The War That Killed Achilles (28 page)

from the city, on his own, and driving him toward the plain
has stopped him of that fateful ardor
which possessed him, since he never remained in the ranks of men
but rushed far to the front, yielding in his courage to no one.”
Thus speaking, she raced through the hall like a madwoman,
her heart shaking, and her two maids ran with her.
But when she reached the tower and the crowd of men,
she stood on the wall, staring around her, and saw him
dragged before the city. Swift horses
dragged him, unconcernedly, to the hollow ships of the Achaeans.
Dark night descended over her eyes,
she fell backward and breathed out her soul;
far from her head she flung her shining headdress,
the diadem and cap, and the braided binding,
and the veil, which golden Aphrodite gave her
on that day when Hektor of the shimmering helm led her
out of the house of Eëtion, when he gave countless gifts for her dowry.
In a throng around her stood her husband's sisters and his brothers'
wives,
who supported her among themselves, as she was stricken to the point
of death.
But when then she regained her breath and the strength in her breast
was collected,
with gulping sobs she spoke with the Trojan women:
“Hektor, I am unlucky. For we were both born to one fate,
you in Troy, in the house of Priam,
and I in Thebes, under forested Plakos,
in the house of Eëtion, who reared me when I was still young,
ill-fated he, I of bitter fate. I wish that he had not begotten me.
Now you go to the house of Hades in the depths of the earth,
leaving me in shuddering grief,
a widow in your house. The child is still only a baby,
whom we bore, you and I, both ill-fated. You will
be, Hektor, no help to him, now you have died, nor he to you.
For even if he escapes this war of the Achaeans that has caused so
many tears,
there will always be for him pain and care hereafter.
Other men will rob him of his land;
the day of orphaning cuts a child off entirely from his agemates;
he is bent low in all things, his cheeks are tearstained.
In his neediness, the child approaches his father's companions;
he tugs one by the cloak, another by his tunic;
pitying him, one of them offers him a little cup,
and he moistens his lips yet does not moisten his palate.
But a child blessed with both parents will beat him away from the
feast,
striking him with his hands, reviling him with abuse:
‘Get away—your father does not dine with us'—
and, crying, the boy comes up to his widowed mother
—Astyanax, who before on his father's knees
used to eat only marrow and the rich fat of sheep,
then, when sleep took him and he left off his childish play,
he would slumber in a bed in his nurse's embrace,
in his soft bedding, his heart filled with cheery thoughts.
Now he will suffer many things, missing his dear father
—Astyanax—‘little lord of the city'—whom the Trojans called by this
name,
for you alone defended their gates and long walls.
Now beside the curved ships, away from your parents,
the writhing worms devour you when the dogs have had enough
of your naked body; yet there are clothes laid aside in the house,
finely woven, beautiful, fashioned by the hands of women.
Now I will burn them all in a blazing fire,
for they are no use to you, you are not wrapped in them,
—I will burn them to be an honor to you in the sight of the Trojan men
and Trojan women.”
So she spoke, crying, and the women in response mourned.

Everlasting Glory

Achilles has killed Hektor. He has won the climactic battle of this great epic, as he has won his confrontation with Agamemnon. The wrath of Achilles was the dramatic theme of the
Iliad,
and that wrath has now been retired and “unsaid.” Surely, by all convention, the
Iliad
will end here, with the triumphant return of its vindicated hero. But the
Iliad
is not a conventional epic, and at the very moment of its hero's greatest military triumph, Homer diverts his focus from Achilles to the epic's two most important casualties. Patroklos and Hektor: it is to the consequences of their deaths, especially to the victor, that all action of the
Iliad
has been inexorably leading.

At the Achaean camp, Achilles has dumped Hektor's corpse “on his face in the dust” by Patroklos' bier. While the other Achaeans returned to their ships, the Myrmidons, under Achilles' direction, have been processing around the body of Patroklos, weeping. Achilles himself orchestrates a stupendous sacrifice, and oxen, sheep, pigs, and bleating goats are slaughtered for the funeral feast and their blood “ran and was caught in cups” as an offering to Patroklos, a gesture possibly calculated to return to him his life and color.
¹
Still filthy with blood and grime from battle, Achilles refuses to wash until he has cremated Patroklos, and he gives orders for work teams to set forth “ ‘with the dawn' ” to cut timber for the funeral pyre. At last, worn with weariness and grief, he falls asleep by the seashore, with the sound of the waves washing over him:

The ghost of Patroklos begs a last request: that his bones and ashes be placed with those of Achilles, when he, too, dies. In his sleep, Achilles responds to Patroklos, imploring him to stay, “ ‘if only for a little' ”—but the spirit vanishes, going “underground, like vapour, / with a thin cry.” Starting awake, Achilles wonders aloud, “ ‘Even in the house of Hades there is left something, / a soul and an image, but there is no real heart of life in it.' ”

In the
Iliad,
the act of dying is described in close detail, as is the treatment of the corpse, the act of mourning, and the state of mind and actions of those left to grieve. The fate of the deceased warrior himself, however, his “essence” as opposed to his corpse, is touched upon directly only here, with the appearance of Patroklos'
psychḗ
and
eídōlon—
his soul and image.
²
Historically, the Greek practice of cult worship of heroes kept a hero's identity potent after his death, through the worshippers' belief that the dead had power to assist the living; but although hero cults became widespread following the end of Homer's Iron Age, there is no evidence of this practice in the
Iliad.
³

