The Iliad · wrath, sing, goddess
The Deception of Zeus: Hera borrows the girdle of Aphrodite, buys Sleep with a Grace, and Zeus sleeps on Gargaron while the sea-god turns the battle.
The Dios Apatē — the Deception of Zeus — is the Iliad's great comic interlude, and its comedy is engineering: every scene is a tool fetched for the next. Hera sees Poseidon working the lines and Zeus sitting on Ida (153-158); what follows is a bathing and dressing scene built exactly like an arming scene (note 9); a lie to Aphrodite that borrows the deep past — Oceanus "begetting of the gods" and mother Tethys quarreling — as cover story (note 10); the loan of the kestos, the embroidered band that holds "love, and desire, and the trysting-talk — persuasion, that steals the wits even of the close-thinkers," a line Aristotle quoted (note 10); the recruitment of Sleep, who once before put Zeus under for Hera's sake and barely survived it — saved only by Night, "subduer of gods and men," the one power Zeus fears to displease (note 12); and the payment, negotiated upward from golden furniture to a Grace, sworn by Styx with one hand on the earth and one on the shining sea, the Titans under Tartarus called to witness (note 13).
The seduction itself is the poem at its most audaciously funny — Zeus woos his wife with a catalogue of seven prior conquests, mothers and offspring itemized, ending "not even you yourself, as I love you now" (317-328; ancient critics athetized the whole list as indecorous, note 16) — and then, without warning, at its most beautiful: the golden cloud, and the earth flowering beneath them, "dewy lotus, and crocus, and hyacinth, thick and soft, that held them up off the ground" — the sacred marriage older than the comedy, glittering dew falling from the cloud (note 18). Zeus sleeps; Sleep runs to Poseidon; and the last third of the book is the counterattack the nap purchases: the armor sorted by size to the men who can use it, Ajax's boulder spinning Hector "like a top" and putting him, vomiting blood, out of the poem until Zeus wakes, and a chain of vaunts — grief answering grief — that ends with Ilioneus's head raised on a spear "like a poppy-head," the poem's own earlier poppy (8.306) grown monstrous (note 29).
Our printed Greek lacks line 269 — the naming of Pasithea in Hera's offer, an addition in only part of the tradition; the numbering jumps 268 to 270, the line is translated in note 13, and Sleep names her anyway at 276: the third transmission-gap this project reproduces (with 9.458-461 and 11.543). Register notes: 14.82-83 reuse 4.349-350 verbatim ("the fence of your teeth"); 14.508 reuses the fixed Muse-invocation; the ford-of-Xanthus formula (433-434) is laid down for reuse at 21.1-2.
1But the war-cry did not escape Nestor, drinking though he was:1
he spoke winged words to Asclepius' son:
"Consider, brilliant Machaon, how these things will go:
the cry of the strong young men is louder by the ships.
5You sit here now and drink the fire-bright wine
until lovely-braided Hecamede has heated
a warm bath, and washed away the clotted blood;
I will go out to a lookout point and quickly learn the truth."
So speaking he took up the well-made shield of his son,
10horse-taming Thrasymedes, that lay in the hut
all glittering with bronze — the son had his father's shield —
and took up a stout spear, edged with sharp bronze,
and stood outside the hut, and at once saw ugly work:
his own men being driven, and the high-hearted Trojans
15hounding them from behind; and the Achaeans' wall was down.
As when the great open sea darkens with soundless swell,2
boding the quick paths of the shrill winds —
only boding: it neither rolls forward nor to either side,
until some deciding blast comes down from Zeus:
20so the old man weighed it, his heart torn two ways —
to go into the crowd of the swift-colted Danaans,
or after Atreus' son Agamemnon, shepherd of the people.
And as he weighed it, this seemed to him the better course:
to go to Atreus' son. Meanwhile the others went on killing
25one another as they fought; and the unwearying bronze rang
about their bodies, stabbed with swords and double-curved spears.
And the Zeus-nurtured kings fell in with Nestor,
coming up from the ships — all who had been hit by the bronze,
Tydeus' son, and Odysseus, and Atreus' son Agamemnon.3
30For their ships were drawn up far away from the fighting
on the beach of the grey sea: those had been hauled first,
up toward the plain, and the wall was built by the sterns.
For the beach, wide as it was, could not hold all
the ships, and the armies were cramped for room;
35so they had drawn them up in tiers, and filled the whole
long mouth of the shore, all the headlands penned between.
So the kings, wanting to see the battle and the war-cry,
came up together leaning on their spears; and the heart
in each man's chest was grieved. And the old man met them,
40Nestor — and the heart in the Achaeans' chests went cold.
And the lord Agamemnon called to him and spoke:
"Nestor, Neleus' son, great glory of the Achaeans,
why have you left the man-destroying war and come here?
I fear massive Hector may make good the word he spoke
45when he threatened us once, haranguing the Trojans:
that he would not go back from the ships to Ilion
until he had burned the ships with fire and killed the men.
So that man talked; and now it is all coming to pass.
Shame! — surely the other strong-greaved Achaeans too
50are storing anger against me in their hearts, like Achilles,
and have no will to fight by the sterns of the ships."
Then answered him the Gerenian horseman Nestor:
"Yes — all this stands accomplished before us, and not even
Zeus who thunders on high could build it otherwise now.
