Free The War That Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander Page A

Ships’ magnificent display of men and nations dies away here—specifically, it dies with the deal cut between Zeus and Hera. Zeus will sacrifice the Trojans, whom he loves beyond all other peoples, and Hera will sacrifice the Achaean cities she holds most dear in order to glut her hatred. Both gods have agreed to an understanding that will break their own hearts. The unwitting, unwilling victims of this pact are all that grand host, the thousands of lives paraded in such pomp and magnificence by both Catalogues. “ ‘O son of Atreus, blessed, child of fortune and favour / many are these beneath your sway, these sons of the Achaeans,’ ” Priam had exclaimed in wondering admiration, viewing from the battlement of his doomed city the glittering Achaean host.
    For Homer’s audience, the exchange on Olympos would have held particular, devastating import. The cities named by Hera as those she held most dear—“ ‘Argos and Sparta and Mycenae of the wide ways’ ”—had been their own. 42 As Greek populations descended from the refugees of these lost cities would have recognized, the self-defeating pact between the gods represented a bitter parable—the price of the war against Troy was their own defeat. Later traditions would spell out this conviction in more detail, but never with more devastating eloquence.
    â€œ ‘Father Zeus, watching over us from Ida, most high, most honoured, . . . Let the friendship and the sworn faith be true for the rest of us’ ”; “. . . the Trojans and Achaeans were joyful, / hoping now to be rid of all the sorrow of warfare.” With deliberate, extended scenes, the Iliad establishes the hatred with which the war is held by both sides. Lugrós, polúdakrus, dusēlegēs, ainós— “baleful,” “bringing many tears,” “bringing much woe,” “dread”—these are the epithets the Iliad uses of war. 43 Earlier, in vivid, dramatic detail, it established that the Achaeans are ready to flee for their homes. No one wants to be here; everyone regrets that the war ever started. Everyone wants a way out. The war seems to have gathered autonomous momentum, which, as the epic emphasizes, will end in mutual destruction.
    . . . on that day many men of the Achaeans and Trojans lay sprawled in the dust face downward beside one another.
    These are the last, pointed words of Iliad, Book Four, summing up the renewal of fighting on the day that could have ended in peace. To echo Helen’s uncomprehending despair: “ ‘Did this ever happen?’ ”

Enemy Lines
    There the screaming and the shouts of triumph rose up together of men killing and men killed, and the ground ran blood.
    â€” Iliad 4.450-51

    An epic of war, the greater part of the Iliad is concerned with killing and dying, and the deaths of some 250 warriors are recorded, the majority in relentlessly inventive detail: “This man Meriones pursued and overtaking him / struck in the right buttock, and the spearhead drove straight / on and passing under the bone went into the bladder. . . . He dropped, screaming, to his knees, and death was a mist about him.” “Next he killed Astynoös and Hypeiron, shepherd of the people, / striking one with the bronze-heeled spear above the nipple, / and cutting the other beside the shoulder through the collar-bone / with the great sword, so that neck and back were hewn free of the shoulder.” “He spoke, and threw; and Pallas Athene guided the weapon / to the nose next to the eye, and it cut on through the white teeth / and the bronze weariless shore all the way through the tongue’s base / so that the spearhead came out underneath the jawbone.”
    Narrated, as it were, in the heat of battle, the swift, graphic descriptions of wounding and killing are endowed with just sufficiently realistic detail to render even the more far-fetched scenes believable; Homer