The Iliad Page 6

  She goes on to define what she means by force: “force is what makes the person subjected to it into a thing.” She wrote these words in 1939: the article was scheduled for publication in the Nouvelle Revue Française, but before it could be printed Paris was in the hands of the Nazis and her compatriots, like all Europe, were subjected to force and turned into things—corpses or slaves.

  “Its most beautiful, its purest mirror . . .” The most marvelous lines in the Iliad owe their unearthly, poignant beauty to the presence of violence, held momentarily in reserve but brooding over the landscape. They are the lines that end Book 8 and describe the Trojans camped on the plain, awaiting the next dawn, which will launch them on their attack on the Greek fortification.

  And so their spirits soared

  as they took positions down the passageways of battle

  all night long, and the watchfires blazed among them.

  Hundreds strong, as stars in the night sky glittering

  round the moon’s brilliance blaze in all their glory

  when the air falls to a sudden, windless calm ...

  all the lookout peaks stand out and the jutting cliffs

  and the steep ravines and down from the high heavens bursts

  the boundless bright air and all the stars shine clear

  and the shepherd’s heart exults—so many fires burned

  between the ships and the Xanthus’ whirling rapids

  set by the men of Troy, bright against their walls. (8.636-49)

  These are surely the clearest hills, the most brilliant stars and the brightest fires in all poetry, and everyone who has waited to go into battle knows how true the lines are, how clear and memorable and lovely is every detail of the landscape the soldier fears he may be seeing for the last time.

  THE TROJANS

  The city, the polis, as the Greeks called it, was for them the matrix of civilization, the only form of ordered social life they could understand; it is the exclusive form assumed by ancient Greek culture from its beginning to its end. The city was small enough so that the citizens knew one another, participated in a communal life, shared the common joy of festivals, the sorrow of public bereavement, the keen excitement of competition, the common heritage of ancestral tombs and age-old sanctified places. The destruction of a city is a calamity all the more deeply felt because of the close cohesion of its inhabitants and their attachment, reinforced over generations from a mythical past, to its landmarks and buildings.

  The first city we hear of in Greek literature is Troy. It is characteristic of the Iliad’s tragic viewpoint that this city, the literary prototype of all Greek cities, is to be destroyed. The poem ends before Troy falls, but we are left in no doubt about its fate. One of the deep sources of the tragic force of the Iliad is that the city of Troy is doomed, doomed to go down in fire and slaughter under the assault of the Achaeans, whose cities are far away and half-forgotten in the long siege, whose home for ten years has been the raw world of tent shelters and beached ships.

  Homer’s Troy has been assigned a few traits that sound Oriental (or at any rate non-Greek)—Priam’s fifty sons, for example—but it is still recognizably a Greek polis. It is a site chosen with an eye to defensive capabilities, with a high eminence that serves as a citadel, a sacred area for the temples and palaces. It is near the junction of two rivers, and it depends on the produce of the surrounding plain, which is rich plowland and grows wheat. It is fortified against attackers: it is well-walled and well-built, it has steep ramparts and gates. These fortifications enclose a vision of civilized life, the splendors of wealth and peace. The city contains, for example, “Priam’s palace, that magnificent structure / built wide with porches and colonnades of polished stone” (6.289—90). It is at the gates of this palace that the Trojans hold their assemblies. The city has its hallowed landmarks: the Scaean and Dardanian Gates, the tombs of the royal ancestor Ilus in the plain, of old Aesyetes, and of Myrine; the oak tree by the Scaean Gates (6.283), the fig tree near the tomb of Ilus, and the hot and cold springs ...

  where the wives of Troy and all their lovely daughters

  would wash their glistening robes in the old days,

  the days of peace before the sons of Achaea came ... (22.185-87)

  And in the city are those riches the Achaeans dream of, of which they promise each other shares when the city falls, those riches which, even though the nine years’ war has reduced them to a level that Hector regards with dismay (18.334-38), are still enormous. We are given a glimpse of them in Book 6 when Hecuba goes into the royal storeroom to select an offering for Athena, and again in Book 24 when Priam assembles the ransom for Hector’s body.

  But the wealth of Troy is apparent also from the fact that time after time Trojan warriors, menaced with death as they lose a fight, offer a rich ransom:

  “Take us alive, Atrides, take a ransom worth our lives!

