassy enters, both men spring to their feet in surprise, and Achilles offers an unexpectedly gracious and encouraging greeting: “ ‘Welcome. You are my friends who have come, and greatly I need you, / who even to this my anger are dearest of all the Achaeans.' ”

Achilles orders a meal for his guests, and Patroklos serves. The moment seems propitious. Aias looks at Phoinix and nods, and Odysseus takes the cue and with his legendary eloquence lays out the terms of Agamemnon's offer. Golden treasures, horses, women, even “ ‘seven citadels, strongly settled' ” of Agamemnon's own kingdom—Odysseus faithfully recites the list, along with a private and strategic offering of his own:

But Achilles is not moved, and in a scorching speech he rejects out of hand all offers of reconciliation. The Embassy stalls, and to the horror of his old comrades it seems disaster for the Achaeans is assured.

 

 

What does Achilles want? The withdrawal of an angry hero from his people is a standard motif in both folktale and epic—a motif that presupposes, however, the angered hero's eventual appeasement and return. The failure of the Embassy to appease Achilles, then, represents a shocking, dramatic break with tradition. Achilles, moreover, not only rejects the Embassy but, as will be seen, goes further, challenging the very premise of the heroic way of life, which is to say the heroic way of war that epic traditionally extols. The Embassy's many innovative elements suggest that this scene came late in the
Iliad
's evolution and is the work of its last poet—of Homer.
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Certainly it is in the Embassy that the
Iliad
most overtly declares that it is undertaking something new and not simply telling another
kléos andrōn,
or story of old. Intrinsic to the
Iliad
's vision is Achilles, and indeed, it is his character that is the catalyst of the epic's bold new direction.

In plain genealogy, Achilles is, of course, the son of a goddess, the sea nymph Thetis, and a mortal man, Peleus. In heroic society, all warriors are defined by their patrimony; Achilles is Pēleídēs—son of Peleus, whose biography and career can be pieced together from the usual collection of fragments of lost epics, references in other poetry, as well as compilations of traditional genealogy and mythology made by later writers of antiquity.
⁴

From these variegated sources we learn that Peleus was the son of Aiakos, the ruler of the island of Aigina, off the coast of Attica. On killing his half brother—accounts vary as to whether this was by accident or not—Peleus fled north, taking sanctuary with the king of Iolkos, in Thessaly.
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Henceforth Aiakos' son Peleus is associated only with this northern frontier region, specifically with Mount Pelion, and with his small kingdom, Phthia, where he is king over the Myrmidons.
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Tradition also relates how when the king of the important Thessalian city of Iolkos and his wife later wronged Peleus, he “single-handed, without an army, took Iolkos”; this is the sole unambiguously martial feat attributed to him.
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Peleus also makes respectable appearances in a number of heroic sagas: he is among the Argonauts, with Jason, for example (another tale with Thessalian origins), as well as a high-profile participant in the Kalydonian Boar Hunt, a saga relating the attempt by numerous heroes to hunt the monstrous boar that had been sent by a vengeful goddess to devastate the land of Kalydon.

Various themes cluster around Peleus, the most consistent and striking being those of murder and purification, exile and sanctuary. Peleus himself, as was seen, came as an exile to Thessaly, where he was purified for the murder of his half brother. Later he accidentally killed a companion in the Kalydonian Boar Hunt and was purified again. To his kingdom, as the
Iliad
relates, come other exiles, who are received and purified by him in turn, the most important of these being Menoitios' son Patroklos, Achilles' closest friend (and, in some accounts, his cousin): “ ‘ just as we grew up together in your house,' ” Patroklos recalls to Achilles, later in the epic,

Also received by Peleus were an otherwise obscure Myrmidon warrior called Epeigeus and, most significantly, Phoinix, a faithful family retainer and the third man in the Embassy to Achilles. Having come close to killing his father, who had placed a curse on him never to have sons of his own, Phoinix had fled to Phthia, where Peleus received him and “ ‘gave me his love, even as a father loves his own son / who is a single child brought up among many possessions.' ”

