SOURCE: Mueller, Martin. “The Plot of the Iliad.” In The Iliad, pp. 28-76. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1984.

[In the following excerpt, Mueller analyzes the plot of the Iliad in the context of the poem's central figures, Achilles and Hector, and the warrior code they depict.]

THE EMBASSY

The encounter of Achilles and Hektor depends upon the withdrawal of the former, which tempts Hektor beyond the safety of the walls. The withdrawal is the beginning of the plot, the duel its end. The protagonist is absent in the middle. That absence is a narrative fact of great and continuing significance. But its representation is a narrative problem. So is the difficulty of developing in adequate detail the character of the protagonist if the design of the plot severely limits the places of his appearance.

The Embassy is Homer's answer to both problems. A delegation of Achaeans implores Achilles to give up his anger, accept enormous damages from Agamemnon and rejoin the fighting. The attempt must fail since the absence of Achilles must continue, but the failure turns into a magnificent occasion for impressing his absent presence on the reader's mind. Moreover, the Embassy does for Achilles what the encounter with Andromache did for Hektor: it provides a setting in which he can speak freely and passionately about the conditions of his existence.

The decision to approach Achilles is made in a council of Achaean leaders. Nestor diplomatically but firmly points to the link between the desperate situation of the army and Agamemnon's treatment of Achilles. He urges Agamemnon to reconcile Achilles ‘with splendid gifts and gentle words’ (9.113). Agamemnon readily concedes his mistake (114), states his willingness to make amends and lists a long catalogue of gifts that are indeed splendid. He concludes with words that are deficient in gentleness but may be no more than an attempt to save a little face in a humiliating situation:

And let him yield place to me, inasmuch as I am the kinglier
and inasmuch as I can call myself born the elder.

(9.160-1)

Nestor is full of praise: ‘nobody could blame your gifts,’ he says, but then takes care to ensure that the proper words will be spoken as well. He picks the delegation to offer the settlement to Achilles, consisting of Phoinix, the former tutor of Achilles, Aias, the leading soldier after Achilles, and Odysseus, the shrewdest counsellor. Although Agamemnon's offer as he stated it was incomplete, what Achilles receives is a proper offer of ‘splendid gifts and gentle words’. The delegation is as high-ranking as Homeric protocol can imagine. It is out of the question that Agamemnon should go himself. The bitterness of their quarrel makes mediation imperative and socially acceptable. When Achilles later says ‘He wouldn't dare come here himself’ (9.373), the words cannot be taken as the poet's criticism of Agamemnon but reflect Achilles' disastrous refusal to acknowledge the change in circumstances. That Priam will in person reconcile an even more implacable Achilles serves not to call into question the propriety of the earlier occasion but to emphasise the unheard-of nature of Priam's visit. The propriety of the offer is also a major argument in Phoinix' speech (9.518).

The arrival of the ambassadors marks one of those Homeric epiphanies in which the poet looks back and forth to comprehend the entire action in one setting:

Now they came beside the shelters and ships of the Myrmidons
and they found Achilles delighting his heart in a lyre, clear-sounding,
splendid and carefully wrought, with a bridge of silver upon it,
which he won out of the spoils when he ruined Eëtion's city.
With this he was pleasuring his heart, and singing of men's fame,
as Patroklos was sitting over against him, alone, in silence,
watching Aiakides and the time he would leave off singing.

(9.185-91)

The lyre points back to the quarrel and forward to the fate of Andromache, Eëtion's daughter. Achilles is inactive, but his unquenchable thirst for glory finds temporary satisfaction in heroic poetry; his listener is Patroklos, the instrument and victim of his ultimate triumph.

As the delegates approach, Achilles leaps up with the same impulsiveness that will govern his response to Odysseus' speech; he does not even take the time to put aside his lyre (9.194). His strong and cordial welcome is in character: the first book had made a point of his courtesy in his treatment of the heralds who had come on the unpleasant task of claiming Briseis (1.334). But the emphasis on courtesy also establishes a background for the violence of the subsequent eruption. After the customary meal Odysseus turns to business. At the centre of his speech stands the verbatim repetition of Agamemnon's offer, minus the concluding insistence on his superiority. The arguments that frame it are from the speaker's perspective the most persuasive he can think of, but as the poet's words they are composed with a knowledge of the future and look forward to the consequences of Achilles' refusal. Odysseus describes in lurid detail how Hektor has become a threat to the Achaeans and how Achilles' prophecy in the first assembly has come true. The words are meant to gratify Achilles, but Odysseus attaches a warning, and the poet looks forward to the Patrokleia:

Up, then! if you are minded, late though it be, to rescue
the afflicted sons of the Achaians from the Trojan onslaught.
It will be an affliction to you hereafter, there will be no remedy
found to heal the evil thing when it has been done. No, beforehand
take thought to beat the evil day aside from the Danaans.

(9.247-51)

Encouraged by the courteous reception, Odysseus then strikes a tone of camaraderie (ō pepon, 9.252) and puts himself in the position of an older mentor, reminding him of his father's advice to control his temper in order to gain glory among the Achaians. This memory provides the link to the repetition of Agamemnon's lavish offer. At the end of his speech he returns to the theme of the raging Hektor. If Agamemnon is hateful to you, he says, think of the other Achaeans and the glory they will bestow on you:

For now you might kill Hektor, since he would come very close to you
with the wicked fury upon him, since he thinks there is not his equal
among the rest of the Danaans the ships carried hither.

(9.304-6)

The words project a non-tragic resolution and set the stage for Achilles' violent refusal through which such a resolution is ruled out for ever. Achilles' refusal is not, as Eichholz argued in an influential essay, a just response to an inadequate offer but an intensified repetition of his behaviour in Book 1. The Embassy continues the theme of vindictive intransigence that began with his prayer to Zeus and represents the repeated ‘no’ of Achilles as a decision for whose consequences he bears the responsibility.

