The War That Killed Achilles (2 page)

England, as late as the Elizabethan age, was largely Greekless, and the first translation of a substantial portion of the
Iliad
(ten books) into the English language was made by way of a French text and published in 1581 by Arthur Hall, a member of Parliament until he suffered disgrace for, among other offenses, “sundry lewd speeches” and debt. His translation flirts with doggerel:

Then, between 1598 and 1611, George Chapman's landmark translation of the
Iliad
appeared, made from Greek and other texts (and Latin translations), and was followed in five years by his translation of the
Odyssey.
It was the latter that, two hundred years later, Keats, who did not know Greek, read and commemorated unforgettably in his sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer”:

The ice had been broken, and “there is since the late sixteenth century hardly a generation in the English-speaking world which has not produced its ‘Homers.' ”
⁵

But as knowledge of Homer was disseminated by English translations, as well as by knowledge of the original Greek, the perception of the
Iliad
's central hero, Achilles, shifted, and so accordingly did the perceived meaning of the epic. Not only had Achilles been tarnished by the medieval lays, but from the time of Augustan England of the eighteenth century, he was further diminished by the ascendancy of another ancient epic: Virgil's
Aeneid,
which related the deeds and fate of the Roman hero
pius Aeneas—
Aeneas the pious, the virtuous, dutiful, in thrall to the imperial destiny of his country. In contrast to this paragon of fascism, Achilles, who asserts his character in the
Iliad
's opening action by publicly challenging his commander in chief's competence and indeed the very purpose of the war, was deemed a highly undesirable heroic model.
⁶

Thus, while the
Iliad
's poetry and tragic vision were much extolled, the epic's blunter message tended to be overlooked. Centuries earlier, tragedians and historians of the classical era had matter-of-factly understood the war at Troy to have been a catastrophe: “For it came about that, on account of the length of the campaign, the Greeks of that time, and the barbarians as well, lost both what they had at home and what they had acquired by the campaign,” wrote Strabo in the early first century B.C., in what can be seen as a summation of the ancient view of the Trojan War, “and so, after the destruction of Troy, not only did the victors turn to piracy because of their poverty, but still more the vanquished who survived the war.”
⁷
But now, later ages marshaled the
Iliad
's heroic battles and heroes' high words to instruct the nation's young manhood on the desirability of dying well for their country. The dangerous example of Achilles' contemptuous defiance of his inept commanding officer was defused by a tired witticism—that shining Achilles had been “sulking in his tent.”

 

 

Homeric scholarship goes back to the dawn of literary scholarship, to the work of Theogenes of Rhegium, around 525 B.C., and in most Western—and some non-Western—universities continues to this day. Thousands of books, articles, and lectures, beyond tabulation, have been composed on this epic, and an incalculable mass of scholarship has examined and analyzed the
Iliad
from almost every conceivable angle of approach.

This book is not about many of the things that have occupied this scholarship, although inevitably it will touch on the same themes. This book is not an examination of the transmission of the Homeric text or of what Homer has meant to every passing age. It is not an analysis of the linguistic background of the epic, and it is not about the oral tradition behind the poem; it is not about formulaic expressions or whether “Homer” should refer to an individual or a tradition. It is not about Bronze Age Greece nor the historicity of the Trojan War. This book is about what the
Iliad
is about; this book is about what the
Iliad
says of war.

NOTE TO THE READER

The translation used throughout this book, with one exception, is that of Richmond Lattimore, whose landmark
Iliad
was first published in 1951 by the University of Chicago Press. It was Lattimore's translation that introduced me to the
Iliad
at the age of fourteen and inspired me to learn Greek, and my appreciation of its plain diction but epic gravitas and tone has only increased over the years. I am very grateful to the University of Chicago Press for permission to quote from this work.