Peleus, then, stands in a somewhat similar relation to troubled men as Thetis does to troubled gods: in the
Iliad,
Thetis is credited with saving Dionysos, Hephaistos, and of course, most famously, Zeus. Importantly, however, Peleus is harboring outlaws, and the congregation of so many fugitives from justice on the wild frontier of Thessaly is striking and suggestive.
⁸

The manner in which Peleus won the hand of the immortal Thetis is described in various, not wholly incompatible traditions, the most famous being that he was told “to seize her and hold her fast in spite of her shape-shifting,” to quote the vivid account of Apollodorus (writing in the second century B.C.): “he watched his chance and carried her off, and though she turned, now into fire, now into water, and now into a beast, he did not let her go till he saw that she had resumed her former shape.”
⁹
The theme of a mortal man who wins a fey, or supernatural maiden, by holding her throughout her changeable forms is widely familiar in fairy and folktales. Such mystical marriages are usually resolved when the maiden eventually forsakes the world of men and returns to her own kin, whether they be swans or seals or, in Thetis' case, deities of the sea.
¹⁰
Significantly, although the
Iliad
implies that Peleus and Thetis lived together in the past, it is clear that they are now apart, Peleus living forlornly in Phthia and Thetis with her sisters and father, Nereus, “the sea's ancient.”

In other accounts of this unequal marriage, Thetis is not captured but married off by a directive from Zeus. Usually this is prompted by his discovery of Thetis' unique destiny to bear a son greater than his father; as has been seen, this is the tradition to which the
Iliad
alludes.
¹¹
In the
Iliad,
the unhappy outcome of this forced union is made unambiguously clear: “ ‘I had to endure mortal marriage / though much against my will,' ” Thetis laments, and her keening brokenheartedness for the marriage and the mortal son the marriage produced is her most characteristic trait in the epic.
¹²

Why, if it was necessary to marry this ill-fated goddess to a mortal, did the gods choose Peleus above all other men? According to one tradition, Zeus, in his role as defender of the rights of hospitality, chose Peleus to reward him for resisting the illicit advances of his host's lustful wife.
¹³
The righteousness of Peleus is further underscored by his ancestry: Peleus' father, Aiakos, was said to be wisest of mortals, even rendering judgment among the gods, and in later tradition he appears in the Underworld as one of the three judges of the dead.
¹⁴

This specific reward for his righteousness apart, Peleus seems, from early tradition, to have been renowned for enjoying the exceptional love and blessings of the gods. In the
Iliad,
this love is spoken of on two occasions, once by Hera, who refers to him as “ ‘one dear to the hearts of the immortals,' ” and once by Achilles, who recalls the many “ ‘shining gifts' ” the gods gave his father. Hesiod gives a long, striking account of Peleus' good fortune, and from this, one suspects that Peleus was once a byword for his god-bestowed blessings: “he came to Phthia, mother of sheep, / bringing [much] wealth from spacious Iolcus, / Peleus,] Aeacus' son, dear to the immortal gods. / The spirit of all [the people] who saw him was astonished at how] he had sacked the well-founded [city], and how he had fulfilled / a lovely marriage], and they all of them said this speech: ‘Three times blessed, son of Aeacus, and four times happy, Peleus.' ”
¹⁵

Yet while a nexus of traditions speaks of Peleus' good fortune, in the
Iliad
he is most memorably recalled as a forlorn object of pity, “ ‘ on the door-sill of sorrowful old age,' ” and it is in this pathetic light that Achilles himself perceives his famous father. The striking disjunction between Peleus' early legendary good fortune and later abandonment suggests that the characterizations preserved in both the
Iliad
and other traditions are mutually incomplete and that some other story, now lost, included him in an account of heroes whose fabled prosperity turned to fabled adversity.
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