Whereas Odysseus had dwelt emphatically on the change in the circumstances of the Achaeans, Achilles pretends that nothing has changed. His speech is a passionate repetition and extravagant elaboration of his earlier grievances about Agamemnon's rapacity. The six lines of the original complaint (1.163) are magnified as Achilles sees himself as a mother bird ceaselessly working on behalf of her young while Agamemnon sits back, dividing the spoils and keeping the lion's share. The iterative verb forms, lost in the translation, add colour to his language. His whole life is based on the premiss of distinction, but the war has proved a great leveller: ‘we are all held in a single honour, the brave with the weaklings’ (9.319). He has gained nothing from always risking his life (9.322). Why should he fight for other men's wives (9.339)? The rehearsal of grievances leads, as in the assembly, to a flirtation with the alternative of an unheroic life, also greatly intensified:

But, now I am unwilling to fight against brilliant Hektor,
tomorrow, when I have sacrificed to Zeus and to all gods,
and loaded well my ships, and rowed out on to the salt water,
you will see, if you have a mind to it and if it concerns you,
my ships in the dawn at sea on the Hellespont where the fish swarm
and my men manning them with good will to row. If the glorious
shaker of the earth should grant us a favouring passage
on the third day thereafter we might raise generous Phthia.

(9.356-63)

There is in the Iliad a rhetoric of the unreal, that is to say, a tendency to elaborate through special flights of language departures from reality as the poet and his reader know it. The suspicion aroused by such rhetoric is usually confirmed if we compare what the character says with what actually happens. Diomedes and Aias give the lie to Hektor's boasts. The gifts of Agamemnon are described in such lavish detail because they will be rejected. Achilles' elaboration of his plan to go home is similarly deflated by reality. When Achilles speaks of arriving in Phthia on the third day (or the day after tomorrow, as we would say) that prediction contrasts with the reality of the duel of Hektor and Achilles, which will take place on that day. It is a further ironic effect that Achilles' outburst occurs in the same night in which Hektor makes his decision to stay outside the walls (8.497).

Achilles' rejection of Agamemnon's gifts exceeds their description in its extravagance. He will have nothing to do with them even if they outnumber the sand on the beach, nor will he marry the daughters of Agamemnon even if they combine the beauty of Aphrodite with the skills of Athene. When in this context Achilles claims that Agamemnon will not persuade him ‘until he had made good to me all this heart-rending insolence’ (9.387) the words cannot be taken as referring to some inadequacy in Agamemnon's offer. Rather, they show that there is no conceivable settlement that Achilles would accept. Unreality also pervades Achilles' portrayal of the quiet life that awaits him on his return to Phthia, but the height of absurdity is reached when Achilles, the paragon of the risk-taking man, exalts survival as the highest value and argues that not even the treasures of Troy should lead a man to risk his life (9.400). At this point the motif of the choice appears in its explicit form:

For my mother Thetis the goddess of the silver feet tells me
I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death. Either,
if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans,
my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting;
but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers,
the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life
left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly.

(9.410-16)

Here is another Homeric ‘almost’; what will bring about the fulfilment of the original choice is precisely the mode in which Achilles seeks to cancel it.

Whereas Odysseus had dwelt on the opportunities for glory, Phoinix in the second plea turns to the consequences of intransigence. He ends with a warning: if you do not give up your anger now when you can cash it in for the reward of glory, you may have to give it up when you will get nothing for it. Achilles in his response dwells on the sufficient honour he is receiving from Zeus (9.608), without recognising that this honour will be purchased at the price of Patroklos' life. His misplaced confidence is the structural equivalent of Hektor's when he rejects the advice of Poulydamas. Yet there is an important tension between the beginning and the end of Achilles' response to Phoinix. While his confidence in Zeus is a sign of his continuing intransigence, the conclusion of his speech yields a little. To Odysseus he had said: Tomorrow I will sail. To Phoinix he says: Tomorrow we will deliberate whether to go home or stay. This partial yielding will happen again in the response to Aias (9.650) and at the opening of the Patrokleia (16.60), with results far worse than either a complete turn or continued intransigence.

Aias does not initially address Achilles at all but comments to Odysseus on the failure of the mission (9.624). The words of the plain soldier are particularly valuable because they show how much Achilles' behaviour breaks established norms. Men have been known to settle disputes over the death of a kinsman, he says, but you—and here he suddenly turns to Achilles—persist in a quarrel over nothing more than a girl (the emphatic enjambment heineka kourēs / oiēs makes his point very well, 9.637-8). Gradually the speech of Aias turns into a final appeal that recalls Achilles' welcoming words in which he had greeted the delegates as the dearest of the Achaeans:

          Yet now we offer you seven, surpassingly lovely,
and much beside these. Now make gracious the spirit within you.
Respect your own house; see, we are under the same roof with you,
from the multitude of the Danaans, we who desire beyond all
others to have your honour and love, out of all the Achaians.

(9.638-42)

If the words of Aias show his incomprehension of Achilles' behaviour, it seems that Achilles himself is puzzled by the resistance of his passion to conventional forms of treatment, for his response to the blunt Aias is unexpectedly conciliatory (9.644). He yields a little more. Gone is the flirtation with going home and, while he still refuses to fight, the future he now envisages is dominated by Hektor:

          I shall not think again of the bloody fighting
until such time as the son of wise Priam, Hektor the brilliant,
comes all the way to the ships of the Myrmidons, and their shelters,
slaughtering the Argives, and shall darken with fire our vessels.
But around my own shelter, I think, and beside my black ship
Hektor will be held, though he be very hungry for battle.

