Greek Mythology, page 26
Achilles’ absence encouraged the Trojans. Even Paris swaggered in the front line:
Draped across his shoulders was a panther skin, and buckled fast a sword and quiver. In his hand he shook two spears, bronze-headed, as he called out all the bravest of the Greeks to fight in single combat. When Menelaus, whom the war-god Ares loved, saw him striding out among the ranks, he delighted in his heart as a hungry lion delights to find a fallen carcass – an antlered stag or goat – and ravenously he tears at it, although swift dogs and eager huntsmen crowd around.
The outcome of this single combat between Paris and Menelaus was meant to end the war. But when Paris was wounded, Aphrodite intervened, wrapping him in mist and transporting him to his bedchamber. Battle was rejoined, and when more warriors were killed or wounded, even the gods took pity. So at the bidding of Apollo (who supported Troy) and Athene (who supported the Greeks), Troy’s greatest champion, Hector, issued a challenge to the greatest of the Greeks to fight him. He meant Achilles, but since he still refused to fight, Ajax took his place. When neither man won they agreed instead to exchange gifts. Ajax gave Hector his sword-belt; Hector gave Ajax his sword.
The Trojans were ascendant, but, when it was announced that their ally, the Thracian king Rhesus, was nearby with reinforcements, the fulfilment of another condition of their city’s capture helped seal their fate still tighter. A prophecy foretold that Troy could not fall if Rhesus’ horses drank from the River Scamander. So Odysseus and Diomedes, king of Argos, crept out by night, intercepted Rhesus, killed him and stole his horses.
But the next day Hector and the Trojans breached the Greek stockade, fanned out across the beach and torched the fleet. Achilles could stand by no longer. Still, though, he would not fight. Even when Agamemnon offered him great riches, he rebuffed him. Instead, he lent Patroclus his armour, and let him lead his men to battle. Unleashed, Patroclus slew Sarpedon, the son of Zeus, and chased the Trojans back inside their walls. But then Apollo intervened. He punched Patroclus so hard on his back that his helmet flew off, revealing his true identity. As Patroclus stood there stunned, Hector drove a spear through his belly.
As a lion defeats a tireless boar in battle, when they fight enraged on a high mountain ridge, each thirsting for a trickling spring; the boar snorts loud, but the lion defeats him with his strength. Thus Hector, Priam’s son, deprived the brave Patroclus of life, although he had killed many, impaling him at close quarters with his spear.
Then he stripped Patroclus’ armour. Somehow the Greeks retrieved the body and brought it to Achilles. Racked with self-blame, he mourned his friend and promised retribution.
That night Sleep and Death flew down to Troy to claim Sarpedon’s corpse. Back home in Lycia he was buried with great honour. The same night, Thetis brought armour freshly fashioned by Hephaestus to Achilles’ tent. She had already warned her son that one of two destinies awaited him: either to grow old in Phthia, where his bravery would be forgotten; or to die at Troy and enjoy ‘unwithering fame’ (kleos). Achilles knew, too, that if he killed Hector, he would die soon afterwards. He did not care. He yearned only to avenge Patroclus.
Next day Achilles rejoined the fight. No one could resist him. Even the river-god Scamandrus felt his anger, as he wrestled vainly with Achilles to stop him reaching Troy. At last Achilles found Hector. For a moment they faced each other. Then Hector turned and fled. Close on his heels Achilles followed: ‘As a hawk high in the mountains, the fastest of all birds, swoops hard to catch a trembling dove; she flees from him, while he, shrieking shrilly, presses hard and his heart drives him on to snatch her.’ As the gods watched enthusiastically, Athene, disguised as Deiphobus, persuaded Hector to stand his ground. Hector launched his javelin. Then:
he called to white-shielded Deiphobus, and asked for a long spear. But Deiphobus had vanished. And Hector understood and said, ‘The gods have called me out to die. I thought Deiphobus stood near me, but he is inside the walls, and Athene has deceived me. Now hateful death is close and there is no escape. I think this has long been the will of Zeus and of his son Apollo, who shoots from afar, who helped me until now with willing hearts. But now my share in life is over.’
As Hector lay dying, his throat transfixed by a spear, he begged Achilles to return his body for burial. Instead, he tied Hector to his chariot with the sword-belt Ajax had once given him, and dragged the corpse around the walls of Troy before returning to his tent. Then he organized Patroclus’ funeral, with athletic games and sacrifices (including twelve Trojan prisoners); and every day he dragged Hector’s corpse three times around the funeral mound.