55For the wall is down — the wall we trusted
to be an unbreakable shield for the ships and for ourselves;
and the enemy at the swift ships keep up their relentless
battle without pause. You could no longer tell, however hard
you studied it, from which side the Achaeans are being driven:
60so mixed is the killing; and the clamor goes up to heaven.
Let us take thought how these things will go —
if thought can do anything. But I do not counsel
that we enter the fighting: a wounded man cannot fight."
Then the lord of men Agamemnon answered him:
65"Nestor — since they are fighting by the sterns of the ships,
and the built wall was no use, nor the ditch,
though the Danaans suffered so much for it, and hoped in their hearts
it would be an unbreakable shield for the ships and for ourselves —
Such, it seems, must be the pleasure of overmastering Zeus:
70that the Achaeans perish here, nameless, far from Argos.
I knew it when he defended the Danaans with a will,
and I know it now, when he glorifies our enemies
like the blessed gods, and has bound our fury and our hands.
Come then — as I say it, let us all obey:
75the ships that are drawn up nearest the sea —
let us drag them down and haul them all to the bright water,
and moor them riding high at anchor-stones, until
the deathless night comes — if even by night the Trojans
will hold off from war; and then we might haul down every ship.
80There is no shame in fleeing ruin, not even by night.
Better a man who flees and escapes the evil than one who is caught."
Glaring at him darkly, resourceful Odysseus answered:
"Son of Atreus — what a word has escaped the fence of your teeth!4
Ruinous man! I wish you commanded some other army,
85a shabby one — not that you were lord over us, for whom Zeus
has given it, from youth right down to old age,
to wind the skein of hard wars, till we perish every one.
Is this how you long to leave the wide-wayed city
of the Trojans, for which we have suffered so much misery?
90Silence! — before some other Achaean hears this word,
which no man should so much as bring through his mouth,
no man whose heart knows how to speak what is fitting,
no sceptered king whom armies obey —
armies as many as the Argives you rule.
95This time I scorn your judgment outright — such a thing to say!
You tell us, with the war standing joined and the shouting up,
to haul the well-benched ships to the sea, so that the Trojans
can have still more of their prayers, winning as they already are,
and sheer destruction tip its beam onto us. For the Achaeans
100will not hold their battle while the ships are dragged seaward:
they will look back over their shoulders and drop out of the fighting.
Then, marshal of the people, your counsel will have wrecked us."
Then the lord of men Agamemnon answered him:
"Odysseus — you have caught me hard, straight to the heart,
105with that grim rebuke. I do not order the sons of the Achaeans
to haul the well-benched ships to the sea against their will.
Now let there be a man with better counsel than mine —
young or old — and I would welcome him gladly."
And among them spoke Diomedes, good at the war-cry:
110"The man is here — we need not search for long — if you are willing
to listen, and each of you does not bristle with resentment
because by birth I am the youngest among you.
I too claim my descent from a noble father,
Tydeus, whom the heaped earth covers now at Thebes.5
115For to Portheus three blameless sons were born,
and they lived in Pleuron and steep Calydon:
Agrius, and Melas, and the third was the horseman Oeneus,
my father's father — in valor the best of them.
Oeneus stayed there; but my father settled at Argos,
120a wanderer: so, I suppose, Zeus and the other gods willed it.
He married a daughter of Adrastus, and lived in a house
rich in substance: he had wheat-bearing fields enough,
and many orchards of trees stood round about,
and he had flocks in plenty; and he surpassed all the Achaeans
125with the spear. You will have heard all this — that it is true.
So you cannot say my stock is base and cowardly
and dishonor the word I speak, if I speak it well.
Come: let us go to the battle, wounded as we are. We must.
There, let us hold ourselves out of the combat,
130beyond spear-cast, lest anyone take wound upon wound;
but the others we will drive in and send to it — those who before,
indulging their tempers, have stood apart and would not fight."
So he spoke; and they heard him well, and obeyed,
and set off; and the lord of men Agamemnon led them.
135But the famed earth-shaker kept no blind man's watch:
he came after them in the likeness of an old man,6
and took the right hand of Agamemnon, Atreus' son,
and speaking winged words he addressed him:
"Son of Atreus — now, I think, Achilles' ruinous heart
140is rejoicing in his chest, watching the slaughter
and the rout of the Achaeans; for there is no sense in him, none.
Well — let him perish just so; may a god strike him lame.
But with you the blessed gods are not yet wholly angry:
the day is coming, I think, when the leaders and lords of the Trojans
145will raise the dust of the wide plain, and you yourself will watch them
running for the city, away from the ships and the huts."
So speaking he gave a great shout, and swept off across the plain.
as loud as nine thousand men, or ten thousand,
cry out in war when they join the strife of the war-god,
150so great was the voice the lord earth-shaker sent
out of his chest; and into each Achaean's heart he threw
great strength, to war and fight without ceasing.7
Now Hera of the golden throne looked out and saw them,
standing on her peak of Olympus; and at once she knew
155her own brother — her husband's brother too — bustling
through the battle where men win glory, and her heart was glad;
and she saw Zeus, seated on the topmost peak
of Ida of the many springs, and he was hateful to her heart.
Then ox-eyed lady Hera fell to pondering
160how she might trick the mind of aegis-bearing Zeus;8
and this to her mind seemed the best counsel:
to array herself with care and go to Ida —
in hope that he might desire to lie in love
against her body, and she might pour a sleep, harmless and warm,
165over his eyelids and over his close counsels.
