The War That Killed Achilles (4 page)

 

As at Troy, some local Mycenaean populations attempted to rebuild on the sites of devastation, returning to the rubble of what had been their homes to scavenge what they could from the citadels' damaged walls and sanctuaries and storerooms; but as with modern disasters, those with the means to move on did so. Although sharing the same culture, religion, and language throughout Greece, the Mycenaeans were distinguished among themselves by regional differences, and when their world collapsed, they chose different routes of escape. Those who had lived in Boiotia, in central Greece, and in wild Thessaly, on the northern extremity of the Mycenaean world, drifted eastward to the island of Lesbos, possibly joining small settlements of kin who had settled here earlier, before or during the time of the Trojan War. Significantly, passing references are scattered throughout the
Iliad
to Achaean raids made in the Troad and eastern Aegean islands: “ ‘I have stormed from my ships twelve cities / of men, and by land eleven more through the generous Troad,' ” says the Greek hero Achilles, in a passage that undoubtedly recalls his people's conquest of the region.
²⁸
Excavations on Lesbos show that the indigenous culture was an extension of the Troad's—by chance or ironic destiny, then, the Mycenaeans had settled among a people who were culturally akin to Trojans.
²⁹
Later Greeks, recounting fragmentary knowledge of their post-Mycenaean history, called these colonists Aeolians, from Aeolis, a son of Hellen, the eponymous clan hero of the Hellenes, or Greeks, and the term is used by historians today.

Behind the Mycenaean immigrants lay their land, their cities, the graves of their ancestors. As refugees they had undoubtedly carried with them whatever they were able of their former lives—gold and precious goods, if feasible, the clothes on their back, household wares—or so one presumes, for this is the way of all refugees, down to the present day. Many things they were unable to preserve, however, and valuable assets evaporated with the disintegration of their civilization: literacy, for example, vanished and was not to reappear for nearly five hundred years.

Of all the things the refugees carried from their shattered world, the most significant were also the least tangible—the gods they worshipped, the language they spoke, the stories they told. Here, in the region of Lesbos, memories of the lost Mycenaean world were handed down to subsequent generations in stories and poems: tales of great cities, rich in gold; remembrances, often muddled, of battles fought and types of armor. Their poems sang of the exploits of warriors who fought like lions and communed with the gods, of favorite heroes, such as the great Trickster whose wily devices always got the better of his foes, and a stubborn giant of a man who fought behind a shield that covered him like a wall—heroes who would later be known to the world as “Odysseus” and “Aias.”
³⁰

Along with such common elements, the refugees also carried traditions that were specific to Thessaly. At some point, a new and electrifying character strode into the evolving narrative about warriors and war, a semidivine hero indelibly associated with rugged, faraway Thessaly, who was called “Achilles.” The old martial tradition also adopted a specific conflict, shaping itself around the siege of an actual town whose ruins now lay just a day's sail away, on the Hellespont, in western Anatolia: “Taruisa,” in the language of the Hittites, “Troia” in Greek—Troy.
³¹

Presumably the Trojan allies among whom the Mycenaeans were now settled possessed stories of their own about the city—its people, its plight, and its destruction; scattered Anatolian words and phrases embedded in the
Iliad
are evidence of contact between the colonizers and local inhabitants.
³²
With the ruins of their own cities behind, and the ruins of another a day's sail ahead, the Aeolic poets entrusted with the old epic narrative might have come to see, from their new vantage, that the old story of Troy's destruction was inextricably bound to the story of their own.

The evolving epic was still centuries from completion, with other critical stages yet to come. Possibly in the late tenth or early ninth century B.C., the Aeolic epic was absorbed by poets working in Ionic Greek.
³³
Sophisticated and innovative, the Ionians enhanced the old Aeolic epic with parallel traditions and made it their own. Despite its discernible strand of well-embedded Aeolisms, the
Iliad
we have today is composed in Ionic Greek, and ancient tradition held Homer to be a poet of Ionia.
³⁴

Such, then, was the mix of elements that were passed down by epic poets over the five centuries that followed the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization, into the era historians have dubbed variably as Greece's “Dark” or “Iron Age”—the age in which Homer lived. During this still-little-known period, populations declined, as did material culture. Yet for all its relative poverty, life and society must not only have endured but eventually thrived, for when the “Dark Ages” ended, a vibrant, new human landscape was revealed. City-states had replaced the feudal palace settlements of Mycenaean times, expeditions abroad had led to the colonization by Greek settlers of new lands, writing had been reestablished, using an alphabet adapted from the Phoenician—and Homer's
Iliad
had been composed.

Little at all is known about how the
Iliad
received its final form. Was it dictated? Was it written? For whom was it performed? Recitation of the entire poem would last for days, suitable entertainment perhaps for occasional festivals, but it seems more likely that the epic was performed in episodes. The
Odyssey
gives portraits of two professional singers, both belonging to the courts of noble families, who perform short “lays”;
³⁵
one of these singers, Demodokos, is blind, a fact that inspired a tradition that Homer himself was a blind bard.
³⁶
The small, aristocratic, and mostly—but by no means exclusively—male gatherings for whom the poets of the
Odyssey
perform are plausible models for the audiences of the
Iliad.
³⁷

 

When the
Iliad
opens, the Achaean and Trojan armies are mired in a stalemate after a decade of hostilities. The huge fleet of ships drawn from all parts of the Greek world lie beached on the sands below Troy's fortified city, their ropes and wooden hulls rotting with disuse; and, as the epic makes very clear, the troops are desperate to go home.

