The Iliad · wrath, sing, goddess
The fight over the body of Patroclus: Hector puts on the armor of Achilles, the immortal horses weep, and Ajax prays not for rescue but for light.
Book 17 is the Iliad's longest tug-of-war: one dead man at the center, and the whole day's war reorganized around the question of who will hold him. The poem frames it in similes of guardianship and labor rather than glory — Menelaus over the body "as a mother- cow, lowing, stands over her first calf" (note 1); the corpse dragged this way and that "as men stretch a great bull's hide soaked in fat," the tanning-yard come to the battlefield (note 21); the rescue at last like mules hauling a ship-timber down a rocky path, the two Ajaxes behind it like a wooded ridge damming a flood (note 37). Against these stand the book's two heights of theology. Zeus watches Hector put on the stripped armor of Achilles and shakes his head: the gear "not taken by right," the power granted as ποινή — blood-price paid in glory to a man who will never come home from the battle, "nor will Andromache take from you the famous armor of Peleus' son" (notes [12], [13]). And Zeus watches the immortal horses stand like a grave-stone, manes in the dust, weeping for their charioteer, and asks the poem's deepest question of his own gift: why did we give you to a mortal, "you who are ageless and deathless? Was it so that you too might have sorrows among unhappy men? For there is nothing anywhere more pitiful than man, of all things that breathe and creep upon the earth" (notes [25], [26]).
The book's people are its second glory: Euphorbus dead with his Graces' hair in the blood and the olive-sapling simile that Pythagoras's biographers never stopped quoting (note 4); Glaucus proposing to trade corpse for corpse, Patroclus for Sarpedon — bodies as the war's currency (note 10); the anonymous soldiers' paired vows (note 23); Antilochus struck speechless by the news he must carry (note 35); and Ajax, in the god-sent mist, making the request Longinus judged the most sublime in literature — not life, but light: "and in the light — kill us, since that is now your pleasure" (note 33).
Register notes: 17.63-64 reuse the lion lines of 11.175-176; 17.75-78 reuse the horses-of-Aeacus taunt of 10.402-404; 17.97 and 17.106 reuse the fixed soliloquy lines; 17.177-178 reuse 16.691-692; 17.454-455 reuse the sunset clause of 11.193-194; the reluctant lion of 17.657-664 reuses 11.550-555. Zenodotus's excision of 404-425 (Achilles' ignorance) and the athetized narrator's confession at 260-261 are noted in place.
1Nor did it escape Atreus' son, Menelaus dear to Ares,
that Patroclus had been broken by Trojans in the combat.
He came through the front-fighters helmed in blazing bronze
and stood over the body — as a mother-cow, lowing,
5stands over her first calf, who never knew birth before:1
so tawny-haired Menelaus stood over Patroclus.
He held his spear before him, and his shield, balanced every way,
hot to kill whatever man might come against him.
Nor was Panthous's son of the good ash spear careless
10of blameless Patroclus fallen: he came and stood
close by, and spoke to Menelaus dear to Ares:
"Son of Atreus — Zeus-nurtured Menelaus, marshal of the people —
give way: leave the body; let the bloody spoils be.
For no man of the Trojans or their famed allies
15hit Patroclus with the spear in the strong encounter before me:2
so let me take my good fame among the Trojans,
or I will strike you and take your honey-sweet life."
Then, deeply angered, tawny-haired Menelaus answered him:
"Father Zeus — how ugly a thing is arrogant boasting!
20Not the leopard's fury is so great, nor the lion's,
nor the murderous wild boar's — whose heart in his chest
is the biggest of all, glorying in his strength —
as the pride of the sons of Panthous with their good ash spears.
Yet the strength of Hyperenor, breaker of horses, had no joy
25of his youth, when he mocked me and stood against me
and called me the sorriest fighter of the Danaans:
I say his own feet never carried him home
to delight his dear wife and his devoted parents.
Just so, I promise you, I will unstring your strength, if you stand
30against me. Go back into the crowd — that is my counsel —
and do not stand against me, before some evil
takes you. When the thing is done, even the fool learns."
So he spoke, and did not persuade him; and he answered:
"Now, Zeus-nurtured Menelaus, now you will pay in full3
35for my brother, whom you killed — and boast of it in speeches —
whose wife you widowed in the depth of her new bridal chamber,
who brought his parents cursed mourning and grief.
I could be some stay of weeping for those unhappy two
if I brought back your head and your armor
40and laid them in the hands of Panthous and brilliant Phrontis.
But not for long shall the labor go untried between us,
and unfought — whether it end in courage or in flight."
So speaking, he stabbed at the shield, balanced every way;
but the bronze did not break through: the point bent back
45in the strong shield. And second, with the bronze,
rose Atreus' son Menelaus, with a prayer to Zeus the father:
as Euphorbus drew back, he stabbed the base of his throat,
and leaned into the thrust, trusting his heavy hand;
and clean through the soft neck the point ran out.
50He fell with a thud, and his armor clattered upon him.
His hair was soaked with blood — hair like the Graces',4
and the braids pinched tight in gold and silver.
As a man rears a flourishing olive sapling
in a lonely place, where water wells up in plenty —
55a fair shoot, and a thriving; and the breathing of every
wind rocks it, and it breaks thick with white blossom;
but suddenly a wind comes with a great squall
and wrenches it out of its trench and lays it flat on the earth:
such was Panthous's son of the good ash spear, Euphorbus,
60when Atreus' son Menelaus killed him, and set to stripping his armor.