The excerpts used in this book are faithful to Lattimore's translation with a few exceptions. The more familiar “Achilles” has been substituted for Lattimore's strictly correct transliteration of the Greek name “Achilleus,” just as “Achaeans” has been substituted for his “Achaians” and “Mycenae” for “Mykenai.” There is no single orthography for the rendering of Greek names, and readers will therefore encounter, in the quoted translation and in transliterations used by editors of the many other works cited, both “Athene” and “Athena,” “Hektor” and “Hector,” “Aias” and “Ajax,” the Greek “Aineias” and the Roman “Aeneas,” and so forth. In addition, the “Greeks” of Homer's
Iliad
are called variously Achaeans, Argives, and Danaans, just as some Trojans are also Dardanians.

The ninth chapter of this book, “The Death of Hektor,” is the author's own translation of the
Iliad
's Book Twenty-two. The translation was not made because it was felt that Lattimore's work could be improved upon, but because this Book is too perfect to be fragmented by commentary, and it seemed an impertinence to lift an entire chapter of another scholar's work.

The Things They Carried

It is the epic of epics, the most celebrated and enduring of all war stories ever told. In sparest outline, the ancient legend of the Trojan War tells of the ten-year-long siege of the Asiatic city of Troy, or Ilion, by a coalition of Greek forces to regain Helen, a famously beautiful Greek noblewoman, who had been taken to Troy by the Trojan prince Paris. The war was won by the Greeks—or Achaeans, as they were known—who finally gained entrance to the fortified city by hiding their best men inside the belly of a gigantic wooden horse alleged to be an offering to the god Poseidon. After the deceived Trojans dragged the horse inside their own fortifications, the hidden Achaeans emerged at night, sacked the city, set it aflame, and killed or enslaved all remaining Trojans.

The greatest war story ever told commemorates a war that established no boundaries, won no territory, and furthered no cause. The war is cautiously dated to around 1250 B.C. Its story was memorialized by the
Iliad,
an epic poem attributed to Homer and composed some five centuries later, around 750-700 B.C. Homer's
Iliad
is the only reason that this inconclusive campaign is now recalled.

Across the perilous gulf between the Bronze Age and Homer's time, generations of poetic storytellers had passed the legend of the war down the centuries. Many of the episodes evoked by these forgotten bards in their now-lost poems were ignored or rejected by the
Iliad.
Homer's epic does not tell of such seemingly essential events as the abduction of Helen, for example, nor of the mustering and sailing of the Greek fleet, the first hostilities of the war, the Trojan Horse, and the sacking and burning of Troy.

Instead the 15,693 lines of Homer's
Iliad
describe the occurrences of a roughly two-week period in the tenth and final year of what had become a stalemated siege of Troy. Thus the dramatic events that define the
Iliad
are the denouncement by the great Achaean warrior Achilles of his commander in chief as a mercenary, unprincipled coward; the withdrawal of Achilles from the war; and the declaration by Achilles that no war or prize of war is worth the value of his life. Homer's
Iliad
concludes not with a martial triumph but with Achilles' heartbroken acceptance that he will in fact lose his life in this wholly pointless campaign.

 

 

In Homer's day, the ruins of what had once been the well-built walls of Troy, on their commanding site overlooking the Hellespont, as the Dardanelle Straits were then known, were visible to any traveler; the
Iliad
's close description of the Troad, the region around Troy, suggests that it was known to its poet at first hand. The war, then, was real, not mythic, to Homer and to his audience. Similarly, the major Greek principalities named by the
Iliad
as participating in the war also existed. Their ruins, too, were visible to any traveler.

Knowledge of Troy and Troy's time has been advanced by archaeology. The Trojan War itself, however, the terrible conflagration that unmoored whole nations, remains mysterious. Regardless of whatever facts may come to light, the
Iliad
's unambiguous depiction of what this war
meant
remains unchanged. Reaching deep into his already ancient story, Homer had grasped a savage and enduring truth. Told by Homer, the ancient tale of this particular Bronze Age war was transported into a sublime and sweeping evocation of the devastation of all war of any time.