(9.650-5)

The progress of the Embassy repeats that of the first assembly. An original decision to go home is replaced by a decision to wait while Hektor inflicts damage. The moment of crisis, however, is more sharply defined: whereas in the assembly Achilles foresaw in general terms the savage work of Hektor, now he envisages more clearly the battle near the ships, and he states the point beyond which he will not allow Hektor to go. What changes the situation from the first book is the fact that the attitude of Achilles persists in the light of a serious attempt, fully adequate to the norms of the warrior code, to offer a just settlement. Achilles' refusal to accept the offer changes the mode of conflict resolution from negotiation to violence and greatly increases the cost to himself. Thus the Embassy does to the story of Achilles what the abortive duel of Menelaos and Paris and the broken truce do to the story of the war.

THE PATROKLEIA

The plot of the Iliad is made possible by the blindness of the protagonists. Hektor and Achilles become mortal enemies through a sequence of errors. The first and most pregnant of these errors is Achilles' prayer to Zeus after his withdrawal from battle. It leads to Hektor's false security, and it sets Achilles on the path of blind intransigence. In the Embassy, Achilles compounds the initial error by rejecting an opportunity that would more than redress his grievance. But the Embassy also puts an end to the flirtation with the pleasures of the quiet life. When we next see Achilles he has become an active observer. As the battle rages and even Aias is forced to retreat, he stands in the bow of his ship ‘looking out over the sheer war work and the sorrowful onrush’ (11.600) and, we may confidently add, waiting for Hektor. Nestor drives by, carrying on his chariot the wounded Machaon, whom Achilles does not quite recognise. He summons Patroklos to find out:

At once he spoke to his own companion in arms, Patroklos,
calling from the ships, and he heard it from inside the shelter, and came out
like the war god, and this was the beginning of his evil.

(11.602-4)

Here is another instance of the poet's tracing of a causal chain to an act of Achilles. Whereas in the previous scenes Patroklos was present, now he is summoned to his fate. The poet honours him with the epithet isos Arēï, ‘like the war god’, but he dwells on his passive role as respondent. The beginning of his tragedy points forward to the circumstances of his death in which his status as victim finds its most pitiful expression.

Patroklos dutifully goes to Nestor's tent, where he sees Machaon. His task is done; it only remains for him to return to Achilles and tell him. Anxious to leave, he does not enter the tent nor does he accept an invitation to sit down, but Nestor detains him anyhow with a litany of Achaean woes that soon turns into an account of his first triumph as a young warrior. The rambling narrative implicitly contrasts the eagerness of the young Nestor with the reluctance of Achilles. In the final part of his speech Nestor's reminiscences turn to Achilles directly. We learn about the recruiting mission of Odysseus and Nestor, about Peleus' warnings about the consequences of yielding to anger, and about the counselling role Patroklos as the older friend is supposed to play. Returning to the present, Nestor suggests a compromise: if you cannot persuade him to fight, perhaps he will let you fight in his armour. Stirred by Nestor's words Patroklos hurries to Achilles' tent, no longer to confirm the identity of Machaon, but to try his skill at persuasion. This new intention is both blocked and advanced by yet another obstacle that prevents the speedy execution of his mission. On his way back he encounters Eurypylos

                                                                                                                                                      limping
away from the battle, and the watery sweat was running
down his shoulders and face, and from the sore wound dark blood
continued to drip, and yet the will stayed steady within him

(11.811-13)

Like Machaon, Eurypylos is the victim of Paris' archery. The characters are doublets: the former motivates Patroklos' visit to Nestor, the latter delays his return until the fighting has taken an even more desperate turn. The narrative motivation has a thematic colouring. Despite his loyalty to Achilles, Patroklos does not hate the Achaeans. Nestor's words had moved him; in the figure of Eurypylos the suffering of the Achaeans confronts him in concrete form. Patroklos speaks to him in pity, and Eurypylos asks him to conduct him to his tent and look after his wounds. The request puts Patroklos in a bind: is not his goal to return to Achilles and act on Nestor's advice? But the immediacy of Eurypylos' suffering brooks no delay, and he goes with him. The loyal companion of Achilles has become the helper of the Achaeans and in the process has revealed much of his generous and cooperative nature.

When, after many delays, Patroklos reaches Achilles' tent and makes his plea, his friend yields, thereby setting in motion the chain of events that lead to the death of Patroklos and settle the fate not only of Hektor and Troy, but of Achilles as well. The yielding shows Achilles at the deepest point of delusion, and the poet takes care to portray his decision not as a change of heart but as a further development of the state of mind that had first manifested itself in the prayer to Zeus.

Patroklos' plea to Achilles is based on solidarity with the Achaeans, but Achilles responds to his friend's gentle nature rather than to his cause. The response appears in the affectionate banter with which he compares the tears of Patroklos to those of a little girl wanting to be picked up by her mother (16.7). But the woes of the Achaeans leave him untouched, as we learn from the tone of harsh self-righteousness with which he guesses the cause of his friend's tears (16.17) and from the hyperbolic wish that concludes his answer to Patroklos:

Father Zeus, Athene and Apollo, if only
not one of all the Trojans could escape destruction, not one
of the Argives, but you and I could emerge from the slaughter
so that we two alone could break Troy's hallowed coronal.

(16.97-100)

If we hold this conclusion against the image of the crying girl, we see that Achilles is swayed by two powerful emotions—the love of Patroklos and the hatred of the Achaeans—without any awareness of their contradiction. Under the sway of these emotions Achilles projects a vision of the future no less unreal than his flirtation with the pleasures of the unheroic choice. Patroklos is to join the fighting, but he is to stay within certain limits, so as not to threaten the supremacy of Achilles and to ensure his own safety as well. As a consequence the Achaeans will return Briseis and give many other presents besides. The vision concludes with the bizarre image of Patroklos and himself as sole survivors and conquerors of Troy. Reality will refute this vision at every point: Patroklos will not be circumscribed by the role Achilles assigns to him, Achilles will take no pleasure in gifts, and neither Achilles nor Patroklos will be present when Troy is taken.

