The War That Killed Achilles (22 page)

Everything Hektor believes is false, just as everything Patroklos states with his last breath is true. For all his prowess, Hektor is an ordinary soldier, privy to no prophecies, blind to his own fate. Elated, drunk with triumph, Hektor allows himself to entertain an impossible notion—that perhaps Achilles, too, will fall to him.

As Trojans and Achaeans previously swarmed over the body of Sarpedon, contending for his corpse and the prize of his armor, so now both sides converge to fight for Patroklos. Menelaos strides forward and stands over him, “as over a first-born calf the mother / cow stands lowing, she who has known no children before this.” This will be Menelaos' finest hour in the epic, although soon, faced with the relentless onslaught of ranks of Trojans, he is forced to make a temporary retreat. Safe among his own companions, he looks around wildly for Aias: “ ‘This way, Aias, we must make for fallen Patroklos / to try if we can carry back to Achilles the body / which is naked; Hektor of the shining helm has taken his armour.' ” At stake is the timeless credo “Leave no man behind.” The stakes are very high, as Hektor of the shining helm, the loving family man and dutiful patriot, having stripped the remaining armor from Patroklos, “dragged at him, meaning to cut his head from his shoulders with the sharp bronze, / to haul off the body and give it to the dogs of Troy.”
²⁷

Aias, always reliable, joins Menelaos in returning to Patroklos, and while the two heroes mount a second, pitched defense over the corpse, Hektor briefly withdraws so as to put on the plundered armor of Achilles. For all of Book Seventeen, throughout the remainder of this long day, the battle rages over the body of Patroklos, which is soon obscured in an eerie mist. Waves of grief are set in motion by his death, washing over god, man, and even Achilles' immortal horses, who stand apart from the fray in shock:

As the day draws at last toward dusk, Antilochos, Achilles' other close companion, is dispatched to break the dreadful news to Achilles. Amid the din and confusion and the dusty mist that engulfs the toiling men, the fall of Patroklos has passed unnoticed for a few, and one of these few is Antilochos. Now he, too, learns the tragic news; he, too, like the immortal horses, stands stock-still in grief: “He stayed for a long time without a word, speechless, and his eyes / filled with tears, the springing voice was held still within him.”

The shock waves of this one death reverberate through the heavens and across the plain, from Zeus to the horses of Achilles to Antilochos. The audience holds its breath while the news is at last carried by Antilochos toward the ships. Simultaneously, with momentous effort, Menelaos and Meriones of Crete hoist the body of Patroklos over their shoulders and, covered by great Aias and his companion, attempt a slow, dangerous retreat.

At the ships, where he has been keeping an anxious watch, Achilles is gripped by a premonition, “thinking / over in his heart of things which had now been accomplished,” and noting that the Achaeans are once again retreating in confusion. As his fears mount, Antilochos appears and breaks the dreaded news: “the black cloud of sorrow closed on Achilles. / In both hands he caught up the grimy dust, and poured it / over his head and face, and fouled his handsome countenance.”

As he lies sprawled in the dust, Thetis, from the depths of the sea, hears her son's crying. Knowing what this forebodes, she, too, “cried shrill in turn.” From the deep recesses of the ocean throng about her the shadowy multitude of her sister Nereïds, daughters of Nereus, the old man of the sea. Filling the “silvery cave” where Nereus dwells, they beat their breasts and wail, their threnody echoing that of the handmaids of Achilles and Patroklos. “ ‘Hear me,' ” Thetis wails to her sisters:

So profound and affecting is Thetis' grief that one could overlook the fact that she is mourning the wrong man; it is Patroklos who has died—not Achilles.

Homer's
Iliad
describes the events of a very few days in the last year of the Trojan War; these events do not encompass what was surely one of the most climactic moments of the entire Trojan War cycle—the death of Achilles. That the
Iliad
knew the body of tradition that did describe Achilles' death, however, is evident from its striking parallels with key scenes in the other epics. In the
Aethiopis,
Achilles avenges the Trojan ally Memnon for the death of his close friend Antilochos, whose role resembles that of Patroklos in the
Iliad.
Then, having slain Memnon,

A telling counterpart of the Iliadic scene of Thetis' mourning of Patro clos also occurs toward the end of Homer's second epic, the
Odyssey.
There the ghost of Agamemnon tells the ghost of Achilles that when he, Achilles, died, “ ‘ your mother, hearing the news, came out of the sea, with immortal / sea girls beside her. Immortal crying arose and spread over / the great sea' ” (24.47-49).

