Free The War That Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander Page B

“knew where the major organs were,” as one medical authority has stated. “He did not know what their function was.” 1 For a civilian audience, however, they suffice to evoke convincingly the carnage of the battlefield. More to the point, notwithstanding the anatomical improbabilities, these deaths are clearly intended to be realistic.
    More important, the deaths are also clearly intended to be pathetic, and on this point the Iliad parts company with conventional heroic saga. Fighting, battling, wounding, inflicting death are not merely the central tropes of heroic narrative, they are by and large what heroic narrative is about, as can be illustrated by the following fairly typical, fairly random examples:
    The forty warriors rushed to the fight,
Began the fight against the heathen.
They came in a flood then,
They were covered in blood.
They scattered cries here.
They brandished their pikes here.
The face of the earth was covered with blood. . . .
    â€”Epic of Manas
    Or:
    Each strained at the other from the saddle
Till the eight hoofs of their horses were mingled.
But neither was victorious.
They unsheathed their glittering swords from their covers,
Seven and eight times they dealt each other blows
Over their bladders,
But neither was victorious.
They made haste, they struck each other on their belts,
They dealt each other blows behind and before. . . .
    â€”Dzhangariada 2
    In distinct contrast to these impersonal slugging matches, the Iliad ’s “poetry of combat,” as it has been called, takes pains to personalize its heroic deaths. The slain warriors of the Iliad are mostly obscure fellows who have received no previous mention in the epic, but who are evoked—brought to life—at the moment they are killed by some small personalizing detail: “Meriones in turn killed Phereklos, son of Harmonides, / the smith, who understood how to make with his hand all intricate / things. . . .” “Meges in turn killed Pedaios, the son of Antenor, / who, bastard though he was, was nursed by lovely Theano / with close care, as for her own children, to pleasure her husband. . . .” “Diomedes of the great war cry cut down Axylos, / Teuthras’ son, who had been a dweller in strong-founded Arisbe, / a man rich in substance and a friend to all humanity / since in his house by the wayside he entertained all comers.”
    The vanquishing warrior may carry the action, but the audience’s emotional attention is diverted to the fallen foe. This personalizing quality ensures that most of the Iliad ’s deaths are perceived—perhaps only fleetingly—to be regrettable. Although the winning of glory in combat is the aim of the conventional hero of combat poetry, in the Iliad glory is usurped by sympathy for the human being, possessed of a family and life story, who has been extinguished. Fully three times as many Trojans die as Achaeans in this Greek epic, so the Iliad is dense with the descriptions of enemy warriors who die pathetically. This remarkable point is worth emphasizing: subtly, but with unflagging consistency, the Iliad ensures that the enemy is humanized and that the deaths of enemy Trojans are depicted as lamentable. The Iliad is insistent on keeping to the fore the price of glory.
    The Iliad ’s wounded warriors also tend to die. There are no instances in which a mortally wounded hero fights on to prevail over the weakness of his flesh; no god reattaches a hero’s severed limb or miraculously restores a shattered skull. Nor are we ever shown the enduring wounds of war, the maimed soldiers who somehow survived a heroic onslaught at the cost of a limb, or an eye, or other diminishment. This may simply be a reflection of the medical realities of Homer’s Dark Age, when, undoubtedly, wounded soldiers did in fact tend to die. The inevitability of death after wounding may, then, be a historical, not a poetic, truth, but in any event the mortality of