Within the first of its total 15,693 lines, the
Iliad
tells of the confrontation between the hero Achilles and his inept commander in chief, Agamemnon, the ruler of wealthy Mycenae. Following their confrontation, Achilles angrily withdraws himself and his men from the common cause and threatens to return to his home in Thessaly. These events occur in Book One (by early convention—or possibly by Homer himself—the
Iliad
is divided into twenty-four chapters or “Books”),
³⁸
and Achilles remains withdrawn until Book Eighteen; most of the epic's action, then, takes place with its main hero absent. When his closest companion, Patroklos, is killed by the Trojan hero Hektor, Achilles returns to battle with the single-minded intent of avenging his friend. This he does, in a momentous showdown that ends with the death of Hektor. After Achilles buries Patroklos with full honors, Hektor's father, Priam, the king of Troy, comes at night to the Greek camp to beg for the body of his dead son. Achilles relents and returns the body, and Hektor is buried by the Trojans. The epic ends with the funeral of Hektor. From ancient times, this epic has been called the
Iliad
(the first mention of its title is made by Herodotus
³⁹
)—“the poem about Ilios,” Ilios and Ilion being the alternative names for Troy. Remarkably, there are no accounts, in Greek epic or mythology, of the fall of any of the Greek cities; all emotional pathos was invested in the loss of the Asiatic settlement of Troy.

While Homer's epic told of the events of a very narrow slice of the ten-year war, the full legend supported a sprawling web of subplots and a broad cast of both momentous and minor characters. The complete story of the war was once told by a series of six other epics, known collectively as the Trojan War poems of the Epic Cycle. Composed at various dates, all considerably later than the
Iliad,
they also, like the
Iliad,
drew on much older, common traditions. The
Iliad
itself shows a keen awareness of these other, possibly competitive narratives by making allusion to events and characters distinctive to them. Those places where it does so are always worth close study, for they can reveal traditional elements that the
Iliad
adapted or rejected—junctures, in other words, where our
Iliad
made deliberate, transforming choices. The epics of the cycle have long been lost to time, and only their rough outlines and a few stray lines survive, the primary source being a compendium of “useful literary knowledge” cautiously believed to have been written by a philosopher named Proclus, in the fifth century A.D. From these summaries we learn that the epic
Cypria
had told of the origins of the war, for example, while the
Aethiopis
told of the death and funeral of the war's greatest hero, Achilles. Other epics told of the capture of Troy by the Greeks, the destruction of Troy, and the return of the Greek veterans to their homes.
⁴⁰

Given the wide array of topics available, the
Iliad
's selection of the narrowest sliver of the least consequential period of this all-encompassing war—a quarrel between a warrior and his commander during the protracted stalemate of the siege—is striking. Behind this choice there undoubtedly lay a much older epic song built on the familiar theme of wrath, revenge, and the return of a slighted warrior. As it is, the
Iliad
's chosen structure necessarily rivets attention on Achilles. This epic rendering thus focuses less on the launching of fleets or the fall of cities than on the tragedy of the best warrior at Troy, who, as the
Iliad
makes relentlessly clear, will die in a war in which he finds no meaning.
⁴¹

There is much evidence within the
Iliad
to suggest that Achilles was originally a folk hero possessed of magical traits and gifts that made him invulnerable, and that he was brought into epic at a relatively late date. In the
Iliad,
he bears the indelible traces of his earlier folk origins but has been stripped of all magically protective powers. Homer's Achilles, the son of the goddess Thetis and the hero Peleus, is wholly mortal, and indeed his mortality is one of the unmoving poles around which the epic turns.

Achilles is the vehicle for the
Iliad
's greatness. It is his speeches that galvanize the defining events, his thrashing questioning that gives the poem its powerful meaning. “ ‘I for my part did not come here for the sake of the Trojan / spearmen to fight against them, since to me they have done nothing,' ” he rages at his commander in chief, Agamemnon, in the heat of the quarrel that sets off the epic; “ ‘but for your sake, / o great shamelessness, we followed, to do you favour.' ”

“ ‘Nor, son of Peleus,' ” says the Achaeans' aged adviser Nestor, seeking to rein Achilles in, “ ‘think to match your strength with / the king, since never equal with the rest is the portion of honour / of the sceptred king to whom Zeus gives magnificence.' ”

“ ‘So must I be called of no account and a coward' ” is Achilles' response, ignoring old Nestor and speaking directly to Agamemnon, “ ‘if I must carry out every order you may happen to give me. / Tell other men to do these things, but give me no more / commands, since I for my part have no intention to obey you.' ”
⁴²

Thus, drawing on its long tradition, the
Iliad
used conventional epic events and heroes to challenge the heroic view of war. Is a warrior ever justified in challenging his commander? Must he sacrifice his life for someone else's cause? How is a catastrophic war ever allowed to start— and why, if all parties wish it over, can it not be ended? Giving his life for his country, does a man betray his family? Do the gods countenance war's slaughter? Is a warrior's death compensated by his glory? These are the questions that pervade the
Iliad.
These are also the questions that pervade actual war. And in life, as in epic, no one has answered them better than Homer.

Chain of Command

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilles
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaeans,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

—
Iliad
1.1-7