The Rise of Athens

When Patroclus enters the battle everyone mistakes him for Achilles, because of the armor he is wearing. He dispatches many of the enemy, but he does not know when to stop. He comes up against Hector, a better fighter, who kills him and strips him of Achilles’ armor. After a fierce struggle, the Greeks rescue his corpse.

Achilles is devastated. Heroes in Homer express their feelings, and he cannot stop crying. One night he dreams of Patroclus and holds out his arms to embrace him. In vain. The vision

vanished like a wisp of smoke and went gibbering underground. Achilles leapt up in amazement. He beat his hands together and in his desolation cried: “Ah then, it is true that something of us does survive…but with no intellect at all, only the ghost and semblance of a man.”

Determined on revenge, Achilles makes up his quarrel with Agamemnon and goes out once more to fight the Trojans. He chases after Hector, who loses his nerve and runs away. Eventually the breathless Trojan halts and faces his unforgiving foe.

The gods watch in silence. Zeus confesses to a fondness for Hector and asks the others to agree to spare his life. “What are you saying?” Athena bursts out, adding that his doom has long been settled. “But do as you please. Only don’t expect the rest of us to applaud.” Zeus yields the point.

Achilles dispatches Hector. He then maltreats his body, which he intends to throw to his dogs. But a proper burial is an essential passport to the underworld and after military defeats Greeks invariably negotiate burial rights for their fallen.

Zeus insists on dignity for the dead man. He has a message sent to the brutal victor: Hector is to be given his full funeral rites. The old king of Troy, Priam, secretly travels across the windy plain and presents himself to Achilles, to whom he offers rich presents. For once the Greek warrior behaves nobly. He recognizes Priam’s grief for his son as being of the same depth and character as his own father’s love and misery for himself, seeing that he will not return home for burial.

The two mourners share supper. This is important, for it signifies that Achilles has recognized Priam as his guest, a sacrosanct relationship sealed with gifts. In return for those he brought, the king has received Hector’s body. They weep together in shared grief. Achilles says: “We men are wretched things, and the gods, who have no cares themselves, have woven sorrow into the very pattern of our lives.” Alongside their ruthless rivalries, their sociopathically sunny egoism, Greeks understand very well the tragedy of the human condition. Life is ephemeral and filled with pain.

Homer writes elsewhere, in justly famous lines:

Men in their generations are like the leaves of the trees. The wind blows and one year’s leaves are scattered on the ground, but the trees burst into bud and put on fresh ones when the spring comes round. In the same way one generation flourishes and another nears its end.

After a night’s sleep, Priam and Achilles part and go their ways. Both know what destiny has in store for them. The king buries his son. Here the Iliad comes to an end, but what has been predicted comes to pass. Soon Achilles is shot dead by an arrow from Paris’s bow. He does not live to take part in the fall of Troy, which is brought about by cunning rather than courage.

The Greeks pretend to abandon the siege and sail away. They leave behind a huge wooden horse, as an offering to the gods. The foolish Trojans drag it inside the city and celebrate the end of the war. But, of course, the horse contains a body of armed men. In the middle of the night they emerge and let the Greek army into the city. Troy falls and is destroyed. Priam is slaughtered by the son of Achilles.

Helen goes back to Sparta.

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Homer hints broadly that the Trojan War achieved little. Too many brave men have died. And the argumentative family on Olympus moves on to other topics. Deities who took different sides of the argument, the sea god Poseidon and Apollo, decide to destroy the great defensive wall the Greeks erected around their ships. It had been built without the mandate of heaven.

Now that Troy has gone and “all the best of the Trojans were dead, and many of the Greeks too, though some were left,” all that remains is this massive fortification. The gods turn against it the united waters of all the rivers in the area. Zeus the sky god lends a hand by raining continuously. After nine days the wall and its foundations have been washed out to sea. Poseidon then covers the wide beach again with sand and turns the rivers back to their old courses.

It is as if nothing had ever happened on that bloodstained shore. Had Helen been worth it? What had Hector, Achilles, and all the others really died for? To most Greeks the answer was obvious. Whatever their pointless ostensible purpose, brave deeds conferred glory in and for themselves. No other rationale was needed. From a vantage point in the underworld valor brought no practical benefits.