The continuity of Achilles' behaviour at this point with his previous actions is the explicit subject of one of the most moving scenes in the Iliad. When Patroklos has left for battle, Achilles prays for his safe return. Elaborate preparations mark the solemnity of the occasion. From the bottom of a treasure chest given him by Thetis, Achilles fetches a goblet from which only he drinks, and only when sacrificing to Zeus. He cleans the goblet with sulphur and water, washes his hands, and begins his prayer with an invocation as unique as the circumstantiality of the preparatory narrative:

High Zeus, lord of Dodona, Pelasgian, living afar off,
brooding over wintry Dodona, your prophets about you
living, the Selloi who sleep on the ground with feet unwashed.
          Hear me.

(16.233-5)

The prayer itself begins with an acknowledgement to Zeus of his previous support and seeks support for the future as well:

As one time before when I prayed to you, you listened
and did me honour, and smote strongly the host of the Achaians,
so one more time bring to pass the wish that I pray for.

(16.236-8)

Specifically Achilles prays that Patroklos may win glory and a safe return:

          Let glory, Zeus of the wide brows, go forth with him.
Make brave the heart inside his breast, so that even Hektor
will find out whether our henchman knows how to fight his battles
by himself, or whether his hands rage invincible only
those times when I myself go into the grind of the war god.
But when he has beaten back from the ships their clamorous onset,
then let him come back to me and the running ships, unwounded,
with all his armour and with the companions who fight close beside him.

(16.241-8)

Zeus ‘granted him one prayer, and denied him the other’ (16.250). This supreme moment of Iliadic irony derives its power not merely from the tension between the symmetry of the phrasing and the inequality of what is granted and denied, but from its critical function in the central plot. The Zeus who denies half of Achilles' prayer is the same Zeus who granted the former request, but now he exacts its price. Through the death of Patroklos, Achilles will learn what it means to pray for the destruction of the Achaeans and what it means for such a prayer to be heard.

The blindness of Achilles comes to an abrupt end with the news of Patroklos' death, which is the turning-point of the epic. But, despite his significance, Patroklos does not achieve a fate of his own: rather, his role is to fail in the role of Achilles a failure foreshadowed by the spear of Achilles, which alone of all of his friend's arms he does not carry into battle (16.140). The life and death of Patroklos are primarily events in the life of Achilles. The poet's constant observance of this perspective accounts for the manner in which he represents the circumstances of his death.

In the famous scene in which Antilochos brings the news of Patroklos' death Achilles is represented as having anticipated the event already in his imagination (18.12). If we return from that scene to our last sight of Achilles, we find him putting the goblet back into its chest and following his friend with his eyes:

          When Achilles had poured the wine and prayed to Zeus father
he went back into the shelter, stowed the cup in the chest, and came out
to stand in front of the door, with the desire in his heart still
to watch the grim encounter of Achaians and Trojans.

(16.253-6)

The lines are a discreet reminder of Achilles' anxiety; they also guide the perspective of the reader, who follows Patroklos where Achilles leaves off. The peculiar horror and pathos of Patroklos' death are in good measure a result of the manipulation of the reader's response so that he stands in for Achilles and becomes the witness of the friend's death. From the pursuing glances to the moment of foreboding, Patroklos is never out of the eyes of the reader/Achilles.

In donning the arms of Achilles, Patroklos for a while assumes his invincible strength. He drives the Trojans away from the ships of Protesilaos, cuts off their escape to the city, and wreaks havoc among them. But after his victory over Sarpedon he disregards the explicit advice of Achilles, goes on the offensive, and in the subsequent attack on Troy loses his life. Patroklos' death is at one level a version of the death of Achilles. The Iliad presupposes and repeatedly alludes to the tradition according to which Achilles during an attempt to storm Troy suffered death at the hands of Paris and Apollo, the human and divine archers. The Iliad mirrors that tradition when Diomedes, the replacement for Achilles, suffers a non-lethal wound in the heel at the hands of Paris (11.377). Patroklos' death at the hands of Apollo and the brother of Paris is a more serious version of that tradition, a vicarious anticipation of the death of Achilles that permits the poet to incorporate into his epic an event that lies beyond its narrative scope. This procedure underscores the pivotal nature of Patroklos' death: he dies like Achilles because Achilles dies with him. Inseparable in life, their ashes united in a common urn (23.91), their virtual identity also manifests itself in the manner of their death.

While the death of Patroklos anticipates that of Achilles, it also has distinct features of its own, designed to impress on Achilles that Patroklos is the victim of his revenge on the Achaeans. The helpless agony of his last moments is a fitting and horrible conclusion to a heroic career that, despite its temporary glamour, lacks independence. The passive nature of Patroklos, which appeared in his silent listening (9.190) and in his response to Achilles' summons (11.604), manifests itself also in his final glory. The poet could have shown a warrior who in the exultation of victory wilfully and explicitly disregards advice and ventures into a more aggressive role. But Homer represents this transgression as a being drawn; and Patroklos' moment of exultation triggers a reflection on human impotence:

But Patroklos, with a shout to Automedon and his horses,
went after Trojans and Lykians in a huge blind fury.
Besotted: had he only kept the command of Peleiades
he might have got clear away from the evil spirit of black death.
But always the mind of Zeus is a stronger thing than a man's mind,
as now he drove on the fury in the heart of Patroklos.
Then who was it you slaughtered first, who was the last one,
Patroklos, as the gods called you to your death?

(16.684-93)

In his final assault Patroklos threatens the city itself, which would fall but for the intervention of Apollo. The god rebuffs his attack with words that both differentiate him from and identify him with his greater friend:

Give way, illustrious Patroklos: it is not destined
that the city of the proud Trojans shall fall before your spear
nor even at the hand of Achilleus, who is far better than you are.

