The War That Killed Achilles

High on Mount Olympos, Apollo hears the prayer of his aggrieved priest and, enraged, strides down from the mountain pinnacles, his arrows clattering in his quiver. Taking aim first at the army’s animals, the mules and dogs, he then lets fly his arrows against the men:

The corpse fires burned everywhere and did not stop burning.

Nine days up and down the host ranged the god’s arrows, but on the tenth Achilles called the people to assembly.

From this, his first action, Achilles declares himself the hero of the Achaean army and the hero of the epic. The son of the Thessalian king Peleus and an immortal goddess, Achilles is not Agamemnon’s equal in rank. Nonetheless, he takes charge of the crisis with authoritative confidence, displaying the leadership that his commander in chief lacks. Before the assembled men, he calls for “ ‘some holy man, some prophet, / even an interpreter of dreams . . . who can tell why Phoibos Apollo is so angry.’ ” In response, Kalchas, “the best of the bird interpreters,” such as every good army carries, steps forth with trepidation. Kalchas knows that his words will incite Agamemnon’s anger, and only after Achilles personally offers assurances for his safety does the old man speak.

Apollo’s anger, and the plague, Kalchas declares, will continue to rage until Chryseis is returned to her father, “ ‘without price, without ransom. ’ ” Agamemnon’s reaction to this pronouncement, which is tantamount to a public rebuke, is immediate and unseemly. Insulting Kalchas, he nonetheless sourly agrees to surrender his prize—but only if he receives another prize as compensation. Once more it is Achilles who takes the initiative, stepping in to reason with his commander:

“Son of Atreus, most lordly, greediest for gain of all men,
how shall the great-hearted Achaeans give you a prize now?
There is no great store of things lying about I know of.
But what we took from the cities by storm has been distributed;
it is unbecoming for the people to call back things once given.
No, for the present give the girl back to the god; we Achaeans
thrice and four times over will repay you, if ever Zeus gives
into our hands the strong-walled citadel of Troy to be plundered.”

“ ‘What do you want?’ ” is Agamemnon’s outraged and panicked response. “ ‘To keep your own prize and have me sit here / lacking one? Are you ordering me to give this girl back?’ ” Lashing out, he issues the threat to Achilles that will haunt him and the entire Achaean army for the rest of the epic: “ ‘Either the great-hearted Achaeans shall give me a new prize . . . or else . . . I myself shall take her, / your own prize, or that of Aias, or that of Odysseus.’ ” And in this way Agamemnon unleashes the wrath of Achilles.

The summaries of the lost Trojan Cycle poems indicate that quarrels between allied heroes was a favorite theme of ancient epic.³ In the lost epic Cypria, for example, “Achilles quarrels with Agamemnon because he received a late invitation” to a feast. In the Aethiopis, “Achilles kills Thersites after being abused by him and insulted over his alleged love” of the Amazon queen. Also in the Aethiopis, “a quarrel arises between Odysseus and Ajax over the arms of Achilles,” which were to be awarded after his death to the best of the Achaeans .⁴ Finally, the Odyssey relates at some length a quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus. This last example is particularly noteworthy, as the story is sung by a Homer-like singer of tales:

But when they had put away their desire for eating and drinking, the Muse stirred the singer to sing the famous actions of men on that venture, whose fame goes up into the wide heaven, the quarrel between Odysseus and Peleus’ son, Achilles, how these once contended, at the gods’ generous festival, with words of violence . . .

—Odyssey 8.72ff.

Given that he appears as a protagonist in most of the heroic quarrels cited, Achilles was evidently a character who attracted éris, or strife: “ ‘For- ever quarrelling is dear to your heart,’ ” Agamemnon says to Achilles in the heat of their confrontation, a knowing nod toward his wider reputation. Audiences of Homer’s time, therefore, would not necessarily have found the Iliad’s opening lines to be fully explanatory, since the “anger” or “wrath” of Peleus’ son could have referred to any of several possible epic stories.

