Things to Do in Ilium When You’re Dead

Introducing Iliad 18.

This post is a basic introduction to reading Iliad 18. Here is a link to the overview of Iliad 17 and another to the plan in general. As a reminder, these posts will remain free, but there is an option to be a financial supporter. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.

Iliad 18 brings us to the end of the Iliad’s longest day: since book 11, the battle has raged on the field between the city of Troy and the Achaean ships, moving all the way into the ships until Patrokos entered the battle in Achilles’ armor and pushed the Trojans back. Book 12 features the breaching of the Achaean walls, book 13 has the Achaean captains getting injured, then Books 14 and 15 are primarily occupied with the seduction of Zeus and its aftermath, and book 16 brings Patroklos into the fray.

The cumulative action, aimed at transferring Achilles’ rage from Agamemnon and the Greeks to Hektor and the Trojans, goes through several delaying mechanisms. Patroklos first speaks to Nestor in book 11 but does not arrive to speak to Achilles until book 16. Antilochus is dispatched at the end of book 16 to tell Achilles what happened. And then in book 18 we get another delaying device: Achilles arms have been lost, Thetis goes to replace them near the beginning of the book, arrives 2/3 of the way through, and then the final quarter of the book is the description of Achilles’ shield.

There is so much in book 18. But here’s the basic structure:

1.       Achilles learns the truth (Thetis counsels him), 1-242

2.       Trojan Assembly, 243-315

3.       First lament for Patroklos, 310-342

4.       Divine Interlude, 343-366 (Hera and Zeus)

5.       The Shield Scene, 367-617 (Thetis requests; the actual shield-making: 477-617)

Each of these sections adds something to the themes I have outlined in reading the Iliad: (1) Politics, (2) Heroism; (3) Gods and Humans; (4) Family & Friends; (5) Narrative Traditions. The central themes I emphasize in reading and teaching book 18 are family & friends as well as heroism (in Achilles’ responses and the first laments for Patroklos), politics in the characterization of Hektor and the final Trojan assembly, and narrative traditions in the creation of Achilles new weapons. There’s a lot to be said about Gods and Humans as well from the exchanges in this book. But nobody has time for that: we’ve got to get Achilles back to war!

Was It was all his fault? Burdening the Earth with Heroes

In the first section of book 18 as I outline it above, Achilles receives the news about Patroklos and soon has a pretty immediate impact on the battle: his screams cause the Trojans to rush back toward the city and hold an impromptu assembly. But before his grief gets so public, he has a conversation with his mother who starts off by asking him why he is weeping, when “all these things were done by Zeus / the way you prayed when you raised your hands before  and asked that the Achaeans would all hide among the ships because they lacked you and suffer terrible things” (18.74-77). Achilles responds by acknowledging what his mother has said, but asking how he can continue to live if he does not kill Hektor. Thetis responds that Hektor’s death will quickly lead to his own.  Achilles responds with a memorable, gut-wrenching speech.

Homer, Iliad 18.97-126

“Swift footed Achilles then addressed her, glaring sharply:
‘May I die right away, since I was not ready to defend my friend
As he was being killed. He (men) died so very far from his homeland
and (de) he lacked me as someone to defend him from harm.
So now I will not return to my dear paternal land,
Since I was not a saving light for Patroklos nor any of the rest
of our companions, those many indeed killed by shining Hektor
No, I sat here alongside the ships, a useless burden on the earth,
When I am the kind of person no other Achaean can match
In war. Well, there are others who are better in the assembly.
I wish strife would perish from the worlds of gods and men
Along with anger, that force that makes even a prudent man mean,
And somehow grows more sweetly than dripping honey
In the chests of men something like smoke.
So Agamemnon the lord of men made me angry.
But now let’s leave all these things in the past, even though we are aggrieved,
Battering down the dear heart in our chests with necessity.
I am going to find the murderer of my dear love,
Hektor. I will accept death at the time whenever Zeus
And the rest of the immortal gods want to give it to me.
For not even violent Herakles escaped his fate,
though he was most dear to lord Zeus, son of Kronos,
but fate tamed him and the anger of Hera, hard to endure.
That’s how it is for me too, if my fate is similar.
I’ll lie down when I die. But now I would claim noble fame
And make any of the Trojan Women and the deep-bosomed Dardanians
Streak their tender cheeks with both of their hands
As they wipe away tears in constant mourning—
May each know that I have taken myself from war for long indeed.
Don’t try to keep me from battle, even though you love me. You won’t convince me.”

Achilles’ language is remarkable throughout the Iliad—as I discuss when writing about book 9, Achilles has been compared to a Hesiodic poet and has rightly been identified as one of epic’s most forceful and varied speakers. This speech alone contains several similes, complex grammar, a compressed comparison to another god, and vivid language like that at the end  where he imagines the lamentation of Trojan Women.