(16.707-9)

From this rebuff the battle moves towards an encounter of Patroklos and Hektor. The former scores an initial success by killing Hektor's charioteer Kebriones, and a fierce battle ensues over the body of the fallen warrior. At the climactic point of this fight the narrative takes an unexpected turn from what had been a fairly conventional account of battle. Instead of making the defeat of Patroklos depend on an aggressive act by Hektor, the poet makes Apollo intervene directly. He strikes Patroklos from behind with his flat hand and stuns him:

Apollo now struck away from his head the helmet
four-horned and hollow-eyed, and under the feet of the horses
it rolled clattering, and the plumes above it were defiled
by blood and dust. Before this time it had not been permitted
to defile in the dust this great helmet crested in horse-hair;
rather it guarded the head and the gracious brow of a godlike
man, Achilleus; but now Zeus gave it over to Hektor
to wear on his head, Hektor whose own death was close to him.
And in his hands was splintered all the huge, great, heavy,
iron-shod, far-shadowing spear, and away from his shoulders
dropped to the ground the shield with its shield sling and its tassels.
The lord Apollo, son of Zeus, broke the corselet upon him.
Disaster caught his wits, and his shining body went nerveless.

(16.793-805)

The helpless terror of the stricken warrior has its only parallel in the Iliad in the much briefer account of the panic of Alkathoös, who becomes the victim of Poseidon and Idomeneus (13.436). But in the case of Patroklos it is not Hektor who, like Idomeneus, takes advantage of the opportunity created by the god. Homer introduces a new character, the young Euphorbos, who wounds Patroklos and then is so terrified even by the naked Patroklos that he immediately retreats to the safety of his comrades. Struck by the god and by Euphorbos, Patroklos finally becomes an easy prey for Hektor (16.818).

The incomprehension and helplessness of Patroklos at the point of death contrast sharply and deliberately with the death of his noblest victim. The function of Sarpedon in the Iliad is to provide the career of Patroklos with a suitably climactic achievement. To that purpose he is introduced earlier in the poem as an adversary whose nobility is manifest both in words and deeds. He anticipates Hektor's success in breaching the wall (12.397), and Homer gives to him the most celebrated and complete statement of the warrior's creed (12.310). Sarpedon is a textbook hero, and as such he is also a paradigm of heroic friendship. When he first appears, he kills Tlepolemos but is seriously injured in turn. Immediately his friends surround him; Hektor holds the Achaeans at bay while his friends carry him to an oak-tree where he faints and then recovers (5.663). His famous speech is addressed to his friend Glaukos, who is far more than a convenient addressee and turns out to be no less essential to the death than to the life of the hero.

Sarpedon attacks Patroklos and is mortally wounded by him. His fall is an important event, marked by two similes and a speech. Apart from Hektor and Patroklos, Sarpedon is the only character to whom the poet gives the power of speech at the moment of death. The most remarkable quality of Sarpedon's final words is their matter-of-factness. He does not express surprise or regret at his fate. He had acknowledged the risk of death in the conclusion of his creed:

But now, seeing that the spirits of death stand close about us
in their thousands, no man can turn aside nor escape them,
let us go on and win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others.

(12.326-8)

When death comes he is ready for it. His final words encourage his friend Glaukos to do what the warrior's code requires on such an occasion: rescue the body (16.492). Having said his piece, he dies, as he lived, by the book, but—and this is the crucial point—protected both in life and in death by his confidence in the presence and help of his friends. That Glaukos will follow the command of his friend goes without saying, but the poet none the less makes a fuss about his compliance. It turns out that Glaukos cannot help Sarpedon because he is still suffering from a hand-wound received earlier in the day. In his despair Glaukos turns to Apollo, who listens to his prayer and instantly heals his wound (16.508). It is not the poet's usual manner to worry about loose ends. Thus the serious thigh-wound of Sarpedon suffered in Book 5 is entirely forgotten in Book 12. Why twenty lines to draw attention to an inconsistency nobody would notice? The answer is surely that the episode serves to foreground the theme of heroic fellowship: if one has to die in battle, then it is best to die like Sarpedon in the company of a friend. The death of Sarpedon underscores the pathos of the death of Patroklos, who dies alone and unexpectedly, confronted with an experience of overwhelming terror. When Achilles blames himself later for not having been at the side of his friend (18.98), the poignancy of that self-accusation is greatly increased by the reader's experience of the contrasting deaths of Sarpedon and Patroklos.

With the death of Patroklos the careers of Hektor and Achilles reach their point of maximum delusion. To Achilles' attempt to prescribe the limits of Patroklos' action corresponds Hektor's boastful triumph over his dying victim:

Wretch! Achilleus, great as he was, could do nothing to help you.
When he stayed behind, and you went, he must have said much to you:
‘Patroklos, lord of horses, see that you do not come back to me
and the hollow ships, until you have torn in blood the tunic
of manslaughtering Hektor about his chest.’ In some such
manner he spoke to you, and persuaded the fool's heart in you.

(16.837-42)

Like Achilles before him, Hektor is wrong on every single point. Patroklos, who in his death regains his mental composure, points this out and predicts Hektor's death at the hands of Achilles (16.844). The words have a chastening effect on Hektor. He does not (how could he?) accept their truth, but neither does he reject them, answering instead with a question to which he pretends the answer is still open:

Patroklos, what is this prophecy of my headlong destruction?
Who knows if even Achilleus, son of lovely-haired Thetis,
might before this be struck by my spear, and his own life
          perish?

(16.859-61)

He cannot know that the poet has provided an answer in advance when he describes the moment of Patroklos' death in three lines that he will later use for Hektor as well (16.855-7 = 22.361-3).