Devastated at the treatment of Hector’s body, Priam visited Achilles in his tent by night. With profound humanity and using simile to devastating effect, Homer relates how:
Great Priam … clasped in his arms Achilles’ knees and kissed his hands, his terrible man-killing hands, that had slain so many of his sons. And just as blind infatuation [atē] grips a man, who kills another in his father’s house and so flees to a wealthy stranger’s home, and wonder seizes all who look on him, so was Achilles seized with wonder as he looked on godlike Priam.
As Priam described his desolation at the loss of so many sons, imagining Achilles’ father Peleus in Phthia anxiously awaiting news, Achilles was moved to compassion. In a moment of sublime humanity both wept together for the tragedy of war. So Priam took his son’s body back to Troy and buried him.
The Death of Achilles & its Consequences
Achilles continued to harry his Trojan enemies and their allies. In single combat he killed both the Amazon queen Penthesilea and the Ethiopian king Memnon, the son of Eos and Tithonus. At last, death came to Achilles, not at the hands of a great warrior, but through the skill of the archer, Paris. As Achilles fought beneath Troy’s Scaean Gates, Apollo guided Paris’ arrow. It struck the one place where Achilles was not invulnerable: his right heel. The Greeks and Trojans fought hard over his corpse, lying ‘in the swirling dust, huge and heroic but no longer caring for his battle-skills’.
Ajax took Achilles’ body to the Greek ships, where Thetis and her nymphs rose from the waves, ‘and the sound of their other-worldly lamentation rippled across the surface of the sea’. As the Muses sang their requiem and the army clashed their weapons on their shields to honour him, Achilles was cremated. His bones were laid in a gold urn with Patroclus’ remains, and a mound was raised on the headland, ‘to be seen far off from sea by those alive today and those still to come’. As the ghost of Agamemnon, who provides this description in the Odyssey, concludes: ‘Even in death your name is not forgotten, but your fame [kleos] will live for ever among men.’
Some claimed that Zeus made Achilles immortal. An early traveller, Leonymus of Croton, even claimed to have seen the spirits of Achilles (now married to Helen) and other Greek heroes on White Island near the Danube’s mouth. Others said that Achilles spent eternity in the Islands of the Blessed, the husband of Medea. Late mythographers, keen for a romance between Achilles and Polyxena, had him consider betraying the Greeks in return for her hand in marriage.
Ajax believed that by right he should inherit Achilles’ armour, but out of spite – or brainwashed by Athene – the Greeks awarded it to Odysseus. In god-lashed fury Ajax stalked the Greek camp, intent on massacring all who had humiliated him, but at sunrise he awoke surrounded by the corpses of not men but cattle. Athene had deluded him. Humiliated, he killed himself with the sword he had received from Hector. Only his half-brother Teucer (son of the Trojan princess Hesione) honoured Ajax’s corpse, until Odysseus persuaded Agamemnon to bury it.
Final Conditions Fulfilled
Four last conditions controlled Troy’s fate. The first was that Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, a brave but brutal warrior, be summoned from Scyros. (In early tradition the siege of Troy may have lasted not ten but twenty years, which makes Neoptolemus’ age more plausible.)
Neoptolemus helped in the fulfilment of the next precondition, too. Only with Heracles’ bow and arrows could Troy be taken. These were owned by Philoctetes, a Greek hero, who, before reaching the Troad, was bitten by a snake. The stench from his wound was so obnoxious that he was abandoned on Lemnos (an island associated in the Argonaut myth, too, with unpleasant smells). Now when Odysseus arrived, demanding his presence at Troy, Philoctetes gave him short shrift. Only Neoptolemus’ pleas – and those of Heracles’ ghost – persuaded Philoctetes to rejoin the army. At Troy he was cured by Machaon, the son of the healing god Asclepius.
Watched by Athene, Greeks and Trojans clash shields fighting for possession of the ‘huge and heroic’ body of Achilles. (Chalcidian amphora, c. 540 BC.)
Philoctetes proved his worth, soon shooting Paris in the wrist and ankle and blinding him in one eye. The prince crawled to Mount Ida, where Oenone had once promised to cure him should he ever be mortally wounded. Still piqued by Paris’ infidelity, however, the nymph refused – though later in remorse she hanged herself. Meanwhile Helen tried to leave Troy, lowering herself down on ropes, but she was caught and given as wife to Deiphobus.