  Vast treasures are piled up in Antimachus’ house,

  bronze and gold and plenty of well-wrought iron—

  father would give you anything, gladly, priceless ransom

  if only he learns we’re still alive in Argive ships!” (11.153-57)

  So the sons of Antimachus to Agamemnon, and in similar terms Adrestus begs Menelaus for his life and Dolon supplicates Odysseus. In all three cases the ransom is refused—the war has turned savage in its final phase. But in time gone by, Trojan ransom money has been a steady source of wealth for the Achaeans; it is clear from Thersites’ sarcastic questions addressed to Agamemnon, in Book 2, that this was a regular traffic. “Still more gold you’re wanting? More ransom a son / of the stallion-breaking Trojans might just fetch from Troy?” (2.267-68). The repeated appeals to accept ransom are not only indicative of Troy’s immense wealth, they are also a reminder of Trojan attitudes: the belief, typical of rich, civilized cities, that wealth can always buy a solution, and the illusion that civilized ways of warfare—quarter for disarmed men or men who surrender, ransom and exchange of prisoners—are laws as valid and universal as the laws under which their own civilization lives. Inside Troy the manners of civilized life are preserved; there are restraints on anger, there is courtesy to opponents, kindness to the weak—things that have no place in the armed camp on the shore. In the city, those who have most cause to blame, even to hate, Helen, the old men of Troy, members of the council, murmur to each other praise for her beauty as they express their wish that she would go back to the Achaeans; and old Priam, who has lost sons because of her presence in Troy and will lose more—Hector above all, and all Troy with him—Priam too treats her with kindness and generous understanding.

  Unfortunately for Troy, the Trojans have the defects of their qualities: they are not so much at home in the grim business of war as their opponents. In Book 3 Priam comes to the battlefield to seal the oaths that fix the terms of the duel between Paris and Menelaus, but he cannot bear to stay and watch the fight: he fears for his son. And Paris, the loser in the duel, is rescued by the goddess Aphrodite and returned to the arms of Helen. He is more at home in his splendid palace than on the battlefield. But he knows his strengths as well as his limitations; he answers Helen’s bitter mockery with equanimity, and accepts his brother’s harsh but just reproaches calmly, with a claim that war is not the whole of life and that preeminence in other spheres has its importance:

  “... don’t fling in my face the lovely gifts

  of golden Aphrodite. Not to be tossed aside,

  the gifts of the gods, those glories ...

  whatever the gods give of their own free will—” (3.77-80)

  But Troy is not at peace: it is under siege, and by men who mean to raze it from the face of the earth. The arts of peace are useless now. Troy will not be saved by the magnanimity and tender-heartedness of Priam nor by Paris’ brilliance in the courts of love. If it is to survive it will do so because of the devotion, courage and incessant efforts of one man, Priam’s son Hector. On him falls the whole burden of the war. He is a formidable warrior, fo
rmidable enough so that in Book 7 no Achaean volunteers to face him in single combat until they are tongue-lashed by Menelaus and then by Nestor. But war is not his native element. Unlike Achilles, he is clearly a man made for peace, for those relationships between man and man, and man and woman, which demand sympathy, persuasion, kindness and, where firmness is necessary, a firmness expressed in forms of law and resting on granted authority. He is a man who appears most himself in his relationships with others. It is significant that our first view of him in action is not in combat but in an attempt to stop it. Announcing Paris’ offer to fight Menelaus and so settle the war, he moves ahead of the Trojan ranks and forces them to a seated position with his spear; meanwhile he is the target of Achaean arrows and stones, until Agamemnon calls a halt. It was a dangerous initiative and one that demanded immense authority, a force of personality recognized by both sides.

  But his true quality is seen in his relationship with his fellow countrymen and his family. In Book 6 the seer Helenus sends him back to Troy to organize a sacrifice and procession to Athena. He no sooner appears than the wives and daughters of the Trojans come running, to ask for news of their “brothers, friends and husbands” (6.285); he is their stay and support, the man to whom they turn for comfort. In the palace of Paris, Helen tells him to sit and rest, but he will not: he must visit his own wife and child before he goes back to the fight. He finds Andromache on the wall, with their son. She weeps and begs him to be careful, as wives have begged their husbands all through history.

  “Reckless one,

  my Hector—your own fiery courage will destroy you!

  Have you no pity for him, our helpless son? Or me,

  and the destiny that weighs me down, your widow ... (6.482-85)

  And she begs him to cease fighting in the forefront of the hand-to-hand battle on the plain, to adopt a defensive strategy and command from the walls. Hector’s sad reply reveals his tragic dilemma. His feeling for her prompts him to accept her suggestion but he cannot do it. He is the leader, the commander, as his name suggests: Hector means “Holder.” He is the one who holds the Trojan defense steady by his example and he must fight in the front ranks. In any case, the standards of martial valor by which he has always lived will not permit it:

  “All this weighs on my mind too, dear woman.

  But I would die of shame to face the men of Troy

  and the Trojan women trailing their long robes

  if I would shrink from battle now, a coward. ” (6.522-25)

  But deep in his heart he knows that the effort is futile, that Troy is doomed. He realizes what that will mean for her and hopes that he will not live to hear her cries as she is led off to slavery. He is distracted from this dark vision of the future by the terrified cries of his own baby son, who recoils screaming from the bronze-clad man who moves to embrace him. Forebodings of the future, no matter how well-founded, have to be brushed aside if life is to go on, and Hector now speaks in more hopeful terms as he prays that his son will grow up to be a greater man than his father and then comforts his sorrowing wife. This scene reveals the greatness of Hector as a complete man; we see not only the devotion of the warrior who does his duty and fights for his people, even though he knows that they are doomed, but also his greatness as a husband and father—a striking contrast with the atmosphere of the armed camp on the shore.