She went to her chamber, which her dear son Hephaestus
had built her, fitting the close doors to their posts
with a secret bolt no other god could open.
There she went in, and closed the shining doors.
170With ambrosia first she washed from her desirable body
every stain, and anointed herself with rich oil,
ambrosial, soft, and scented for her especially:
if it were so much as stirred in the bronze-floored house of Zeus,
its breath reached earth and heaven alike.
175With this she anointed her fair body, and combed her hair,
and with her own hands plaited the shining braids,
beautiful, ambrosial, streaming from her immortal head.
And she put on the ambrosial robe that Athena
had smoothed and worked for her, and set with many figures,
180and pinned it across her breast with brooches of gold.
She belted it with a girdle hung with a hundred tassels,
and in her pierced earlobes she hung the earrings,
three-dropped, mulberry-dark; and great grace shone from her.
And over all, brilliant among goddesses, she veiled herself
185in a headdress lovely and new, white as the sun,
and beneath her shining feet she bound fair sandals.9
And when she had set all this adornment about her body,
she went from the chamber, and calling Aphrodite
apart from the other gods she spoke her word:
190"Would you do something for me, dear child, if I ask it?
Or will you refuse me, holding it against me in your heart
that I defend the Danaans, and you the Trojans?"
Then Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus, answered her:
"Hera, eldest goddess, daughter of great Cronos,
195say what is in your mind. My heart bids me do it,
if do it I can — if it is a thing that can be done."
And with guile in her heart the lady Hera answered:
"Give me now love, and desire — the power with which
you master all the immortals, and mortal men.
200For I am going to the ends of the generous earth, to see
Oceanus, the begetting of the gods, and mother Tethys,
who reared me well in their own halls and cherished me,
taking me from Rhea, when wide-seeing Zeus put Cronos
down beneath the earth and the barren sea.
205I go to see them, and to loose their endless quarrel:
for a long time now they have held apart from one another,
from bed and from love, since anger fell upon their hearts.
If with words I could persuade those two dear hearts,
and bring them back to their bed, to be joined in love,
210forever I would be called dear to them, and revered."
Then laughter-loving Aphrodite answered her:
"It cannot be, and it would not be right, to refuse your word:
you sleep in the arms of Zeus, and Zeus is highest."
She spoke, and loosed from her breast the pierced band,
215embroidered, where all her enchantments lie worked:
in it is love, in it desire, in it the trysting-talk —
persuasion, that steals the wits even of the close-thinkers.10
She put it in her hands, and spoke a word, and named her:
"There: take this band and put it away in the fold
220of your breast — embroidered: everything is worked into it. And I tell you
you will not come back unaccomplished, whatever your heart intends."
So she spoke; and ox-eyed lady Hera smiled,
and smiling put it away in the fold of her breast.
Then Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus, went to the house,
225and Hera in one spring left the peak of Olympus,
and touching down on Pieria and lovely Emathia11
swept over the snowy mountains of the horse-herding
Thracians, over their topmost summits, nor grazed the ground with her feet;
from Athos she stepped out over the heaving sea
230and came to Lemnos, city of godlike Thoas.
There she met Sleep, the brother of Death,12
and clung to his hand, and spoke a word, and named him:
"Sleep, lord of all gods and of all men —
as once before you heard my word, so now again
235obey me; and I will owe you thanks all my days.
Put Zeus's shining eyes to sleep for me beneath his brows,
the moment I have lain beside him in love.
And I will give you gifts: a fair throne, imperishable forever,
golden, which my own son Hephaestus the crook-footed
240will make with all his craft; and under it he will set a footstool
where you can rest your shining feet at the feast."
And answering her spoke sweet Sleep:
"Hera, eldest goddess, daughter of great Cronos,
any other of the gods, the everlasting-born,
245I would easily put under — even the streams of the river
Oceanus, who is the begetting of them all;
but Zeus, the son of Cronos — I would not come near him,
much less put him to sleep, unless he himself commanded.
For once before now a command of yours taught me my lesson,
250the day when that high-hearted son of Zeus
sailed from Ilion, having sacked the Trojans' city.
I laid the mind of aegis-bearing Zeus asleep,
poured sweet about him; and you devised evils in your heart,
rousing the blasts of punishing winds over the sea,
255and carried Heracles away to well-peopled Cos,
far from all his friends. And Zeus, waking, was furious,
hurling gods this way and that through the house; and me above all
he hunted, and would have flung me from the sky into the sea, gone forever,
had Night not saved me — Night, subduer of gods and men.
260To her I came running; and he checked himself, for all his anger:
he stood in awe of doing what swift Night would hate.
And now you ask me to do this other impossible thing."
Then ox-eyed lady Hera answered him:
"Sleep, why do you brood on such things in your heart?
265Do you think wide-seeing Zeus will rage for the Trojans
as he raged that time over Heracles, his own son?
Come — I will give you one of the younger Graces:
marry her, and let her be called your wife."
[Line 269 is absent from the printed text; see note 13.]
270So she spoke; and Sleep was delighted, and answered her:13
"Swear to me now by the inviolable water of Styx —
lay one hand on the earth that feeds so many,
and the other on the shining sea, so that all may be
witnesses between us, the gods below with Cronos —
275that you will truly give me one of the younger Graces:
Pasithea, whom I myself have longed for all my days."
So he spoke, and the goddess white-armed Hera did not refuse:
she swore as he commanded, and named all the gods
under Tartarus, who are called the Titans.
