The War That Killed Achilles Read Free Page B

finds its counterpart in Muhammad Ali’s famous refusal to fight in Vietnam:
    I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. . . . No Viet Cong ever called me nigger. . . . I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder, kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people.
    Like Ali’s, Achilles’ words are particularly dangerous in that one can assume he is speaking aloud words that other, less charismatic men had long thought.
    The critical exchange, with the full tide of Achilles’ eloquence is as follows:
    â€œ. . . but for your sake,
o great shamelessness, we followed, to do you favour,
you with the dog’s eyes, to win your honour and Menelaos’
from the Trojans. You forget all this or else you care nothing.
And now my prize you threaten in person to strip from me,
for whom I laboured much, the gift of the sons of the Achaeans.
Never, when the Achaeans sack some well-founded citadel
of the Trojans, do I have a prize that is equal to your prize.
Always the greatest part of the painful fighting is the work of
my hands; but when the time comes to distribute the booty
yours is the greater reward, and I with some small thing
yet dear to me go back to my ships when I am weary with fighting.
Now I am returning to Phthia, since it is much better
to go home again with my curved ships, and I am minded no longer
to stay here dishonoured and pile up your wealth and your luxury.”
    â€œ ‘Run away by all means’ ” is Agamemnon’s retort, and recklessly he repeats, and now confirms, his earlier threat to strip Achilles of his prize, a captive woman named Briseis:
    â€œ. . . that you may learn well
how much greater I am than you, and another man may shrink back
from likening himself to me and contending against me.”
    Achilles’ instinct is to draw his sword and kill the king; he is checked, hand on hilt, by the sudden intervention of the goddess Athene, visible to Achilles alone, who offers sympathetic words but counsels him to stay his hand. Whether Athene’s appearance is taken literally or metaphorically—the sober second thought sent by the goddess known for wisdom—Achilles is receptive and sheathes his sword.
    The full import of Achilles’ rebellion is difficult to gauge given the Iliad ’s vagueness on the nature and basis of Agamemnon’s power. In other legend, related in detail by Hesiod, an epic poet following Homer, the coalition of Achaean forces was the result of a vow made years earlier by each of Helen’s many suitors to her father: each man pledged that, regardless of whom she married, he would unite with her other suitors to come to her aid, if the need should ever arise. All the major Greek heroes at Troy appear to have made this pledge—save Achilles, who was too young to have been a suitor (but, according to Hesiod, “neither warlike Menelaus, nor any other human on the earth would have defeated him in wooing Helen, if swift Achilles had found her still a virgin”). 5 The Iliad makes no mention of this legendary pact, but some kind of agreement like it nonetheless informs the epic. Consequently, Agamemnon appears to be commander in chief not only because he is king of the wealthiest kingdom of the coalition but because he is brother to Menelaos, husband of Helen, whose cause the coalition fights. Minor kings such as Achilles, Diomedes, and Odysseus, then, have come to Troy with their own troops voluntarily, not as vassals beholden to the Great King.
    The weight of Agamemnon’s authority is spelled out most unambiguously by Nestor, king of Pylos, the Achaean army’s aged counselor-at-large, who was famously long-lived: “In his time two generations of mortal men had perished, . . . and he was king in the third age.” Characteristically, his pronouncements betray him as being stuck in his own past; Nestor’s many war memories date from the First World