Epic tradition, then, appears to have offered numerous possibilities for igniting Achilles’ dramatically necessary anger. The fact that the Iliad rejected traditions about a quarrel between Achilles and a comrade-in-arms and chose instead to pit him against his commander in chief immediately establishes a more dangerous and interesting arena of contention. The éris is now more than a “quarrel,” and not only because Achilles is guilty of insubordination. What interests Homer are issues of authority and leadership on the one hand and duty and individual destiny on the other, issues brought swiftly to the fore by Achilles himself:

“I for my part did not come here for the sake of the Trojan spearmen to fight against them, since to me they have done nothing. Never yet have they driven away my cattle or my horses, never in Phthia where the soil is rich and men grow great did they spoil my harvest, since indeed there is much that lies between us, the shadowy mountains and the echoing sea; but for your sake, o great shamelessness, we followed, to do you favour.”

It is a great gauntlet-throwing speech, particularly remarkable for occurring at the very outset of the epic. What Achilles is challenging is the bedrock assumption of military service—that the individual warrior submit his freedom, his destiny, his very life to a cause in which he may have no personal stake. In modern times, the speech 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.

The critical exchange, with the full tide of Achilles’ eloquence is as follows:

“. . . 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.”

“ ‘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:

“. . . 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 War, so to speak, and we are in Vietnam. Now, seeking to mollify Achilles and the king of Mycenae, Nestor intervenes in the quarrel, reminding both men that in his time he has “ ‘dealt with better men than / you are, and never once did they disregard me.’ ” After a long and rambling narration of his former exploits fighting and destroying “ ‘the beast men,’ ” or centaurs, who lived in the mountains, Nestor offers his counsel: to Agamemnon—“ ‘great man that you are’ ”—his advice is to give up the girl. To Achilles he offers a rebuke:

“Nor, son of Peleus, think to match your strength with
the king, since never equal with the rest is the portion of honour
of the sceptred king to whom Zeus gives magnificence. Even
though you are the stronger man, and the mother who bore you was
immortal,
yet is this man greater who is lord over more than you rule.”

Nestor is the spokesman for the status quo, for the tradition-hallowed belief that institutional power equates with unquestioned authority. Both Nestor and Agamemnon can smell the danger that Achilles himself does not yet know he threatens. Already Achilles has taken charge, instinctively, of the assembly; he has confidently extended unqualified protection to Kalchas; by making the commonsensical assertion that Chryseis should be returned, he is in essence distributing war prizes, the prerogative of kings; and in his manifestation of concern for the men under Agamemnon’s charge he has assumed, again instinctively, the responsibility of a genuine leader. Were Agamemnon to submit to Achilles’ injunction and return his prize, he would surrender the last vestige of ceremonial authority he possesses.

As the éris between the two men goes from bad to unmanageable, Achilles takes hold of the scepter of the assembly, a symbol of royal authority, and unleashes another blistering assessment of his commanding officer:

“You wine sack, with a dog’s eyes, with a deer’s heart. Never
once have you taken courage in your heart to arm with your people
for battle, or go into ambuscade with the best of the Achaeans.
No, for in such things you see death. Far better to your mind
is it, all along the widespread host of the Achaeans
to take away the gifts of any man who speaks up against you.
King who feed on your people, since you rule nonentities;
otherwise, son of Atreus, this were your last outrage.
But I will tell you this and swear a great oath upon it:
in the name of this sceptre, which never again will bear leaf nor
branch, now that it has left behind the cut stump in the mountains,
nor shall it ever blossom again, since the bronze blade stripped
bark and leafage, and now at last the sons of the Achaeans
carry it in their hands in state when they administer
the justice of Zeus. And this shall be a great oath before you:
some day longing for Achilles will come to the sons of the
Achaeans.”

After speaking, Achilles “dashed to the ground the sceptre” of the assembly; to Achilles this revered and potent object is only a piece of wood stripped of foliage.⁶ His action neatly encapsulates the crisis of command: if the traditional trappings of authority are simply not recognized, then leadership of the gathered host is up for grabs. “ ‘So must I be called of no account and a coward / if I must carry out every order you may happen to give me,’ ” says Achilles, toward the end of this confrontation. “ ‘Tell other men to do these things, but give me no more / commands, since I for my part have no intention to obey you.’ ”

The altercation breaks off when Achilles stalks away to his quarters with his companions; in withdrawing from the war, he also withdraws the twenty-five hundred Myrmidon comrades who sailed with him.⁷ A delegation under Odysseus, proverbially known for his smooth talking and diplomacy, is sent to return Chryseis to her father and to make propitiatory offerings and “perfect hecatombs” to Apollo; a hecatomb is believed to be a sacrifice of “a hundred cows”—in Greek hekatòn bous—an appalling slaughter, but the term seems to have become generalized over time to mean something along the lines of “a worthy number.”⁸ While this delegation is busy, Agamemnon, making good on his threat, sends his heralds to Achilles’ shelter to confiscate Briseis, Achilles’ prize.