280And when she had sworn and brought the oath to completion,
the two of them left the towns of Lemnos and Imbros,
clothed in mist, and made their road swiftly.
They came to Ida of the many springs, mother of wild things,
to Lecton, where they first left the sea; and over dry land
285they went, and the treetops shook beneath their feet.
There Sleep halted, before the eyes of Zeus could see him,
climbing into a towering fir, the tallest
then grown on Ida, that reached through the mist to the upper air.
There he perched, hidden close in the fir boughs,
290in the likeness of the clear-voiced mountain bird
the gods call chalkis, and men call kymindis.14
But Hera went quickly on up to Gargaron peak
on lofty Ida; and Zeus the cloud-gatherer saw her.
And the moment he saw her, desire wrapped his close mind round,
295as on the day they first mingled in love,
going to the bed again and again behind their dear parents' backs.15
He stood before her, and spoke a word, and named her:
"Hera — where are you rushing, that you come down from Olympus
like this — with no horses near, no chariot to mount?"
300And with guile in her heart the lady Hera answered:
"I am going to the ends of the generous earth, to see
Oceanus, the begetting of the gods, and mother Tethys,
who reared me well in their own halls and cherished me;
I go to see them, and to loose their endless quarrel:
305for a long time now they have held apart from one another,
from bed and from love, since anger fell upon their hearts.
My horses stand at the foot of Ida of the many springs,
ready to carry me over dry land and water both.
It is on your account I have come down from Olympus now —
310so that you would not be angry with me afterward, if I went
in silence to the house of deep-flowing Oceanus."
Answering her spoke Zeus the cloud-gatherer:
"Hera — you can set out for there later just as well.
Come, let the two of us go to bed, and turn to love.
315For never has desire for goddess or for woman
so flooded and mastered the heart inside my chest —
not when I loved Ixion's wife,16
who bore Peirithous, the equal of the gods in counsel;
nor Danaë of the lovely ankles, Acrisius' daughter,
320who bore Perseus, most admired of all men;
nor the daughter of far-famed Phoenix,
who bore me Minos and godlike Rhadamanthys;
nor Semele, nor Alcmene in Thebes —
and she bore Heracles, my strong-hearted son,
325while Semele bore Dionysus, a joy to mortals;
nor when I loved the lady Demeter of the lovely braids,
nor glorious Leto — no, nor you yourself:
none as I love you now, and sweet desire takes hold of me."
And with guile in her heart the lady Hera answered:
330"Most dread son of Cronos, what a word you have spoken!17
If now you long to lie down in love
on the peaks of Ida, where everything stands open to view —
how would it be if some one of the everlasting gods
saw us asleep, and going among all the gods
335told them? I could not rise from that bed and simply
walk home to your house; it would be a scandal.
But if you will — if that is truly your heart's pleasure —
you have a chamber, which your dear son Hephaestus
built you, fitting the close doors to their posts:
340let us go and lie there, since the bed is your desire."
Answering her spoke Zeus the cloud-gatherer:
"Hera, have no fear that any god or man
will see: such a cloud will I wrap around us,
a golden one. Not even Helios could spy us through it,
345and his light is the sharpest sight there is."
He spoke, and the son of Cronos caught his wife in his arms;
and beneath them the bright earth put out fresh grass,
and dewy lotus, and crocus, and hyacinth,
thick and soft, that held them up off the ground.
350In that they lay together, and drew over them a cloud,
fair and golden; and glittering dew-drops fell away from it.18
So the father slept, unmoving, on Gargaron peak,
broken by sleep and love, his wife in his arms;
and sweet Sleep set off at a run for the ships of the Achaeans
355to bring the word to the holder of the earth, the earth-shaker.
Standing close, he spoke winged words to him:
"Now, Poseidon, help the Danaans with a will,19
and hand them the glory — at least a little while, while Zeus
still sleeps; for I have wrapped him in a soft daze,
360and Hera has tricked him into bed, into love."
So speaking he went off toward the famed tribes of men;
and Poseidon, stirred still more to defend the Danaans,
sprang far out among the foremost at once, and called:
"Argives! Are we to concede the victory again to Hector,
365Priam's son — let him take the ships and win the glory?
That is his own claim and his boast, because Achilles
sits by the hollow ships with anger in his heart.
But Achilles will not be missed so very much
if the rest of us rouse ourselves to defend each other.
370Come then — as I say it, let us all obey:
let us dress ourselves in the biggest and best shields
in the army, and hide our heads in helmets
blazing all over, and take the longest spears in our hands,
and go. And I will lead; and I say Hector, Priam's son,
375will not stand us, however hot he burns.
And whatever staunch fighter has a small shield at his shoulder,
let him give it to a worse man, and get into a bigger."20
So he spoke; and they heard him well, and obeyed.
And the kings themselves, wounded as they were, marshaled them —
380Tydeus' son, and Odysseus, and Atreus' son Agamemnon —
and going down the whole line they made the exchange of war-gear:
the good man got into good armor, and gave the worse to the worse.
And when they had clothed their bodies in the flashing bronze
they set out; and Poseidon the earth-shaker led them,
385holding in his heavy hand a terrible thin-edged sword
like a lightning-flash — a thing no man may meet
in the grim combat: dread holds men back from it.21
And on the other side glorious Hector marshaled the Trojans.
Then it was that they stretched the most terrible strife of war,
390blue-maned Poseidon and glorious Hector,
one defending the Trojans, the other the Argives;
and the sea washed up to the huts and ships
of the Argives, and the armies met with a great war-shout.
