Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
mourns for Patroclus, wandering distraught along the beach, or time and again lashing his enemy’s corpse to his chariot and dragging it three times around his beloved’s tomb. At last the gods intervene. Thetis comes to tell her son that it is Zeus’ will he return the body. That night, helped by Hermes, who has led him unseen past the Greek sentries, old King Priam appears in Achilles’ tent and begs to be allowed to ransom Hector’s body. He offers in exchange magnificent gifts: twelve of the brocaded robes for which the weavers of Troy are celebrated all over the known world, tripods and cauldrons, ten bars of gold, a priceless Thracian cup. Achilles, who has repeatedly spurned Agamemnon’s attempts to conciliate him with rich gifts, accepts.
On the wonderful shield Hephaestus forged for Achilles two cities are depicted, two visions juxtaposed. One is that of a world of war, where even allies quarrel over tactics, where animals and men alike are promiscuously and wastefully killed, where the only way of resolving differences is by the slaughter of opponents. The other is a microcosm of civilized life, typified first by weddings and dancing, emblems of union and cooperative creation, and, most pointedly, by the detailed representation of a dispute resolved, not by violence, but by argument culminating in financial payment. A man has been murdered. The killer and the victim’s kinsman have come into the marketplace so that the case may be publicly debated. The killer offers to pay the blood price. The other refuses to accept it. Both ask for a judge to ‘cut the knot’ of their antagonism, to save them from the horrors of vendetta. The elders of the city, in turn, propose solutions. Money, not blood, will end this quarrel.
Mercenary exchange has frequently been held to be antithetical to the heroic ideal. One who allows himself to be bought off forfeits his claim to glory. Plato censured Homer for showing the great Achilles trading a corpse for gifts. A hero should not be represented as suffering from the ‘disease of mean-spirited avarice’. Sallust, the Roman historian, praised the great men of Rome’s early days for their disdain for gold, their preference for fame: ‘To be seen of all while doing a splendid deed, this they considered riches.’ Virgil, whose hero was the Trojan prince Aeneas, cast Achilles as the archenemy, not only of Troy but of civilization in general, and took every opportunity of discrediting him: in the Aeneid the events of the Iliad are conflated so as to suggest that Achilles was driven by financial greed, that he killed Hector with the ignoble intention of selling him. The distaste for deal-making has proved persistent. At the beginning of the twentieth century members of the European nobility still thought twice before marrying their children to nouveaux riches who had made their fortunes in trade.
The heroes of the Iliad have no such scruples. In the terrifyingly belligerent world Homer describes, the making of a financial deal seems like a blessed release from the otherwise inevitable cycle of killing and counter-killing. As Ajax argues: ‘Any man will accept the blood-price paid/For a brother murdered, a child done to death.’ Once the price has been paid the murderer can be reincorporated into society and the injured man must ‘curb his pride, his smouldering, vengeful spirit’. Such transactions may run counter to the individual’s craving for vengeance but they are necessary to the preservation of the community. Far from being dishonourable, they are manifestations of praiseworthy forbearance. Achilles’ refusal to accept Agamemnon’s gifts along with his apology is a sign that he is still death-bent, an enemy of his own kind, a ‘hard, ruthless man’.
He accepts the exchange Priam proposes because the old King asks it not only for his own sake but also for that of Achilles’ father, who will some day grieve as he does now for the loss of a glorious son. Touched at last, Achilles weeps with him. The rage that had made him emotionally inviolable has passed. He feels pity, for Priam, for his own father, for Patroclus, for himself. He is no longer isolated, no longer either superhuman or subhuman, but part of a family, part of a race. He urges Priam to eat, as Odysseus and Thetis have each on earlier occasions urged him to do: the need for food being something that humbles people, reminds them of their vulnerability and of the imperative need for cooperation. He seems almost ready to countenance the compromises and sacrifices a social existence requires, to accept the limitations physicality sets to a human’s behaviour. Ever since Briseis was taken from him, he has been set on a suicidal course. ‘Only death submits to no man,’ says Agamemnon, infuriated by his obduracy; but Achilles has been as implacable as death, and implacably set on dying. Perhaps, if it were open to him to choose again, he might this time choose survival. But he is given no second chance. Priam returns to Troy with Hector’s body. For twelve days both sides observe a truce while the Trojans celebrate the funeral rites. Shortly after the fighting resumes, Achilles falls.
The Romans had a legend that in earliest times a chasm opened up in the centre of the Forum, threatening to yawn wide enough to swallow the city. The terrified citizens consulted the oracles, which told them that the horrid mouth would close only if Rome’s greatest treasure were cast into it. A splendid young man named Curtius, handsome, brave and nobly born, at once sprang upon his horse and, fully armed as though for battle, put his spurs to its sides and leapt into the abyss. The earth closed over him. The city was saved. Similarly, the death of Achilles, ‘the best of the Achaeans’, opens the way for a Hellenic victory. Once their supreme warrior, their greatest treasure, has been sacrificed, the Greeks take Troy.
When the war is over, when the fabled towers of Troy are shattered, its riches plundered and its people slaughtered or enslaved, when the Greeks at last have sailed away, Poseidon and Apollo throw down the massive rampart that protected the Greek ships. The proper sacrifices were not made before building began. The prodigious wall is an impious defacement of the landscape. The gods call upon the waters of the earth to wash it away. Rivers in flood, torrential rain, the sea’s breakers, all batter against it until there is nothing left of that desperate labour. Poseidon ‘made all smooth along the rip of the Hellespont/And piled the endless beaches deep in sand again’. This war, the most celebrated in human history, is to leave no trace upon the face of the earth.
‘You’d think me hardly sane,’ says Apollo to a fellow god, ‘if I fought with you for the sake of wretched mortals./Like leaves, no sooner flourishing, full of the sun’s fire,/Feeding on earth’s gifts, then they waste away and die.’ Human affairs, viewed sub specie aeternitatis, are of gnat-like insignificance. Human aspirations are absurd, and human lifespan as short as summer’s lease.
For Homer’s heroes there is no sublime afterlife to compensate for this one’s brevity. The souls of the dead survive, but once parted from their bodies their existence is shadowy and mournful. When a warrior dies his soul goes ‘winging down to the House of Death,/ Wailing its fate, leaving his manhood far behind,/His young and supple strength’. Physical beauty, the marvellous vigour and grace of the human body, these are life’s splendours. The pleasures of the intellect, of stratagem and story telling and debate, are prized as well, but they too are a part of corporeal life, dependent for their very existence on ear and tongue and brain. ‘In Death’s strong house,’ says Achilles, ‘there is something left/A ghost, a phantom – true, but not real breath of life.’
Achilles and his fellows treat bodies, alive or dead, with reverence and tenderness – or with a violence that deliberately outrages the body’s acknowledged sanctity. More than half of the fighting described in the Iliad consists of battles over corpses, as a warrior’s enemies try to strip his fallen body of armour (which, poignantly, is far more durable than its wearers) while his comrades struggle to defend him from such posthumous indignity, giving their lives sometimes to save one already dead. It is the flesh that is precious: without it, the spirit is of little consequence. Funerals are awesome, long-drawn-out, and prodigally expensive. Funeral games honour the dead by celebrating the survivors’ bodily strength and swiftness and skill, insisting, even in commemoration of one who has lost it, that the breath of life is of ineffable value. And once gone it is irretrievable. Achilles refuses all Agamemnon’s