The heralds set out “against their will beside the beach of the barren / salt sea.” On their arrival at Achilles’ camp, set confidently at the extreme end, and thus the most exposed position, of the long line of ships stretched along the beach, “These two terrified and in awe of the king stood waiting / quietly, and did not speak a word at all.” Achilles, however, receives them graciously, and the heralds duly return to Agamemnon with Briseis, who “all unwilling went with them.” While Briseis is still a silent cipher at this point, her reluctance is quietly suggestive of a tender relationship with her captor.

Once the little delegation has departed, Achilles drops his hauteur, and, going down to the sea, weeping, he calls upon his mother, the sea nymph Thetis:

“Since, my mother, you bore me to be a man with a short life, therefore Zeus of the loud thunder on Olympos should grant me honour at least.”

Hearing her son, Thetis rises like mist from the sea and sits beside him, while Achilles tearfully relates all that has happened: the plague, the quarrel, the loss of Briseis and with her loss the assault to his honor. He then asks of Thetis the single favor that will define the rest of the epic: that she supplicate almighty Zeus, the son of Kronos, for a favor, reminding the king of the gods that she once saved him from destruction:

“. . . that time when all the other Olympians sought to bind him,
Hera and Poseidon and Pallas Athene. Then you,
goddess, went and set him free from his shackles, summoning
in speed the creature of the hundred hands to tall Olympos,
that creature the gods name Briareus, but all men
Aigaios’ son, but he is far greater in strength than his father.
He rejoicing in the glory of it sat down by Kronion,
and the rest of the blessed gods were frightened and gave up
binding him.
Sit beside him and take his knees and remind him of these things
now, if perhaps he might be willing to help the Trojans,
and pin the Achaeans back against the ships and the water,
dying, so that thus they may all have profit of their own king,
that Atreus’ son wide-ruling Agamemnon may recognize
his madness, that he did no honour to the best of the Achaeans.”

It is a weird and ultimately savage speech: “ ‘pin the Achaeans back against the ships and the water, / dying’ ” is the summation of Achilles’ murderous request. His references to obscure events of the Olympian past briefly part the elegant drapery that encloses the Homeric world, allowing a glimpse into the murky realm of mythology and folklore from which the Iliad was fomented. Characteristically, Homer eschews such outlandish, implausible creatures as hundred-handed monsters, but here it seems this creature—Briareus—was too closely associated with Thetis and her role as Zeus’ savior to edit him out.⁹ And in fact, Thetis’ powerful claim on Zeus, the King of Heaven, can be shown to rest not so much on her rescue of him from rebellious gods as on a single detail submerged in the bizarre story of Briareus: “ ‘he is far greater in strength than his father.’ ”

In the Iliad’s heroic world, the attribute of being superior to one’s father is very dangerous, associated above all with usurpation. Zeus, the king of gods, came to power by overthrowing his father, Kronos—as Kronos had overthrown his father before him. Among gods, a son greater in strength than his father, then, can, and usually does, overturn the cosmic order. ¹⁰

Among men, a central tenet of the heroic code is that the younger generation is inferior to the elder, or to the generation of its fathers. Old Nestor’s authority among the Achaeans rests exclusively upon the fact, which he never tires of proclaiming, that he belongs to the age of heroes of old: “ ‘I fought single-handed, yet against such men no one / of the mortals now alive upon earth could do battle.’ ” In heroic society, a hero is cajoled, bullied, or persuaded into line by being reminded of the illustrious deeds his father committed. Deference to the tenet that the fathers of old are greater than the heroes of today is part of the moral cement that holds heroic society together.¹¹