Although Achilles has anticipated the death of Patroklos in his imagination, the violence of his response is in no way diminished. He is so wild in the expression of his grief that his mother hears him in the depth of the sea. She comes to comfort him and undertakes to ask Hephaistos for a new armour to replace the one lost by Patroklos. This is the second visit she pays to Achilles. She will come a third time to bring the order of the gods that Hektor should be ransomed. The visits of Thetis articulate the turning-points of Achilles' career and establish relations between them. This is especially true of the second visit, in which Achilles recognises the death of his friend as the consequence of his prayer to Zeus. The theme of connection, to borrow E. M. Forster's phrase in Howards End, is sounded in Thetis' first words. Not only are her opening words the same as on the previous occasion (18.73-4 = 1.362-3), but she also refers explicitly to the fulfilment of Achilles' request, echoing with slight changes the original wording:

          These things are brought to accomplishment
through Zeus: in the way that you lifted your hands and prayed for,
that all the sons of the Achaians be pinned on their grounded vessels
by reason of your loss, and suffer things that are shameful.

(18.74-7; cf. 1.409)

As in the description of Zeus' response to Achilles' second prayer, formal identity points to substantive difference. But Achilles is no longer blind, and his response names the difference:

My mother, all these things the Olympian brought to accomplishment.
But what pleasure is this to me, since my dear companion has perished,
Patroklos, whom I loved beyond all other companions,
as well as my own life.

(18.79-82)

From the fact of Patroklos' death arises the need to avenge him even at the cost of his own life. For the first time, Achilles has a vision of his complete destiny, moving back in time to the wedding of his parents when the gods gave Peleus the arms that his greater son would bear (18.83), and looking forward to his death, which he accepts as the consequence of his revenge on Hektor:

I must die soon, then; since I was not to stand by my companion
when he was killed. And now, far away from the land of his fathers,
he has perished, and lacked my fighting strength to defend him.
Now, since I am not going back to the beloved land of my fathers,
since I was no light of safety to Patroklos, nor to my other
companions, who in their numbers went down before glorious Hektor,
but sit here beside my ships, a useless weight on the good land …

(18.98-104)

Here the poet reaps the reward of his strategy of emphasising the gentleness of Patroklos and the helpless terror of his death: Achilles' words would not resonate so strongly if we did not remember Patroklos tending to the injured Eurypylos and later naked and bewildered by the stroke of the god. The two images lend weight to the moment when Achilles recognises the implications of having asked for the suffering of the Achaeans, whom in retrospect he identifies, together with Patroklos, as his ‘companions’.

The death of Patroklos turns the blind into a seeing Achilles. For the rest of his brief life he will act in a state of clairvoyance that is given to other characters only at the point of death. The gain of this clairvoyance is the ultimate reason for the strategy of deferring the death of Achilles beyond the end of the narrative and refracting it in the death of Patroklos. Heroic action gains its value from the risk of death. But death stands in a paradoxical relation to experience. What we call human experience in the fullest sense requires two conditions: the event must be given immediately to its subject, and the subject must be capable of continuing reflection on it. The experience of death does not meet both conditions. One's own death puts an end to reflection, and that of another lacks immediacy. The literary convention of the death speech is clearly an attempt to bridge the gap between reflection and immediate sensation. The words of a dying character have a special authority because we pretend that they are spoken out of the immediate experience of death. But the convention has intrinsic limits. The death speech cannot be long, or its duration will undermine the fiction that makes the convention possible.

Homer uses the convention of the death speech for Sarpedon, Patroklos and Hektor. But for his protagonist he resorted to a fiction that provided him with richer opportunities to express the consciousness of death. Achilles witnesses and reflects on the death of Patroklos-as-Achilles. He experiences his own death as if it were that of another. The fiction depends on the reader's belief in the identity of Achilles and Patroklos. Once established, the fiction allows for a much wider range of representational devices, for it creates a hero who can be treated as if he were dead not only in his dying moments.

The death of Achilles begins with the news of Patroklos' death. One of the most attractive speculations about narrative sources of the Iliad holds that Achilles' initial response and Thetis' subsequent visit are modelled on an account of Achilles' death (Kakridis, 67-70). When Achilles hears the words of Antilochos he is prostrate with grief: autos d'en koniēisi megas megalōsti tanustheis / keito (‘and he himself, mightily in his might, in the dust lay at length’, 18.26-7). A slight rearrangement of that phrase, keito megas megalōsti (‘he lay mightily in his might’) occurs in the Patrokleia (16.776), where it refers to the body of Kebriones, and in the second underworld scene of the Odyssey, where it refers to the dead Achilles (24.40). When Thetis arrives she cradles her son's head in her hands in a gesture reminiscent of ritual mourning (18.71). Add to this Antilochos' fear that Achilles will kill himself (18.34), and you have fairly suggestive evidence that the scene in which Achilles learns about the death of his friend is modelled on a scene in which he is treated as a corpse.

Because Achilles has ‘already died’, prophecies do not disturb him. When his horses at Hera's command foretell his death he replies with weary indignation that he need not be told what he already knows (19.420). He foresees his own death in the Lykaon scene, and when the dying Hektor gives the most precise account of his imminent death at the hands of Paris and Apollo (22.359) he replies: So be it. Finally, Achilles always thinks of the funeral for Patroklos as a funeral for himself as well (23.141, 243).

As a result of Patroklos' death the heroic energy of Achilles is no longer turned inward against his own comrades as a mēnis oulomenē, but turns against Hektor, his destined enemy. The return is more than a restoration. Achilles' anger grew as it swerved from its proper object, and in its return it burns with even greater intensity. When Thetis brings the weapons of Hephaistos, their glare frightens the Myrmidons, who do not dare look at them:

                                                                                                              Only Achilleus
looked, and as he looked the anger came harder upon him
and his eyes glittered terribly under his lids, like sunflare.