For an audience of Homer's days, then, knowledgeable of the wider epic tradition, the
Iliad
's account of the death of Patroklos would have directly evoked the death of his alter ego, Achilles. Above all, the extended scene of Patroklos' death, with its echoes of the traditional deaths of both Antilochos and Achilles—and Sarpedon's death, in turn, with its foreshadowing of the fate of Patroklos—did more than ensure that the
Iliad
's audience was entertained with a subtle evocation of one of the most famous, possibly popular episodes of the Trojan war cycle.
³⁰
As each death presages the next, the sense of dreadful, impending fate is heightened. The Embassy of Book Nine is memorable for Achilles' passionate declaration that nothing offered on earth is more precious than life. Now the
Iliad
has reached that point where the death of Achilles is forecast as confidently as was the death of Patroklos. Having calibrated the value of his wrath and his honor against his existence, Achilles has been ambushed by guilt and love, and regardless of whether the
Iliad
covers the event or not, unambiguously, he will shortly die. Thetis mourns now because this tragic fact is already as good as accomplished.

These background resonances are made explicit when Thetis comes to comfort her son. Rising from out of the sea with her grieving sisters, she comes to Achilles' shelter. Crying out, she cradles his head in her arms and, weeping, reminds him that all the things he prayed to Zeus for “are brought to accomplishment.” He replies:

The
Patrokleia
and the events of its immediate aftermath reflect some of the most masterful and sophisticated narrative structuring in the
Iliad.
Sarpedon and Glaukos; Antilochos and Achilles; immortal armor that cannot save the man who wears it; divine horses who could run with the West Wind but are stilled with grief, and the screaming death of the mortal horse who dared to run with them; ancient sacrificial ritual and echoes from
Gilgamesh;
a grieving mother whose son still lives—all these motifs and themes dramatically darken the last hours and death of Patroklos. In turn, the layered resonances of the
therápōn
's death foreshadow the event the
Iliad
's audience will never see—the death of Achilles.

The creation of Patroklos established one of the memorable figures in epic and also forged a moral link between two ancient themes: a story of heroic wrath, in which the angered hero is propitiated to return to his community, and a story of retribution, in which the death of the hero's companion is avenged. Homer's innovation was to inexorably relate the one to the other. Achilles' wrath will never be appeased; rather it will be effaced by survivor's guilt.
³²

Phílos; hetaros—
“comrade,” “buddy,” “mate”—“my own,” “my best,” “my beloved companion.” The terms that define the relationship between Patroklos and Achilles have no true counterparts in the civilian world but belong to the enduring terminology of war. “It's a closeness you never had before,” as a veteran of the Vietnam War described his friend-in-arms. “It's closer than your mother and father, closest [
sic
] than your brother or your sister.”
³³
Today the “loss of a buddy,” along with “fear of death,” is recognized as one of the standard primary causes of war trauma. At the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a grieving soldier returned from Iraq “walks the hospital campus in the bloodied combat boots of a friend he watched bleed to death.”
³⁴

Magic armor and horses that carry the hero out of danger—Homer understood that this was pale stuff. The creation of Achilles' alter ego, his sacrificial second self, allowed Homer to unleash the emotions that will always most authentically memorialize war. In the concluding lines of his magisterial account of the Great War, John Keegan offers a summation that is true of all:

No Hostages

“Now I shall go, to overtake that killer of a dear life, Hektor; then I will accept my own death, at whatever time Zeus wishes to bring it about, and the other immortals.”

—
Iliad
18.114-16

Achilles' stern resolve is declared to Thetis, and his grieving mother both accepts his decision and determines to make one last attempt to outmaneuver fate. Just as all the traditions outside the
Iliad
characterize her as being obsessed with protecting her son—attempting to render him invulnerable or immortal, disguising him as a woman among women—so she now embarks upon a last desperate strategy to forestall the death she well knows he is destined to die. New armor, divine armor, armor made by Hephaistos, the very smith of the gods—in this Thetis lays her faith of last resort. Achilles' own armor—the divine gift to Peleus—is now worn on Hektor's shoulders, and Achilles has no armor of his own.
¹
“ ‘Do not yet go into the grind of the war god, / not before with your own eyes you see me come back to you,' ” Thetis implores her son. “ ‘For I am coming to you at dawn and as the sun rises / bringing splendid armour to you from the lord Hephaistos.' ”