The full significance of monstrous Briareus, however, is not only that he is, anomalously and dangerously, greater than his father; it is that he is evoked at just this juncture in the epic, in Achilles’ own speech. The Iliad, as has been seen, is the product of a long and variegated tradition, arising and defining itself over centuries amid other, sometimes competitive, sometimes complementary, traditions. Knowledgeable of these other stories, audiences of Homer’s own time would have recognized the Iliad’s allusions; indeed, sometimes the allusions are explicit enough to suggest that the Iliad is deliberately playing upon its audience’s familiarity with the wider epic material. Often, however, as here, the allusion is obscure, compressed to a telltale phrase buried in the larger narrative. Modern readers, ignorant of the lost traditions, might be led to such subtle references by an outside source—a scene on a vase painting, for example, or a passage in other poetry—that makes more explicit the submerged myth. Those places in the Iliad, therefore, where an unknown myth is touched upon bear close study—and such is the case with Achilles’ passionate evocation of Thetis’ rescue of Zeus with the aid of a being superior in strength to his father.

From later poetry it is known that Achilles’ mother, divine Thetis, bore a unique destiny: to bear a son who would be stronger than his father, whoever that father might be. The most explicit evidence comes from the poet Pindar, who although writing some two and a half centuries after the Iliad can be shown to draw upon very old, even pre-Iliadic traditions. The subject of the poem in question is the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, a favorite subject of both poetry and art:

When they gave ear to the oracles. In their midst
Wise-counselling Themis said
That it was fated for the sea-goddess
To bear for son a prince
Stronger than his father,
Who shall wield in his hand a different weapon
More powerful than the thunderbolt
Or the monstrous trident,
If she wed Zeus or among the brothers of Zeus.
“Put an end to this. Let her have a mortal wedlock
And see dead in war her son. . . .”

It seems, then, that the minor sea goddess Thetis was pursued by the two most powerful gods of the cosmic order—Zeus and Poseidon—and that when her destiny was disclosed to her suitors, their ardor turned to fear and a marriage with a mortal—Peleus—was quickly arranged. Her offspring would not be the most powerful god in the universe, the lord of heaven, but instead the “best of the Achaeans,” a mortal who will die. A cosmic crisis was thus averted, but the price, to Thetis’ eternal sorrow, would be the certain, untimely death of her short-lived son, Achilles. ¹³

Honor for death—this seems to have been the bargain. If Achilles is dishonored at Agamemnon’s hands, the bargain has been transgressed and he loses all. This small scene between the sorrowing mother and her weeping son is, as it now turns out, one of the most potent in the epic, representing the moment from which all subsequent action will be unfolded. Revealed, too, is the high import of the Iliad’s choice of what had at first appeared to be the least significant period in the long Trojan War. In the few days covered by the Iliad’s narrative, no cities will be stormed and the war will not be brought to conclusion. But the rebellion that would have played in heaven will take place on earth. Achilles will assert his birthright—not as the lord of heaven but as the best of the Achaeans. Stronger than all his father’s generation, the legendary men of old, he will also operate beyond the reach of the conventional moral code of their society.

It is against this charged history that Thetis comes to Olympos to make her plea. Finding Zeus, her former suitor, sitting apart from the other gods, she goes directly to him, taking her place beside him, “with her left hand embracing / his knees, but took him underneath the chin with her right hand”—the supplicant’s posture. Her plea to him is strikingly brief, eight lines only:

“Father Zeus, if ever before in word or action
I did you favour among the immortals, now grant what I ask for.
Now give honour to my son short-lived beyond all other
mortals. Since even now the lord of men Agamemnon
dishonours him, who has taken away his prize and keeps it.
Zeus of the counsels, lord of Olympos, now do him honour.
So long put strength into the Trojans, until the Achaeans
give my son his rights, and his honour is increased among them.”

Zeus’ reluctance, as it turns out, is not on account of the enormity of the request or the toll of human life entailed but because it will put him on a collision course with his wife (and sister), the goddess Hera, who is an unflagging champion of the Achaeans and an inveterate, pathological hater of Trojans. Nonetheless, reluctantly, he complies, bending his head in promise. Her petition granted, Thetis descends from Olympos to the ocean in a single leap, leaving Zeus to handle Hera, who immediately, as he had feared, speaks “revilingly” to him, charging him with treachery.