(19.15-17)

He has found an answer to the question first asked in Book 1 and repeated in Book 9: What have the Trojans done to me? The war has acquired a cause that concerns him and only him. Yeats, who often used Greece as a metaphor for Ireland, said in ‘Easter 1916’: ‘A terrible beauty is born.’ The oxymoron is singularly appropriate to the status of Achilles once he re-enters battle. He stands in the shadow of death, and the poet surrounds him with an aura that marks him off from all others. But, although no human adversary can resist or escape Achilles, even his course of victory is not without obstacles, and it is precisely at the point at which he rages with an elemental force that he meets the most radical threat to his heroic destiny. In the most daring ‘almost’ of the poem he is confronted with the indignity of death by water.

The threat occurs at a morally significant point. Achilles has pursued the Trojans into the river that is reddened by the blood of his victims. There is no comparable image of carnage in the Iliad, but the slaughter is not the ultimate expression of Achilles' violence. He takes twelve prisoners alive to be sacrificed at the grave of Patroklos (21.26). More than even the most violent form of battle death, the stylised ritual of that sacrifice expresses the extremity to which Achilles has been driven by his grief. The very formlessness of death by water may be a response to that stylisation. The river pursues Achilles and undercuts his very being. He who is ‘swift of foot’ not only must use his feet in flight rather than pursuit, but the river attacks the source of his strength and makes him lose the ground under his feet (21.269). Never before has Achilles suffered such helplessness, and in his appeal to Zeus he envisages an unheroic end far worse than his fantasies about returning to Phthia:

But now this is a dismal death I am doomed to be caught in,
trapped in a big river as if I were boy and a swineherd
swept away by a torrent when he tries to cross in a rainstorm.

(21.281-3)

At this point the poem touches for a moment on the mythical and supernatural sphere. Achilles is not a monster-slayer like Beowulf. Heroes of that type are familiar to the Iliad, but they belong to a past from which the epic distances itself. Achilles' return to battle, however, involves a deliberate straining of natural limits. The hero's arms are made and brought to him by gods. His horses speak to him. And Achilles emanates a terror that is systematically associated with many forms of fire. Because Achilles is a kind of fire he is threatened most radically by water, and aid comes to him from the god of fire himself, not in his guise as master-craftsman but in his elemental shape. The river, though it comes close to extinguishing the fire of Achilles, is no match for the fire god himself and, as in the other instances of ‘almost’, the narrative rebounds from its false turn and moves towards its resolution with greater force. Will Hektor be a match for an Achilles whose fire has successfully defied the quenching power of water?

HEKTOR AFTER THE DEATH OF PATROKLOS

Whereas through much of the Iliad the courses of Achilles and Hektor converge on paths of error, Achilles' recognition changes the pattern of convergence. Hektor's confidence at the end of Book 8 corresponds to Achilles' rejection of Agamemnon's offer. Achilles' vision of himself and Patroklos as sole conquerors of Troy is mirrored in Hektor's deluded words to the dying Patroklos. But Hektor's recognition lags behind that of Achilles, which produces for a while the contrast between a seeing Achilles and a blind Hektor. The contrast appears most fully in the second assembly of the Trojans.

Night has fallen, and once more the Trojans assemble outside the walls of the city. But everything has changed. The mere appearance of Achilles has routed the Trojans and has caused them to abandon the body of Patroklos. No fires flare to express their confidence; instead we learn that they are too frightened to sit down (18.246). Poulydamas gives sound advice, as he had done in Book 12, and counsels retreat under the cover of night. Once again Hektor contemptuously rejects his cousin's advice, showing an intransigence in the face of changed circumstances very similar to Achilles' behaviour in the Embassy. If Achilles had indeed returned to battle—as if any doubt were possible about the apparition that routed them:

                                                  the worse for him if he tries it, since I for my part
will not run from him out of the sorrowful battle, but rather
stand fast, to see if he wins the great glory, or if I can win it.
The war god is impartial. Before now he has killed the killer.

(18.306-9)

This is less of a prediction of victory than his previous boast that he would kill Diomedes, but it is just as discrepant with the reality that gives the lie to it.

When the rout of the Trojans is complete, Hektor alone does not return to the safety of the city:

But his deadly fate held Hektor shackled, so that he stood fast
in front of Ilion and the Skaian gates.

(22.5-6)

This is exactly the same place where, according to Achilles' words to Odysseus, he had once before braved Achilles—and had barely escaped (9.354). Whereas on that occasion the Skaian gates had marked the farthest point of Hektor's courage, now they mark the closest point to safety and measure no longer his daring but his retreat from the open field of battle that in the exuberance of victory he had claimed as his true home (15.720). On the borderline between the security of the walls and the danger of the open field, Hektor must make a choice. His parents beg him in the strongest terms to return to the city and to think of his obligation as the protector of Troy (22.37). But he is unmoved. His subsequent soliloquy, the longest such speech in the Iliad, expresses the reasons why he cannot return to his former role (22.99-130). He does not at any point deal with the arguments raised by his parents, and his deafness to them may itself be a telling index of the degree to which he is trapped by his previous choices, which he now recognises as mistakes blocking his return. We may remember the Trojan women thronging Hektor upon his return to Troy asking anxiously about the fate of their sons, brothers and husbands. What is he to tell them now? Better to face Achilles in honourable defeat (110) than to live with the reproaches of his inferiors: ‘Hektor believed in his own strength and ruined his people’ (107). But Hektor's resolution is not very firm. Odysseus in a similar situation had considered flight only to reject it by reminding himself of the warrior code:

Yet still, why does the heart within me debate on these things?
Still I know that it is the cowards who walk out of the fighting,
but if one is to win honour in battle, he must by all means
stand his ground strongly, whether he be struck or strike down another.

(11.407-10)

Hektor, on the other hand, looks for ways out. It is only the impossibility of finding such a way that makes him stand. Thus his first decision to face Achilles (109) gives way to an imagined negotiation: should he take off his arms, promise to return Helen, and share the treasures of Troy with the Achaeans? To imagine the solution is to discover its impossibility:

I might go up to him, and he take no pity upon me
nor respect my position, but kill me naked so, as if I were
a woman, once I stripped my armour from me.