Not so loud does the sea's wave roar against the land,22
395driven up out of open water by the hard North Wind;
not so loud the bellow of blazing fire
in mountain glens, when it rises to burn the timber;
not so loud the wind through the high-crowned oaks —
the wind at its loudest, when its rage is up and roaring —
400as the voice of Trojans and Achaeans then,
crying terror, when they sprang upon each other.
At Ajax first glorious Hector cast
his spear, as Ajax stood turned full toward him, and did not miss:
he hit where the two straps lay stretched across the chest,
405one for the shield, one for the silver-studded sword;
the two of them saved the soft flesh. And Hector was angered
that his swift missile had flown from his hand in vain,
and drew back into the band of his companions, dodging doom.
But as he went back, great Telamonian Ajax
410took up a stone — one of the many that rolled there
under the fighters' feet, props for the swift ships —
and struck his chest, over the shield-rim, close to the neck,
and set him spinning like a top with the blow: he reeled full circle.23
As when an oak goes down under the stroke of father Zeus,
415torn out by the roots, and the terrible smell of sulphur
rises off it, and courage fails whoever sees it
from close by — for hard is the bolt of great Zeus:
so Hector's fury dropped in an instant to the dust.
His hand let go the spear, and shield and helmet
420crumpled down on him, and his armor, intricate with bronze, clashed about him.
With a great shout the sons of the Achaeans ran in,
hoping to drag him off, and hurled their spears
thick and fast; but no one could wound the shepherd of the people
with thrust or throw: before that, the best men ringed him round —
425Polydamas, and Aeneas, and brilliant Agenor,
and Sarpedon, leader of the Lycians, and blameless Glaucus;
and of the rest not one neglected him, but they held
their round shields before him. And his companions
lifted him in their arms and carried him out of the toil,
430until they reached his swift horses, which stood behind
the battle and the fighting with their charioteer and the intricate chariot;
these carried him toward the city, groaning heavily.
But when they came to the ford of the fair-flowing river,24
eddying Xanthus, whom immortal Zeus begot,
435there they laid him from the chariot onto the ground, and poured
water over him; and he got his breath, and looked up with his eyes,
and sitting on his knees he vomited dark blood;
then sank back again to the ground, and both his eyes
were covered in black night: the blow still broke his spirit.
440And the Argives, when they saw Hector going off,
leapt at the Trojans all the harder, and remembered their war-craft.
There first of all the swift Ajax, Oïleus' son,
sprang in and wounded Satnius with his sharp-pointed spear —
Enops's son, whom the blameless naiad nymph bore
445to Enops as he herded by the banks of Satnioeis.25
Oïleus' spear-famed son came close and stabbed him
in the flank; he tumbled backward, and around him
Trojans and Danaans joined the strong encounter.
Polydamas the spear-shaker came to avenge him,
450Panthous's son, and hit Prothoenor, Areïlycus's son,
in the right shoulder; through the shoulder the massive spear
drove; and falling in the dust he clutched the earth in his palm.
And Polydamas vaunted terribly over him, crying far:
"There — again! From the massive hand of the great-hearted
455son of Panthous the javelin did not leap in vain:
one of the Argives caught it in his flesh; and I think
he will lean on it for a staff as he walks down into Hades."26
So he spoke, and grief came over the Argives at his vaunting,
and most of all he stirred the heart of war-minded Ajax,
460Telamon's son — for the man fell closest to him.
Quickly he cast at the other with his shining spear as he drew back.
Polydamas himself escaped black doom,
springing aside; but Antenor's son Archelochus
caught it — for the gods had counseled his destruction.
465It struck him where head and neck join,
at the topmost bone of the spine, and sheared both tendons through;
and his head and mouth and nostrils hit the ground
long before his shins and knees, as he fell.27
And Ajax in his turn called out to blameless Polydamas:
470"Think it over, Polydamas, and tell me truly:
is this man not a worthy exchange for Prothoenor
dead? He seems to me no base man, of no base line:
a brother of horse-taming Antenor,
or a son — the family look sits close upon him."
475He spoke knowing it well; and grief seized the Trojans' hearts.
Then Acamas, standing over his brother, wounded with the spear
Promachus the Boeotian, who was hauling the body by the feet.
And Acamas vaunted terribly over him, crying far:
"Argives — arrow-braggarts — never sated with threats!28
480Not for us alone, I promise you, the toil
and the misery: you too will be killed like this, in your turn.
Look how your Promachus sleeps, beaten down
by my spear — so my brother's blood-price should not go
long unpaid. That is why a man prays for a kinsman
485left in his halls: to ward off ruin for him."
So he spoke, and grief came over the Argives at his vaunting,
and most of all he stirred the heart of war-minded Peneleos.
He went for Acamas; and Acamas did not stand the charge
of lord Peneleos; and Peneleos wounded Ilioneus,
490son of Phorbas rich in flocks, whom Hermes loved
beyond all the Trojans, and gave him wealth;
and to him his mother had borne one only son, Ilioneus.
Him he stabbed beneath the brow, at the roots of the eye,
and pushed the eyeball out; straight through the eye
495and through the nape the spear drove, and he sank down,
stretching out both his hands. And Peneleos, drawing
his sharp sword, hewed through the middle of the neck, and struck
to the ground head and helmet together; and the massive spear
still stood in the eye; and holding it up like a poppy-head29
500he displayed it to the Trojans, and spoke in triumph:
"Trojans — take a message for me to the dear father
and the mother of illustrious Ilioneus: let them wail in their halls.