Then in return Zeus who gathers the clouds made answer:
“Dear lady, I never escape you, you are always full of suspicion.
Yet thus you can accomplish nothing surely, but be more
distant from my heart than ever, and it will be the worse for you.
If what you say is true, then that is the way I wish it.
But go then, sit down in silence, and do as I tell you,
for fear all the gods, as many as are on Olympos, can do nothing
if I come close and lay my unconquerable hands upon you.”
He spoke, and the goddess the ox-eyed lady Hera was frightened.

Elsewhere, Zeus similarly threatens other gods; the point of the scene with Hera is not that he is an abusive husband but that there exists no agency that can stand up to his might. This point is underscored by the exchange immediately following between Hera and her son, the lame smith of the gods, Hephaistos. Cautioning his mother against causing unpleasantness on Olympos “ ‘for the sake of mortals,’ ” he also reminds her of an earlier occasion on which he had once tried to intervene on her behalf and was himself hurled by Zeus from Olympos: “ ‘all day long I dropped helpless, and about sunset / I landed in Lemnos, and there was not much life left in me.’ ” Zeus, as Hephaistos declares, “ ‘is far too strong for any.’ ”

Zeus’ threat to Hera at the end of this first Book echoes that of Agamemnon’s threat to Chryses at the beginning, just as Hera’s fright is reminiscent of that of Kalchas. The little scene on Olympos ironically shadows Agamemnon’s strutting of power on earth below and is a reminder of the unassailable magnitude of the real thing: the authority of Zeus is that against which the combined forces of all the other gods cannot contend—this is what it means to be the lord of heaven. Book One ends peacefully on Olympos. The gods resume their feasting, and when the sun goes down, Zeus goes to bed with Hera beside him.

During the night, Zeus ponders the promise he has made to Thetis. How best to make the Achaeans feel Achilles’ absence? How best to turn the tide of battle against the Achaeans in favor of the Trojans? The strategy he eventually devises is one of breathtaking cynicism: the most straightforward way to undo a great army, he decides, is to send a delusional dream of victory to its leader. Accordingly, Zeus dispatches “evil Dream” to Agamemnon’s bedside, who whispers in the king’s ear that Troy is his for the taking. “He thought that on that very day he would take Priam’s city,” Homer says of Agamemnon, in a rare editorializing aside; “fool, who knew nothing of all the things Zeus planned to accomplish.”¹⁴

Relieved by Dream, Agamemnon wakes and dons his tunic, “beautiful, fresh woven,” takes up his “sword with the nails of silver”—in Greek xíphos arguróēlon, a true relic of both Mycenaean language and equipment¹⁵—along with the “sceptre of his fathers, immortal forever,” on which his status depends, and goes forth to summon the heralds to call an assembly.

While the rank and file are mustered, Agamemnon holds a preliminary council with the princes and shares with them the splendid vision of his dream: Significantly, evil Dream had appeared to Agamemnon in the likeness of his most trusted adviser, the perhaps too-aged Nestor. Nestor’s own reaction to Agamemnon’s description of this landmark apparition—Troy to be taken on this very day!—is curious: “ ‘had it been any other Achaean who told of this dream / we should have called it a lie and we might rather have turned from it,’ ” he says, with diplomatic caution. Having faithfully recounted the dream, Agamemnon adds a complicating twist. At some point as events were swiftly unfolding, he devised his own astonishing plan—he will test his men, a spur-of-the-moment ploy that he has apparently dreamed up alone:

“Yet first, since it is the right way, I will make trial of them by words, and tell them even to flee in their benched vessels. Do you take stations here and there, to check them with orders.”

To the place of assembly, the thousands of troops swarm, so many that the earth groans beneath them. Here, leaning upon his father’s scepter, Agamemnon delivers a speech to this grand host in one of the more bizarre episodes in the Iliad. He has had a dream, Agamemnon tells his men, and proceeds to relate the exact opposite of the dream he actually received. There is nothing to be done, he concludes, except to go home:

“And now nine years of mighty Zeus have gone by, and the timbers
of our ships have rotted away and the cables are broken
and far away our own wives and our young children
are sitting within our halls and wait for us, while still our work here
stays forever unfinished as it is, for whose sake we came hither.
Come then, do as I say, let us all be won over; let us
run away with our ships to the beloved land of our fathers
since no longer now shall we capture Troy of the wide ways.”