(22.123-5)

It is striking that Hektor does not refer to Patroklos at this point, although it is Patroklos rather than Helen who has become the casus belli for Achilles. But the poet may remember Patroklos: had not Hektor killed him naked and helpless (16.815)? For a second time Hektor resolves to confront Achilles, but in the face of his approach his resolution buckles and he runs away.

James Redfield [in Nature and Culture in the ‘Iliad’: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago, 1975). p. 128] has interpreted Hektor's decision to await Achilles as his third and final error: having first decided to go on the offensive (Book 8), and having decided not to retreat after the death of Patroklos, Hektor now fails to return to the safety of the city. Redfield writes with great insight of the disjunction between heroic identity and social obligation that defeat creates for the warrior: while his defeat has proved him ‘not to be what he claimed to be’ (p. 154), his protective function still remains necessary to his community. But for some heroes, as for Hektor, the balancing act of weighing present loss against future usefulness becomes impossible. Redfield sees Hektor's decision to face Achilles as a sign of Hektor's inability to take the longer view of things that springs from greater self-assurance. But what obsesses Hektor's consciousness is less the fact of defeat than the recognition that defeat is the consequence of his folly. Not unlike Achilles, who discovers the connection between his anger and the death of Patroklos, he sees himself as the prisoner of his previous decisions. In both cases the acknowledgement of past error leads to the discovery of the single remaining path of action. Thus it does not seem right to speak of Hektor's choice as a new and additional error. He correctly recognises that his past actions have blocked his return to the city. The fact that this recognition takes place immediately outside the gate is deeply ironic. But the open gate does not, like the advice of Poulydamas, point to a road Hektor should have taken. For that it is too late.

Hektor's disillusionment, unlike that of Achilles, does not occur in a single moment of radical insight; it is a process that for a while even breeds new delusions. His recognition of past errors and their consequences does show him the only way that remains open, but his ability to go that way depends on the continuing delusion that he might be equal to Achilles. The two moments of resolution in his speech (22.109, 130) leave the outcome of their encounter in doubt, and this hope, rather than the decision to stay, represents Hektor's continuing error.

Hektor's flight, like that of Achilles from the river, tests the limits of the hero's existence. Achilles learns about a world of natural forces to which human heroism is irrelevant. Hektor's lesson is more obviously a moral one: in his flight he recognises the false premisses of the new role that he had claimed for himself outside the walls of Troy. Hektor does not justify his flight (as Menelaos justifies his retreat from the body of Patroklos). It overcomes him, and it is in a peculiar sense his first honest act. For this reason the poet's restoration of Hektor begins with what is on the surface an act of shameful cowardice. Homer does not blame Hektor for running away. Instead he transforms what might be an abject spectacle into a noble competition in which one competitor is worthy (esthlos), but the other far better (meg' ameinōn), and in which the trophy is far more valuable than the usual bull's hide or ritual beast, for it is the life of Hektor (22.158). The prestige of the competition is enhanced by the fact that the gods themselves—all of them—act as spectators (22.166).

The transition from race to fight recapitulates the delusion to which Hektor had been prone and lays the foundation for the final moment of recognition. In the terror of his isolation Hektor hears the voice of Deïphobos—the disguise Athene has adopted to carry out the resolution of the gods that Hektor should die. Deïphobos/Athene promises help in standing up to Achilles (22.229). It is a common tactic for one warrior to come to the help of another in confronting a superior enemy. Thus, Aeneas and Pandaros fight Diomedes (5.166), Diomedes and Nestor fight Hektor (8.99), Menelaos and Antilochos fight Aeneas (5.561). What makes this scene so special (and Athene's appeal so treacherous) is the fact that the offer of heroic fellowship comes to a warrior who has experienced the terror of isolation in the most excruciating form. When Deïphobos/Athene tells Hektor that he has ventured outside the walls despite the pleas of Priam and Hekabe, the words cannot fail to impress Hektor, who has just rejected similar pleas.

Athene's cruel lie makes the courage of Hektor possible and his death inevitable. Readers have often found difficulty with her role in the death of Hektor since it goes beyond the assistance that gods give to their favourites. There are, however, good reasons for Athene's extraordinary intervention. First, the fact that Hektor's final courage rests on a false premiss echoes and crystallises the condition of Hektor's career throughout the poem. This is an instance of the poetic justice that establishes a significant relationship between a character's life and the mode of his death. Second, the deluded courage of Hektor yields to true courage in the end. When his spear has failed to pierce Achilles' armour, Hektor asks Deïphobos for another spear. But he is gone. Now the poet could have plunged Hektor into a new panic, but instead he endows him with a knowledge that is instantaneous, comprehensive, and leads to a resolution that no longer requires the treacherous support of hope:

          No use. Here at last the gods have summoned me deathward.
I thought Deïphobos the hero was here close beside me,
but he is behind the wall and it was Athene cheating me,
and now evil death is close to me, and no longer far away,
and there is no way out. So it must long since have been pleasing
to Zeus, and Zeus' son who strikes from afar, this way; though before this
they defended me gladly. But now my death is upon me.
Let me at least not die without a struggle, inglorious,
but do some big thing first, that men to come shall know of it.

(22.297-305)

The words receive additional depth from a powerful verbal correspondence with the Patrokleia. When Homer introduces its last act he asks:

Then who was it you slaughtered first, who was the last one,
Patroklos, as the gods called you to your death?

(16.692-3)

What Homer says about Patroklos, Hektor says about himself. The simple change of pronoun distinguishes the pathos of Patroklos' end from the heroic defeat of Hektor. At this moment, and only at this moment, Hektor is equal to Achilles, and superior to all other Iliadic characters, in the depth and intensity of his consciousness of life as limited and valorised by the fact of death.