For neither will the wife of Promachus, Alegenor's son,
rejoice to meet her dear husband coming home, that day
505when we young men of the Achaeans sail back from Troy."
So he spoke; and trembling took the limbs of every one of them,30
and each man looked about him for escape from sheer destruction.
Tell me now, Muses, who keep your homes on Olympus —31
who was first of the Achaeans to lift the bloody spoils
510of men, once the famed earth-shaker had tilted the battle?
Ajax first, Telamon's son, wounded Hyrtius,
Gyrtius' son, leader of the strong-hearted Mysians;
and Antilochus stripped the life from Phalces and Mermerus;
and Meriones killed Morys and Hippotion,
515and Teucer brought down Prothoon and Periphetes;
and Atreus' son next wounded Hyperenor, shepherd of the people,
in the flank, and the bronze drank his bowels through,
tearing in; and his soul through the stabbed wound
came hurrying out, and darkness covered his eyes.
520But the most were killed by the swift Ajax, Oïleus' son:
for there was no one like him for speed of foot in the chase
when men broke and ran, when Zeus drove the panic in them.32
1 lines 1–8 — The book opens on the smallest possible hinge: Nestor, still in the hut of Book 11, hears the noise change pitch — "drinking though he was" — sets down the cup, borrows his son's shield (the son has his father's: the family's gear swapped down the generations), and steps outside into the catastrophe. Machaon is left with the wine and the promised bath: the wounded man's war is a warm tub. ↩
2 lines 16–22 — The old man's indecision as ground-swell: the open sea darkening "with soundless swell, boding the quick paths of the shrill winds — only boding: it neither rolls forward nor to either side, until some deciding blast comes down from Zeus." Deliberation rendered as weather that has not chosen; among the subtlest interior similes in the poem — the mind as sea before the decision that will move it, and the decision, as always, filed under Zeus. ↩
3 lines 27–40 — The council of the wounded: Diomedes, Odysseus, Agamemnon, "leaning on their spears," come up merely to watch — the poem's commanders reduced to spectators with walking- sticks. The parenthesis on the camp's terraced ship-rows (30-36) is the Iliad's clearest picture of its own stage-set: the beach too small for the fleet, the ships in tiers filling "the whole long mouth of the shore." ↩
4 lines 82–102 — Agamemnon's third flight-proposal (cf. 2.139, 9.26) — this time under fire, ships to be dragged seaward mid- battle — meets the poem's fiercest rebuke, reusing 4.349-350 verbatim: "what a word has escaped the fence of your teeth!" Odysseus's indictment is total: the wish for "some other army, a shabby one"; the credo of the war-generation ("for whom Zeus has given it, from youth right down to old age, to wind the skein of hard wars, till we perish every one" — war as spun wool, the life-thread and the war-thread one); the flat imperative "Silence!" (σίγα); and the tactical point that settles it — armies do not fight while their transport is leaving. Agamemnon's answer is the best thing he does in the poem: "you have caught me hard... Now let there be a man with better counsel than mine — young or old — and I would welcome him gladly." ↩
5 lines 109–132 — Diomedes claims the floor by genealogy — Portheus, Agrius, Melas, Oeneus; Tydeus the wanderer who married Adrastus's daughter and lies "under the heaped earth at Thebes" — the poem's fullest version of his family tree, deployed for the right to advise elders. The advice itself is modest and correct: go down, stay out of range, and shame the shirkers in. The youngest speaks last and best (cf. 9.31-49). ↩
6 lines 135–152 — Poseidon as anonymous old man, taking Agamemnon by the right hand: the gesture of pledge. His curse on Achilles — "let him perish just so; may a god strike him lame" — is the harshest thing said of Achilles in the poem, and it is said by a god fighting for Achilles' own side. (Zenodotus's text added a line making the disguise Phoenix — tidier and much less interesting.) Then the shout of "nine thousand men, or ten thousand": divine encouragement measured in decibels, repeating the strength-verse used of Strife at 11.11-12. ↩
7 lines 148–152 — See above — the shout-lines close with the same formula that opened Book 11's Strife-scene: the gods' rallying voices are interchangeable parts, and the poem knows it. ↩
8 lines 153–165 — The plan, stated with the poem's usual candor about Hera: she saw her brother-in-law working "and her heart was glad"; she saw her husband "and he was hateful to her heart." The deception is her own invention from desire's raw materials: body, sleep, and the borrowed girdle. The Dios Apatē is the one stretch of the Iliad where the plot of Zeus is successfully counter-plotted — by his wife, with comedy's weapons. ↩
9 lines 166–186 — The toilette is built exactly like an arming scene — the sequence of items (wash, anoint, robe, girdle, earrings, veil, sandals) laid out with the same formulaic machinery as greaves-corslet-sword-shield-helmet-spear (cf. 3.330-338), ending in the same clause that ends armings. Hera arms for bed. Every item has its maker or provenance (the chamber and bolt by Hephaestus, the robe worked by Athena) — divine materiel, like Agamemnon's corslet or Achilles' spear. The scent of the oil reaching earth and heaven; the veil "white as the sun"; the earrings "three-dropped, mulberry- dark": the poem's richest inventory of female adornment. ↩