The penultimate condition, that one of Pelops’ bones be brought to Troy, was easily fulfilled, but the last took guile and planning. Ownership of Athene’s statue, the Palladium, guaranteed Troy’s safety. So Odysseus plotted to steal it. In a disguise made more realistic when he was voluntarily beaten by his comrades, he undertook a reconnaissance mission, presenting himself at Troy as a Greek deserter. Helen recognized him, but, longing to escape Deiphobus’ unwelcome clutches, she kept quiet. Then Hecabe too discovered his identity. When Odysseus desperately supplicated her, Hecabe’s piety forbade her from exposing him and he escaped – only to return that night with Diomedes and steal the statue.
The Sack of Troy
The war might still have dragged on indefinitely had not Epeius (from Mount Parnassus) conceived an ingenious plan: to build a massive fir-wood horse, conceal hand-picked Greeks inside it, and cause it to be taken into Troy. Soon the horse, its belly pregnant with armed men, was standing proudly on the othwerwise empty shore. For the Greeks had sailed away, leaving only the smoking ruins of their tents. And the wooden horse.
Jubilant, the Trojans raced out of the city to read the inscription on the horse’s flank: ‘From the Greeks to Athene, a thank-offering for a safe homecoming.’ But some doubted this Greek gift: ‘There were three views: one to hack the hollow wood with merciless bronze; another to drag it to the highest point and throw it on to the rocks; and the third to let it stand there as a pious offering to the gods.’
As they debated, a Greek was brought before them. He was Sinis, a spy, and his lying message was convincing: tired of the war, the Greeks were sailing home; if the Trojans took the horse inside their city, Athene would favour them, but if they left it on the beach, they would excite her wrath. While the priest Laocoön counselled caution, two serpents slid across the sea from Tenedos and coiled around him and his two sons before, abandoning their strangled corpses, they glided through the gates and on to Troy’s acropolis.
Ascribing Laocoön’s death to his opposition to the gods, the Trojans knocked down a section of their walls and pulled the horse into the city, where they feasted long and hard. Later, when the city slept, Helen walked the starlit streets. She knew the horse was a ruse, and she knew who was hidden there. Coquettishly she taunted each in turn, flawlessly imitating their wives’ voices. Inside, the unnerved Greeks kept perfect silence.
A Greek gift: one of the earliest representations of the Trojan War appears on a Cycladic relief vase, c. 675–650 BC.
At last they opened the trap door, let down ropes and slid noiselessly to the ground. While some ran to unbar the gates, others signalled to their comrades. For the fleet had merely hidden in the lee of Tenedos, and now it had returned. Suddenly the streets were filled with armed men. Neoptolemus butchered Priam on the palace steps. Another general (the ‘Lesser’ Ajax) tried to rape Cassandra as she clung to Athene’s altar, while Odysseus and Menelaus slaughtered Deiphobus, and in a fit of anger mutilated his corpse.
Striding through the smoke and carnage, Menelaus sought out Helen. But when he saw her standing there in front of him, her breasts bare, her face so radiant and still so beautiful, he was overcome once more by love. He dropped his sword and took her in his arms. Soon they were sailing back to Greece – with Aethra, Theseus’ mother, Helen’s slave, whom she had brought from Sparta. (Her grandsons later restored her to Athens.)
When the massacre was ended, the Greeks led off Troy’s womenfolk to slavery. Only Polyxena remained: Achilles’ ghost demanded her as a sacrifice. The others’ fate was just as grim. Cassandra fell to Agamemnon (though she knew that at Mycenae both would be killed by Clytemnestra). Hector’s wife, Andromache, whose father, brothers and husband had all been killed by Achilles, was given to Achilles’ son Neoptolemus, while to prevent him avenging Troy, her son Astyanax was thrown to his death from Troy’s walls.
Assigned to Odysseus, Hecabe discovered that Polymestor, a Thracian guest-friend, greedy for Troy’s gold which he had been given for safe-keeping, had murdered Polydorus, her one remaining son. With Agamemnon’s help, Hecabe lured Polymestor to her tent, killed his children in revenge and blinded him. By now she had become so savage that it was little wonder that before she could sail for Greece she turned into a dog.