What Agamemnon hoped to achieve by his “test” is never stated; presumably he expected the army to rise as a man and declare they would never cut and run, that Troy could be won, that success was just around the corner.¹⁶ The actual results of the speech, in any event, are disastrous:

All of that assembly was shaken, and the men in tumult swept to the ships, and underneath their feet the dust lifted and rose high, and the men were all shouting to one another to lay hold on the ships and drag them down to the bright sea. They cleaned out the keel channels and their cries hit skyward as they made for home.

At the height of the crisis, there arises another outspoken critic: Thersites, said to be “the ugliest man who came beneath Ilion,” bandy-legged and hunch-shouldered. “Beyond all others Achilles hated him, and Odysseus. / These two he was forever abusing, but now at brilliant / Agamemnon he clashed the shrill noise of his abuse.”¹⁷ Alone of the epic’s major, speaking characters, Thersites has no patronymic, or name that identifies him by his father (“son of Atreus,” “son of Peleus”), an absence indicating his unseemliness, if not low birth. His character may have been invented to serve the single purpose of being an attack dog; his name, Thersites, is derived from thérsos, an Aeolic word meaning “overbold” or “audacious,” well suited to his confrontation here with Agamemnon: ¹⁸

“It is not right for
you, their leader, to lead in sorrow the sons of the Achaeans.
My good fools, poor abuses, you women, not men, of Achaea,
let us go back home in our ships, and leave this man here
by himself in Troy to mull his prizes of honour
that he may find out whether or not we others are helping him.
And now he has dishonoured Achilles, a man much better
than he is. He has taken his prize by force and keeps her.

The mass desertion advocated by Thersites is averted only by Odysseus, who turns upon the little man, threatening to strip away his clothing and send him “ ‘howling back to the fast ships,’ ” and then beats him with the royal scepter, which he has snatched from the impotent hands of Agamemnon. “Frightened, / in pain, and looking helplessly about,” Thersites wipes away his tears, while the diverted host “laughed over him happily.” After this scapegoating, order is restored. Odysseus bolsters morale with a long, eloquent speech, reminding the army of an earlier omen, made ten years previously, that promised eventual success. Nestor steps in with saber-rattling words, urging, among other things, that the Achaeans not go home until each man “ ‘has lain in bed with the wife of a Trojan’ ” to avenge Helen. Finally Agamemnon reappears, rueful and shaken, and credited with not a single word or action to dispel the disaster he has caused:

“Zeus of the aegis, son of Kronos, has given me bitterness,
who drives me into unprofitable abuse and quarrels.
For I and Achilles fought together for a girl’s sake
in words’ violent encounter, and I was the first to be angry.
If ever we can take one single counsel, then no longer
shall the Trojans’ evil be put aside, not even for a small time.
Now go back, take your dinner, and let us gather our warcraft.”

Thus ends Agamemnon’s test of his army. That this was only a test is never explained to the bewildered men, and the episode remains strangely open-ended. Over the years, many subtle theories have been floated to explain the intent and effect of the astounding act of idiocy represented by Agamemnon’s trial of the army: by “wisely . . . diminishing his soldiers’ own reserves of honor,” Agamemnon “increases their need for battle” is one such example.¹⁹ The most straightforward explanation, however, is that as illogical and disastrous as the trial may be, it is entirely consistent with the Iliad’s carefully drawn depictions of Agamemnon in action. His rough handling of Chryses caused the catastrophic plague in the first place, and his tactless pride caused the withdrawal of his most valuable warrior. In Zeus’ judgment, Agamemnon and his delusions were the most effective instrument to turn the course of war against his own army. In fact, Agamemnon’s every word and action in these first, important, stage-setting episodes of the epic has been disastrous. The trial scene is simply one more example—starker and uncomplicated by any other agency—of Agamemnon’s unfitness to command. Is this not the point?²⁰

The political world the poem purports to evoke is, of course, Bronze Age Mycenaean Greece, when strong rulers controlled centralized bases of wealth and power from palace-citadels such as Mycenae; but the end of the poetic tradition, in Homer’s time, occurred in the late eighth century B.C., on the threshold of an age of extraordinary social innovation that included the establishment of citizen-ruled city-states and of colonies abroad by enterprising individuals and clans. Already, in the last phase of the Iliad’s evolution, questions concerning the nature of authority and power, of individual rights and duties had to have been in the air.²¹ Those men who, like Achilles, found themselves constrained by the unreasonable authority of lesser men over them or disaffected rabble rousers like Thersites would have been prime candidates to pick up their tent pegs and start their own colony elsewhere.