But, for thinking about the core story of the rage of Achilles, this speech is especially useful. Following on his mother’s rather direct words that this is kind of what Achilles asked for in book 1, Achilles responds in turn to her warning that he will die if he faces Hektor by saying that he wants to die because he failed to protect his friend. A scholion sees this as a positive lesson: “This is a good example for friendship: [Achilles] was unpersuaded by gifts over his choices, but chooses death on behalf of a friend.” (τεθναίην: καλὸν πρὸς φιλεταιρίαν παράδειγμα, εἴγε τοσούτοις μὴ πεισθεὶς δώροις δίχα τούτων καὶ θάνατον αἱρεῖται ὑπὲρ φίλου, [Schol. bTAd. Hom. Il. 18.98d]). But I think there is more going on here than that. As Lenny Muellner explores in an article about metonymy and simile, Achilles and Patroklos are marked in Homer as part of the same whole. (And he builds on the work of his own friend, Steven Lowenstam, who passed away far too young himself)

As I will mention in discussing Achilles’ other laments, he seems to imagine Patroklos as his permanent replacement as a surrogate. But as Lenny has written elsewhere, key to the root meaning of the word philos (“dear, beloved”) is something as important or crucial to you as a family member or a limb, something part of yourself. Achilles’ self-consignment to death after the loss of Patroklos explores such intercedence and deep abiding love, but this speech already echoes much of it. See, for example, the initial expression of contrast at the beginning of the speech: The μὲν... δὲ contrast (sometimes translated as “on the one hand...on the other hand” is additive/complementary rather than fully contrastive (although I think there is a powerful implicit contrast in the comparison Achilles offers between himself and Patroklos). One has died far from his homeland and the other lacked a defender from ruin. But upon deeper consideration the implicit contrast collapses as well, or at least will collapse once Achilles makes his decision (or, properly, now that he has made a decision).

So, Achilles has decided he is already dead. And we know what he wants to do while dead: he wants to kill Hektor. But what happens before then? Why do we need to continue listening to Achilles?

There’s much more to be said when we get to his other laments for Patroklos, but I did want to speculate in part about the language Achilles uses here to talk about himself. He says that instead of defending his people, he was a “useless burden on the earth” (....ἐτώσιον ἄχθος ἀρούρης). My translation here is somewhat inexact because the Greek noun arourê means “plowed earth” or “worked land” and the only other time a Greek hero is called a “burden on the earth” is in the Odyssey when the suitors are criticizing Telemachus for allowing the beggar (Odysseus in disguise) into his household, because he, someone who doesn’t work, is a “burden on the earth” (Od. 20.379). There may be additional resonance here for Achilles too: when Odysseus (according, of course, to Odysseus) sees him in the underworld, Achilles tells him not to bullshit him about death, since he would “wish instead to be a farmhand, to serve another....” (βουλοίμην κ' ἐπάρουρος ἐὼν θητευέμεν ἄλλῳ) rather than be a lord among the dead note in the word eparouros, the root of the same word for arable land.

I think there is something going on about the utility of heroes, compressed in Achilles’ language. The word akhthos, “burden” is related to a verb of being a burden to something and it tends to be used in Homer to relay being annoying to the gods. Aphrodite describes herself as “burdened” by the wound she received from Diomedes (λίην ἄχθομαι ἕλκος ὅ με βροτὸς οὔτασεν ἀνὴρ, 5.361) and both Diomedes and Glaukos describe figures who transgressed the gods as being “burdensome” to all of them (ἐπεὶ ἀθανάτοισιν ἀπήχθετο πᾶσι θεοῖσιν· 6.141’ ἀλλ' ὅτε δὴ καὶ κεῖνος ἀπήχθετο πᾶσι θεοῖσιν, 6.200). Diomedes speaks this way of Lykourgos, who chased a baby Dionysus until Thetis rescued him; Glaukos describes Bellerophon in the same way. At the end of the Iliad, the gods who oppose Troy are summarized as “sacred troy was a burden to them first, along with Priam and his army, thanks to the recklessness of Alaexandros” (ἀλλ' ἔχον ὥς σφιν πρῶτον ἀπήχθετο ῎Ιλιος ἱρὴ  /  καὶ Πρίαμος καὶ λαὸς ᾿Αλεξάνδρου ἕνεκ' ἄτης, 24.27-8).

I think this pattern, with the exception so far of Achilles’ comments, fits into a cosmic thematic framework that we see in the fragment from the beginning of the fragmentary Kypria. This poem positions the cause of the Trojan War as the burden that the races of human beings put on the earth. The lexical marker akhthos is not part of this, but the language of lightening and emptying is repeated. (And it is directly connected to the plan of Zeus.)