10 lines 187–223 — The lie to Aphrodite runs on real cosmology: Oceanus "the begetting of the gods" and mother Tethys — an alternative theogony in which the world-river, not Cronos or Zeus, is origin (Sleep repeats it at 246: "the begetting of them all"; ancient readers from Plato and Crates on treated these lines as Homer's cosmological fragment). The kestos himas — the "pierced, embroidered band" — carries the poem's finest abstraction-list: "in it is love, in it desire, in it the trysting-talk — persuasion, that steals the wits even of the close-thinkers" (ὀαριστύς again — the intimacy-word the poem put on the front line at 13.291; here in its home register). Aristotle quotes the couplet in the Nicomachean Ethics (1149b) on the coercive power of desire. Aphrodite's consent-line — "you sleep in the arms of Zeus, and Zeus is highest" (213) — was athetized in antiquity; it is also, dramatically, the girdle working before it is even lent: persuasion stealing the wits of the goddess of persuasion. ↩
11 lines 225–230 — The flight-path: Olympus - Pieria - Emathia - the Thracian snow-mountains - Athos - Lemnos, feet never touching ground. Divine travel in the Iliad is always mapped (cf. 13.20-33): the geography is real and sequential, a northern-Aegean arc drawn at a goddess's speed. ↩
12 lines 231–262 — Sleep, "brother of Death" (the pairing returns with terrible weight at 16.672, carrying Sarpedon home). His refusal recalls the poem's deepest backstory: after Heracles sacked Troy, Hera used Sleep against Zeus and blew the hero to Cos; Zeus woke "hurling gods this way and that through the house," and Sleep survived only by running to Night, "subduer of gods and men" — "he checked himself: he stood in awe of doing what swift Night would hate." The one being before whom Zeus restrains himself is primordial darkness; the theology is older than Olympus, glimpsed once, through a frightened minor god's memory. Note too the escalation of fees: golden throne and footstool (furniture, the standard divine honorarium) refused; a Grace accepted — Sleep bargains like a craftsman who knows his labor's worth. ↩
13 lines 267–276 — Our printed Greek lacks line 269 — "Pasithea, for whom you long always, all your days" — the naming of the offered Grace inside Hera's speech; the line stands in only part of the manuscript tradition (an addition in several copies, as the apparatus records), and the numbering here jumps 268 to 270. Nothing is lost but an anticipation: Sleep himself names Pasithea at 276, with the longing-clause intact. This is the third genuine transmission-gap this translation reproduces (9.458-461; 11.543). The oath Sleep demands is the great one: by Styx, one hand on the earth, one on the shining sea, "so that all may be witnesses between us, the gods below with Cronos" — the defeated elder gods, "under Tartarus, who are called the Titans" (279), summoned as notaries: the old world-order exists, in the Iliad, to witness contracts. ↩
14 lines 283–291 — Landfall at Lecton, "and the treetops shook beneath their feet"; then Sleep in the tallest fir on Ida, "in the likeness of the clear-voiced mountain bird the gods call chalkis, and men call kymindis." The double-name motif (Briareus/Aegaeon 1.403, Batieia/Myrine 2.813) — the universe bilingual, and the poet claiming the gods' dictionary — here attached to a real bird (likely a hawk-owl) waiting in a tree to watch a seduction. ↩
15 lines 292–296 — Zeus sees her, "and the moment he saw her, desire wrapped his close mind round, as on the day they first mingled in love, going to the bed again and again behind their dear parents' backs." The marriage's beginning as adolescent secrecy — brother and sister evading Cronos and Rhea — is the poem's one glimpse of the primal domestic scene, and it makes the seduction work: what Hera has staged is his memory of their youth. ↩
16 lines 313–328 — The Leporello-catalogue: seven loves — Ixion's wife (mother of Peirithous), Danaë (Perseus), Europa the daughter of Phoenix (Minos and Rhadamanthys), Semele (Dionysus, "a joy to mortals" — his only Iliadic mention as Zeus's son), Alcmene (Heracles), Demeter, Leto — each with issue noted, ending "no, nor you yourself: none as I love you now." As courtship, an itemized list of adulteries addressed to one's wife is catastrophically tactless; as enchantment- symptom it is exact — the girdle's power made audible as babble. Aristophanes and Aristarchus athetized all twelve lines as unseemly; antiquity laughed and kept them; so does the printed text. ↩
17 lines 330–340 — Hera's answer opens with the register's fixed outrage-line ("Most dread son of Cronos, what a word you have spoken!" = 1.552) — deployed now in mock-modesty: what if some god saw us and told? The counter-offer (Hephaestus's chamber with the secret bolt) is a trap avoided by Zeus's own escalation: the golden cloud. ↩
18 lines 346–353 — The hieros gamos: "beneath them the bright earth put out fresh grass, and dewy lotus, and crocus, and hyacinth, thick and soft, that held them up off the ground." Earth flowering under the union of Sky-god and his queen — a fossil of fertility-religion set blooming in the middle of the war- poem; the golden cloud rains glittering dew. Then the plainest possible clause: "So the father slept." The plot of the Iliad from 8.473 onward hangs suspended inside a nap. ↩
19 lines 354–360 — Sleep reports to Poseidon in person — "I have wrapped him in a soft daze" — divine conspiracy with courier service. The alliance of Sleep and the sea-god frees the battle for exactly one Achaean surge, on borrowed time. ↩