Only the Trojan prince Aeneas escaped, carrying on his shoulders his father Anchises and tightly clutching the hand of his son Ascanius (known to the Romans as Iulus). With the last remnant of Trojans they sailed to Italy to found the city which in time would be called Rome. Storms and shipwrecks meant that few of Troy’s conquerors were destined to return home. Like Troy itself their time was over.
Troy in History & Today
Troy enjoyed a commanding position. Although today alluvial deposits from the River Karamenderes Çayi (probably Homer’s Scamander) mean the coastline has moved almost 6 km (4 miles) away, in the early Bronze Age (c. 3000 BC) Troy was by the sea. Sited near a wide, shallow bay just south of the entrance to the Dardanelles, it controlled the shipping lane between the Aegean and the Black Sea. Moreover, brisk westerly winds meant that sailing ships could voyage east along the Dardanelles only by rowing, but even this was difficult. The west-flowing current runs at up to 3 knots, so to maintain headway oarsmen needed to achieve a constant speed of at least 5 knots. Where better to rest and wait out the winds than in the bay at Troy? The city enjoyed great prosperity. Archaeologists have identified nine phases of development, some of which are subdivided for greater precision.
In the early third millennium BC Troy I was a village of stone and mudbrick houses, but already by its second phase (Troy II) around 2550 to 2300 BC, stone-crowned ramparts pierced by monumental gates surrounded a citadel with large (40-m/130-ft long) buildings, used for public gatherings or religious purposes. A further palisade enclosed a lower town covering 9 ha (22 acres). Troy II was destroyed by fire, perhaps in war, for its people did not salvage their riches, which included artifacts made from gold, silver, bronze, electrum, carnelian and lapis lazuli. When Heinrich Schliemann discovered Troy II’s exquisite items of jewelry, he identified them as the ‘Jewels of Helen’. They were a thousand years too early.
Excavating between 1871 and 1879, Schliemann wrongly identified Troy II as ‘Homer’s Troy’, digging out much of what lay above and badly damaging three phases of Troy’s history. This compounded destruction wrought by Hellenistic Greeks, who flattened the mound for the foundations of their Temple of Athene.
Enough survives to tell that the citadel of Troy VI, founded around 1700 BC, was magnificent. Limestone walls, 5 m (16 ft) wide, angled gently inwards as they rose, their line softened by subtle vertical offsets. Fine towers soared high. A paved and well-drained road led through the city, where on terraces two-storeyed buildings stood, many with defensive ground-floor walls and pillared halls. Outside the citadel was a thriving town, covering 30 ha (75 acres), protected by a ditch and palisade and provided with water by a sophisticated system of artificial shafts and tunnels. Finds suggest that Troy VI traded with the Greek world rather than Anatolian Hittites, but around 1300 BC this changed – perhaps exacerbated by Troy VI’s partial destruction, by earthquake or plunder. The discovery of one arrowhead has excited more speculation than it perhaps deserves.
In the citadel smaller houses now crowded once open spaces. New towers were added, and the Lower Town expanded. We know this bustling metropolis prosaically as Troy VIIa, but the Hittites called it Wilusa (linguistically close to the Greek ‘Ilion’, originally ‘Wilion’). Thirteenth-century BC Hittite correspondence reveals that an attack on Wilusa by south Anatolian Arzawans prompted its king Alaksandu (‘Alexander’?) to bring his city under Hittite rule. Another mid-thirteenth century Hittite document (the ‘Tawagalawa Letter’) is written to the king of the Ahhiyawa – probably the Hittite form of ‘Akhaioi’, as Homer calls the Greeks – confirming ‘an agreement regarding Wilusa, over which we went to war’. Around 1200 BC the Hittites intervened once more when the Wilusan king Walmu was ousted from his throne. Then around 1180 BC Troy VIIa was destroyed by fire.
While these fragmentary references suggest tensions and even warfare, neither they nor archaeology confirm the historicity of the Trojan War. It is not surprising. Mythology and epic are not history. Both rely on invention and exaggeration, and disappointment that Troy was not the scene of a ten-year war over Helen must be tempered by reflecting on its influence on our imagination and creativity over three millennia (for the Iliad contains material which seems to date at least to 1000 BC). Inspired by a brief war over Wilusa which ended in a treaty between Greeks and Hittites, poetic vision fused with reality to form a masterpiece.