Kypria, Frag. 1

“There was a time when the myriad tribes of men
wandering pressed down on the thick chest of the broad earth—
And when Zeus saw this, he pitied her and in his complex thoughts
He planned to lighten the all-nourishing earth of human beings
By fanning the great strife of the Trojan War,
So that he might lighten the weight by death. And then in Troy
The heroes were dying, and the will of Zeus was being fulfilled.”

ἦν ὅτε μυρία φῦλα κατὰ χθόνα πλαζόμεν’ αἰεὶ
βαρυστέρνου πλάτος αἴης,
Ζεὺς δὲ ἰδὼν ἐλέησε καὶ ἐν πυκιναῖς πραπίδεσσι
κουφίσαι ἀνθρώπων παμβώτορα σύνθετο γαῖαν,
ῥιπίσσας πολέμου μεγάλην ἔριν ᾿Ιλιακοῖο,
ὄφρα κενώσειεν θανάτωι βάρος. οἱ δ’ ἐνὶ Τροίηι
ἥρωες κτείνοντο, Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή.

Achilles’ combination of the world etôsion with the phrase akhthos arourês combines an adjective used for weapons that have missed the mark with an image of a human being who does not pull his own weight or contribute to the good of working the earth for a living. The Achilles of the Odyssey seems to directly countermand his former heroic existence as useless, preferring something that is productive not destructive. So, while he laments his own loss and criticizes himself for sitting idly by while his friends died, Achilles may also be provided a coded critique of his position, of the heroic ability to ask for so much and provide so little in the end.

Bibliography on the language of Achilles

n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know. Follow-up posts will address the political framework of book 9 and the duals.

Arieti, James A. “Achilles’ Alienation in ‘Iliad 9.’” The Classical Journal 82, no. 1 (1986): 1–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3297803.

Brenk, F. 1984 “Dear Child: the Speech of Phoinix and the Tragedy of Achilles in the Ninth Book of the Iliad.” Eranos, 86: 77–86.

Claus, David B. “Aidôs in the Language of Achilles.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 105 (1975): 13–28. https://doi.org/10.2307/283930.

Hammer, D. 2002. The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought. Norman.

HAMMER, DEAN. “THE ‘ILIAD’ AS ETHICAL THINKING: POLITICS, PITY, AND THE OPERATION OF ESTEEM.” Arethusa 35, no. 2 (2002): 203–35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44578882.

Friedrich, Paul and Redfield, James. 1978. “Speech as a Personality Symbol: The Case of Achilles.” Language 54: 263–288.

Griffin, Jasper. “Homeric Words and Speakers.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986): 36–57. https://doi.org/10.2307/629641.

Held, G. 1987. “Phoinix, Agamemnon and Achilles. Problems and Paradeigmata.” CQ 36: 141-54.

Knudsen, Rachel Ahern. 2014. Homeric Speech and the Origins of Rhetoric. Baltimore.

Lloyd, Michael. 2004. “The Politeness of Achilles: Off-Record Conversation Strategies.” JHS, 124: 75–89.

LOWENSTAM, S. The Death of Patroklos: A Study in Typology. Königstein/Ts.: Hain, 1981.

Mackie, H. 1996. Talking Trojan: Speech and Community in the Iliad. Lanham, MD.

Martin, Richard. 1989. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca.

MUELLNER, L. Metonymy, Metaphor, Patroklos, Achilles. Classica: Revista Brasileira de Estudos Clássicos, [s. l.], v. 32, n. 2, p. 139–155, 2019. DOI 10.24277/classica.v32i2.884

Steve Nimis. “The Language of Achilles: Construction vs. Representation.” The Classical World 79, no. 4 (1986): 217–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/4349869.

Reeve, M. D. “The Language of Achilles.” The Classical Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1973): 193–95. http://www.jstor.org/stable/638171.

Parry, Adam. 1956. “The Language of Achilles.” TAPA, 60: 1–8.

—,—. 1972. “Language and Characterization in Homer.” HSCP, 76: 1–22.

Roochnik, David. 1990. “Homeric Speech Acts: Word and Deed in the Epics.” CJ, 85: 289–299.

Scodel, Ruth. 1982. “The Autobiography of Phoenix: Iliad 9.444-95.” AJP 103.2: 128–136.

Scodel, Ruth. “The Word of Achilles.” Classical Philology 84, no. 2 (1989): 91–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/270264.

Scully, Stephen. “The Language of Achilles: The OKHTHESAS Formulas.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 114 (1984): 11–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/284136.

if you made it this far you won’t mind the randomness. The language of burden in Achilles’ speech always makes me thing of the song “Cumbersome” by Seven Mary Three. if this song had a scent, it would likely be a sweaty summer garage in Tennessee during the early 1990s.