More particularly, in the case of its two most important dead heroes, the
Iliad
strenuously eschews any hint that the state of death can in any way be mitigated or that the hero retains any abilities after death. Once the soul, or life force, flees, the inanimate body becomes matter, which, although tenderly handled, washed, anointed, and shrouded, will—barring some rare act of divine intervention—rot and breed flies. The soul departs, going “ ‘down under the gloom and the darkness,' ” and although possessions and gifts are cremated along with the corpse, these are only tributes to the dead warrior, not objects he will have any capacity to use in his “journey” to the next existence. In the
Odyssey,
the dreadful impotence and nonbeing of the dead is made explicit; here one learns only that the “ ‘images of dead men' ” flutter on the far shore of the unnamed river of the Underworld, presumably the Styx, and that burial or cremation is required to release them wholly.
⁴
Thus Patroklos does not exist anymore; only his
eídōlon,
or likeness, briefly flickers, caught between memories of Patroklos' life on earth and the urgent need to reach the gray world that now claims him. The simple words of Patroklos' ghostly image ensure that the audience understands, whatever may be said or done afterward in his memory, that death brings the warrior “himself ” no reward or glory.

The funeral of Patroklos is performed with barbaric splendor, led by an honor guard of Myrmidons, mounted in full armor behind their chariots, who are followed by “a cloud of foot-soldiers / by thousands.” Amid this magnificent procession, the body of Patroklos is borne by the
hetaroi
—the companions—blanketed with their hair that they have cut as an act of mourning. At the place of the pyre, Achilles cuts his own hair, “which he had grown long to give to the river Spercheios,” in Phthia, in fulfillment of a vow Peleus had made to commemorate his son's homecoming; Peleus had lived in expectation of his son's eventual return, it seems, as Thetis had lived in expectation of his imminent death.

Around the pyre, a hundred feet square, are arranged the slaughtered bodies of fat sheep and shambling cattle, in whose blubber the body of Patroklos is wrapped, the better to catch the flames. Four horses and the dogs that had belonged to Patroklos are driven against the pyre and slaughtered, and the whole set fire; now Achilles “also killed twelve noble sons of the great-hearted Trojans / with the stroke of bronze, and evil were the thoughts in his heart against them.” When Patroklos' body has been consumed and the fire damped down with wine, his companions gather the bones from the ashes, “weeping, and put them into a golden jar with a double / fold of fat, and laid it away in his shelter, and covered it / with a thin veil; then laid out the tomb and cast down the holding walls / around the funeral pyre, then heaped the loose earth over them / and piled the tomb.”
⁵

Patroklos' sumptuous funeral accords with heroic burials attested in the literature of different cultures from different ages: Icelandic, Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Vedic, as well as epic Greek—all share a consistent burial pattern. The hero, usually with his armor, is cremated on a pyre;
⁶
many animals are slaughtered; the funeral ceremonies take place over an extended time of many days; the remains are interred in a tumulus, mound, or barrow. This consistency of detail suggests that the origin of these motifs may have lain not in poetic tradition but in actual burial practice.
⁷

The archaeological record supports this view, and broad historical counterparts with Patroklos' funeral can be found in both the Bronze Age Hittite kingdoms and Iron Age Greece—although not in the Greek Bronze Age, where interment in tombs or graves, not cremation, was the burial method of the Mycenaeans. In the recently discovered grave of a Mycenaean military official dating to 1200 B.C.—around the time speculated for the Trojan War—a sword, a spear point, and a knife had been laid beside skeletal remains curled into a fetal position, a poignant reminder that not all burials from the heroic age were heroic.
⁸

For many years, it was believed that the closest match to the rites described by Homer were to be found among the Hittites, who cremated their kings on pyres, quenched the embers with wine, and collected the bones, which they then immersed in oil and wrapped in linen.
⁹
In 1980, however, the spectacular discovery of an Iron Age burial above the town of Lefkandi, on the Greek island of Euboia, revealed that heroic burials had been performed in Greece much nearer to Homer's own time. Under the remains of a monumental building, over 150 feet long by some 45 feet wide and constructed over the charred relics of a great pyre, lay a bronze amphora containing the bones of a thirty- to forty-five-year-old male wrapped in a fine linen robe that, remarkably, had remained intact from the time of interment, just after 1000 B.C. Buried with the “hero” were four horses and a woman richly adorned in gold, who had possibly been sacrificed, along with personal effects that included a sword, a razor, and an iron spearhead
¹⁰
(the
heroön
was illegally bulldozed before its thorough excavation by the local landowner, who wanted the site for a vacation home).
¹¹

When Patroklos' magnificent funeral has been concluded and his bones laid in their urn and his tomb piled over, the Achaeans turn back toward their shelters but are stopped by Achilles. Seating them in assembly, he then directs a stream of treasures to be carried from his ships: tripods, cattle, iron, and women. These will be the prizes awarded in athletic contests held in Patroklos' honor, for chariot racing, footracing, boxing, weight throwing, full-armored close combat, archery, spear throwing. Such games were evoked in the
Iliad
very recently: when Hektor ran from Achilles, it was not for the “prizes in the races of men—/ but they ran for the life of Hektor.”