There is no way of knowing how an audience of Homer’s time viewed this pointed portrayal of a traditional king who is unworthy of command, but it is unlikely that they had no memory of a real-life analogy to color the portrait, for the realization that a god-sent leader may not be up to the job cycles through many ages of many people, up to the present time; undoubtedly the last wave of Tommies to head dutifully over the top at the Somme had realized that the authority of king and country did not equate with military acumen. The articulated awareness that the authority above may be inferior to the individual soldier below is the beginning of a dangerous wisdom. Achilles’ contempt for Agamemnon is expressed in the words of the highborn hero; Thersites’ in the words of the people, the men in the trenches. Dangerously, both views coincide.

Behind the straightforward narration of events, from Agamemnon’s first appearance through to the conclusion of his failed trial—the third crisis of his manufacture—is a warning rumble of a not-so-distant political storm. The undisguised ineptness of the king, a shrill but eloquent rabble-rouser in the person of Thersites, a demoralized army, and a charismatic warrior whose outstanding strength and prowess are matched by a dangerous, unconventional independent-mindedness—in the cluster of these disjointed elements lurks the specter of a coup.

That Agamemnon is threatened by Achilles is manifest from his first reactions in their confrontation. What the king does not know, however, is that the usurpation he fears has in effect already taken place: Achilles controls the army’s fate and will continue to do so, present or absent, as Achilles controls the epic. In the rebellion of Achilles, two powerful thematic lines have converged, one historical, one mythic: the historic reas- sessment of an individual’s unquestioned duty to his ruler and the playing out of Achilles’ inherently subversive destiny.

Using the traditional set piece of éris between heroes, the Iliad deliberately probes the consequences of unexamined leadership; the kind of prosaic narrative line hinted at in the summaries of the quarrels of the other, lost epics that fell by the wayside has thus been elevated to cosmic heights. When the Iliad opens, the son of Thetis, who was almost lord of heaven, is taking orders from an ineffectual king. Agamemnon, for whom rank and power, authority and honor are equated with a careful calibration of wealth and prizes, can have no idea of the monstrous scale of real, absolute power, authority, and honor. By taking back a prize of war, he has broken the rules that, had he been wise enough to perceive them, both afforded him his status and were all that kept Achilles’ terrible strength in check. “ ‘Zeus, exalted and mightiest, sky-dwelling in the dark mist,’ ” Agamemnon prays at the conclusion of his disastrous trial, offering accompanying sacrifice:

“let not the sun go down and disappear into darkness
until I have hurled headlong the castle of Priam
blazing, and lit the castle gates with the flames’ destruction; . . .”
He spoke, but none of this would the son of Kronos accomplish,
who accepted the victims, but piled up the unwished-for hardship.

The king cannot know how wholly he is outranked, that it is Achilles’ prayers, not his, that are heard in heaven. The honor Achilles seeks now will be absolute, such as is demanded by the gods. “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles” are the words of the proem. Achilles will bring his king and the mortal comrades who did not follow him to their knees.

To the epic’s deliberate, painstaking portrayal of Agamemnon’s ineptness are juxtaposed Achilles’ most pointedly damaging words:

“I for my part did not come here for the sake of the Trojan
spearmen to fight against them, since to me they have done nothing.
. . . 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.”

As any audience familiar with the story of the Trojan War would have known, this charge—that Achilles and the Achaeans are at Troy solely on behalf of Agamemnon and his brother—is wholly true. Thus, from the Iliad ’s first scenes, Homer has unambiguously established that the demoralized Achaean army fights under failed leadership for a questionable cause and wants to go home. It is, to say the least, a remarkable way to introduce a great war epic.