20 lines 364–382 — Poseidon's tactical speech, with its remarkable order: swap armor by capability — "whatever staunch fighter has a small shield at his shoulder, let him give it to a worse man, and get into a bigger... the good man got into good armor, and gave the worse to the worse." Ancient critics athetized (376-377); soldiers will recognize the first recorded redistribution of kit by fighting value, ordered by a god and executed by three wounded kings. ↩
21 lines 384–387 — Poseidon leads with "a terrible thin-edged sword like a lightning-flash — a thing no man may meet in the grim combat: dread holds men back from it." The god's blade is not said to kill anyone: its work is categorical, a boundary (θέμις) — mortals simply may not engage it. ↩
22 lines 389–401 — The triple negative simile: not the sea's wave under the North Wind, not fire in the mountain glens, not the wind in the high oaks roars so loud as the two armies' voice. The poem's own sound-engineering: three natural crescendos stacked and overtopped — and all three (wave, fire, wind) are the similes this battle has been using for its charges, now outshouted by the real thing. ↩
23 lines 402–420 — The duel of the day: Hector's spear defeated by the crossing-point of two straps — the war of equipment again — and Ajax's answer with one of the ship-props: the stone "set him spinning like a top." Then the great oak simile: struck by the bolt of Zeus, torn out by the roots, "and the terrible smell of sulphur rises off it, and courage fails whoever sees it from close by." The lightning-smell is the most sensorily exact divine detail in the poem — and its theology cuts: Hector, whose whole warrant is Zeus's bolt, falls like a tree struck by it, while Zeus sleeps. ↩
24 lines 433–439 — The retreat to "the ford of the fair-flowing river, eddying Xanthus, whom immortal Zeus begot" — the line- pair that will open Book 21, laid down here; the river-god's paternity registered in passing. Hector's revival is clinical concussion: water poured over him, breath recovered, "sitting on his knees he vomited dark blood," relapse, "black night" again. He is out of the poem until 15.239 — and it takes Apollo, on Zeus's woken orders, to put him back. ↩
25 lines 442–448 — Satnius, son of Enops and "the blameless naiad nymph" who bore him "as Enops herded by the banks of Satnioeis": a river-bank begetting, a boy named for the river, killed in the mud of a different one. The smallest pastoral obituary in the poem. ↩
26 lines 449–457 — Polydamas's vaunt: the spear in Prothoenor's shoulder becomes "a staff... as he walks down into Hades" — death as an old man's stroll, cane provided by the killer. The counselor's wit is colder than the warriors'. The vaunt- chain that follows (458 = 486: "grief came over the Argives / Trojans at his vaunting") is built as strict alternation — grief answering grief, kill for kill, four boasts in sequence: the poem's mechanics of escalation laid bare. ↩
27 lines 463–474 — Archelochus, taking the spear meant for Polydamas "for the gods had counseled his destruction": struck at the join of head and neck, "and his head and mouth and nostrils hit the ground long before his shins and knees." Ajax's forensic vaunt — no base man, "a brother of horse- taming Antenor, or a son — the family look sits close upon him" — identifies the corpse by resemblance: kinship legible in a dead face, the poem's grimmest use of family likeness. ↩
28 lines 476–485 — Acamas over Promachus: "arrow-braggarts" for the Argives; then the blood-price logic said straight — "so my brother's blood-price (ποινή) should not go long unpaid. That is why a man prays for a kinsman left in his halls: to ward off ruin for him." The economy of vengeance (cf. 13.659, where Harpalion's death has no ποινή) stated as household prudence: brothers are insurance. ↩
29 lines 489–505 — Ilioneus: only son of Hermes-loved, flock-rich Phorbas — the eye put out at its roots, the spear through eye and nape, the head severed and lifted, spear and all, "like a poppy-head" (κώδεια, the seed-capsule). At 8.306-308 a dying boy's head drooped "as a poppy in a garden... heavy with seed and the rains of spring"; here the poppy returns as a thing brandished. Peneleos completes it with the poem's cruelest message home: tell his father and mother "to wail in their halls" — and Promachus's wife will not rejoice either, when the young men sail home. The taunt's real addressees are the two houses where the news will arrive; the Iliad's wars are always fought, at last, in the rooms of the parents and the wives. ↩
30 lines 506–507 — After the poppy-head, no answering vaunt: "trembling took the limbs of every one of them, and each man looked about him for escape." The chain of reciprocal boasts (note [26]) ends because one image exceeded the genre. Even this poem's warriors have a limit, and Peneleos found it. ↩
31 lines 508–510 — The fixed Muse-invocation (= 2.484, 11.218) for the rout's tally — "who was first of the Achaeans to lift the bloody spoils of men" (ἀνδράγρια, "man-spoils," a word that occurs nowhere else): full epic formality summoned for a plunder-list, as the tide turns on Poseidon's tilt. ↩
32 lines 511–522 — The tally: Hyrtius, Phalces, Mermerus, Morys, Hippotion, Prothoon, Periphetes — and Hyperenor, whose death at Menelaus's hands is recalled with strange precision at 17.24-28 (there with an insult-backstory the narrative here lacks; the poem's ledgers do not always reconcile). The last word goes to the lesser Ajax: "there was no one like him for speed of foot in the chase when men broke and ran" — the book's closing epitaph is for a sprinter of the pursuit, the specialist of the broken field: the Deception of Zeus ends with the poem's ugliest hero doing the one thing he does best, to men who can no longer fight back. ↩