  It is Hector’s misfortune that Troy is not at peace but at war. He must return to the battle, which now, in accordance with the will of Zeus, turns against the Achaeans. Hector fights courageously, stubbornly, at times exultantly in the near madness of victorious slaughter. But even this berserk fury is still the fighting spirit of the man of the polis, the protector of the community, not the individual rage for glory and booty of a Diomedes or an Achilles. When, at the flood-tide of success, with the Achaeans pinned against their ships, an omen is read by the seer Polydamas as a warning to retreat, Hector will have none of it, will not put his trust in birds and the interpreters of their movements. “Fight for your country—” he says, “that is the best, the only omen!” (12.281). It is one of the most famous lines in the poem, respected and admired by the Greeks of later centuries as the epitome of patriotic courage, of the mood that inspired men to defend their own city, great or small, in the face of overwhelming odds, hostile portents and omens of disaster. It is for his country that he is fighting, and he fights well enough so that the will of Zeus is fulfilled: the Achaeans are penned up in their fortifications, the first Achaean ship is fired. Hector is lord of the battlefield; indeed, from what we have seen of champions in combat in the poem so far, he can claim to be the best man, Greek or Trojan. But that is because we have not yet seen Achilles in battle. And when we do, and Homer recreates for us the irresistible violence of the man born and shaped for battle, who values life, his own included, as nothing, the killer in his own domain—lion in the bush, shark in the water—we realize that Hector’s defeat and death are inevitable.

  The Iliad is a poem that lives and moves and has its being in war, in that world of organized violence in which a man justifies his existence most clearly by killing others. This violence is Achilles’ native element: only in violence are his full powers exerted, his talents fully employed. And he has deliberately chosen this sphere of activity, in which he is invincible, though he knows it will end in his early death.

  “Mother tells me,

  the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet,

  that two fates bear me on to the day of death.

  If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy,

  my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.

  If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,

  my pride, my glory dies ...

  true, but the life that’s left me will be long . . .” (9.497-504)

  And he has chosen glory and death at Troy. The natural consequence of that choice is a fierce devotion to the glory which he has preferred to a long life; any diminution of that glory, any hint that he is not the center of the world of violence, is an intolerable insult. And Agamemnon, in the quarrel that opens the poem, strikes at the roots of his pride, at that self-esteem which he prizes above life itself.

  “You are nothing to me—you and your overweening anger!

  ... I will be there in person at your tents

  to take Briseis in all her beauty, your own prize—

  so you can learn just how much greater I am than you . . .”

  (1.213-19)

  This is an unforgivable insult; it denies Achilles any claim to honor at all, it treats him as a man of no worth, in fact as a subject, an inferior.

  Achilles starts to draw his sword. For him there can be only one answer to such words: “so you can learn just how much greater I am than you” amounts to a denial of his right to exist. For the honor of Achilles is more important than that of other men; he has already chosen an early death for honor’s sake. His intention was to “thrust through the ranks and kill Agamemnon now” (1.225), and he would have done so if Athena had not intervened. Instead he withdraws to his tents and, through his mother Thetis and her supplication of Zeus, brings about the Trojan resurgence, which will send so many valiant souls of heroes down to Hades. For more than three quarters of the poem Achilles takes no part in the fighting; when at last, with Patroclus dead and the fight raging over his corpse, Achilles is ready to fight, he has no armor—he cannot even help rescue the body of his friend. He goes to the edge of the ditch to show himself to the Trojans and shout an announcement that he will return to the battle. And later, in the new panoply made by Hephaestus and brought by Thetis, he advances for the first time in the poem against the Trojan ranks. We have seen many men fight in the Iliad so far, but not Achilles. We have heard of his fighting in the past, from himself and others, but now Homer must show it to us, give us a picture of the supreme violence, goaded to fury and at the highest pitch of its relentless skill and strength. He does not fail us. The violence of Books 20 and 21 makes what has gone
before seem child’s play.

  Death is the lot of the Trojans who stand in the way of Achilles as he seeks out Hector, the new object of his rage. One after another he cuts them down and the death blows are hideously, unnecessarily strong. Others he drives into the river Xanthus and plunges in after them, killing in the water. Later he meets one who escaped from the river and, weary and sweating, has thrown his weapons on the ground. It is one of Priam’s sons, Lycaon, who had been Achilles’ prisoner once, had been ransomed and returned to Troy, only to meet his death now. As Achilles raises his spear, Lycaon runs under it, clasps Achilles’ knees and pleads for life. But Achilles will take no prisoners now. Once he did, but now, for the Trojans who killed his friend Patroclus, there is no pity in his heart, none, above all, for the sons of Priam, the brothers of Hector. In a famous and terrifying passage, he formulates the creed of the warrior devoted to death:

  “Come, friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so?

  Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you.