And as when some mountain-bred lion, sure of his strength,5
snatches from a grazing herd the finest heifer:
her neck he breaks first, seizing it in his strong teeth,
and then he gulps down the blood and all the inward parts,
65rending her; and around him the dogs and the herdsmen
raise clamor upon clamor — from a distance: they have no will
to go against him, for green fear has hold of them:
so the heart in the chest of not one of them dared
to go against glorious Menelaus.
70And now Atreus' son would easily have carried off the famed armor
of Panthous's son, had not Phoebus Apollo grudged it,
and roused Hector against him, the equal of swift Ares,
in the likeness of a man, Mentes, leader of the Cicones;
and speaking winged words he addressed him:
75"Hector — you are running now, chasing what cannot be caught:6
the horses of the war-minded son of Aeacus. They are hard
for mortal men to break or to drive,
for any man but Achilles, whom an immortal mother bore.
And meanwhile Menelaus, warlike son of Atreus,
80standing over Patroclus, has killed the best of the Trojans —
Panthous's son Euphorbus — and stopped his rushing courage."
So speaking, the god went back into the toil of men;
and terrible grief packed Hector's darkened heart.
He peered along the ranks, and knew at once
85the one man stripping the famed armor, the other lying
on the ground, the blood running from the open wound.
He came through the front-fighters helmed in blazing bronze,
screaming sharp, like the unquenchable flame
of Hephaestus. And his sharp cry did not escape Atreus' son;
90troubled, he spoke to his own great-hearted spirit:
"Ah me — if I abandon the fine armor,
and Patroclus, who lies here for the sake of my honor,
I fear any Danaan who sees it will call it my disgrace.
But if, in shame, I fight Hector and the Trojans
95alone — I fear the many will surround me, one man:
Hector of the flashing helmet is leading all of them here.
But why does my own heart argue these things with me?
When a man wills, against the god's face, to fight a man
whom a god honors — a great woe rolls down on him quickly.
100So no Danaan who sees me give way before Hector
will call it my disgrace: he fights out of heaven.
But if I could only hear Ajax of the great war-cry —
the two of us together might go back and remember our war-craft,
even against the god's face, and haul the body clear
105for Achilles, Peleus' son. Of evils, that would be best."
While he was turning this over in mind and heart,
the Trojan battle-lines came on; and Hector led them.
And he gave ground backward, and left the body,
turning again and again — like a bearded lion7
110that dogs and men drive off from the fold
with spears and shouting: the brave heart in his chest
goes stiff with the cold, and unwilling he leaves the yard:
so tawny-haired Menelaus went from Patroclus.
He turned and stood, when he reached the band of his companions,
115peering everywhere for great Ajax, Telamon's son;
and he saw him quickly, on the far left of the whole battle,
heartening his companions and driving them to fight,
for Phoebus Apollo had thrown unearthly panic among them.
He set off at a run, and stood by him at once, and spoke:
120"Ajax — this way, old friend! Let us hurry for dead Patroclus,
and see if we can bring the body at least to Achilles —
naked: for Hector of the flashing helmet has the armor."
So he spoke, and stirred the heart in war-minded Ajax,
and he came through the front-fighters, and with him tawny-haired Menelaus.
125Hector, when he had stripped Patroclus of the famed armor,
was dragging him, to shear the head from the shoulders with the sharp bronze8
and haul the body off and give it to the dogs of Troy.
But Ajax came up close, carrying his shield like a tower,
and Hector drew back into the band of his companions
130and sprang into his chariot; and he gave the fine armor
to Trojans to carry to the city, to be his own great glory.
And Ajax covered Menoetius's son with his broad shield
and stood — as a lion stands over his young,9
a lion leading his cubs, when hunting men come on him
135in the timber: he glories in his strength,
and draws the whole scowl of his brows down over his eyes:
so Ajax bestrode the hero Patroclus.
And on the other side Atreus' son, Menelaus dear to Ares,
stood fast, nursing great grief in his chest.
140Then Glaucus, Hippolochus's son, leader of the Lycian men,
glaring darkly at Hector, rebuked him with a hard word:
"Hector — best of us all to look at: in battle you fall far short.10
Fine fame indeed is yours — a runaway's.
Consider now how you will save your town and citadel
145alone — you with the people born in Ilion;
for no Lycian, at least, will go out to fight the Danaans
for your city, since there was no thanks, it seems,
for battling the enemy without respite, forever.
How would you save a lesser man in the press of war,
150hard-hearted one, when Sarpedon — your guest-friend and companion —
you abandoned to the Argives, their prey and their prize:
a man who served you greatly, your city and yourself,
while he lived; and now you have not dared to keep the dogs from him.
So now, if any Lycian man will obey me,
155we go home — and let sheer destruction show over Troy.
For if the Trojans now had daring fury in them,
unshaking — the kind that comes into men who for their fatherland
take on the toil and the grinding of war against their enemies —
we would quickly haul Patroclus inside Ilion.
160And if that man came to the great city of lord Priam,
dead — if we hauled him out of the fighting —
the Argives would quickly ransom back the fine armor
of Sarpedon, and we would bring the man himself into Ilion:
for the aide of such a man lies killed — far the best
165of the Argives by the ships, he and his close-fighting aides.
But you had not the courage to stand against great-hearted
Ajax, eye to eye in the enemies' clamor,
and fight him straight — since he is a better man than you."
Glaring at him darkly, Hector of the flashing helmet answered:
170"Glaucus — why does a man like you talk so overweening?11
Well now! And I always said you were first in judgment
of all who live in Lycia of the deep soil;
but now I scorn your wits outright — such a thing to say:
you say I did not stand against gigantic Ajax.
175It is not battle I shudder at, nor the thunder of horses;
but always the mind of Zeus who bears the aegis is stronger:
he sends even the brave man running, and strips away victory
easily — and then again himself drives a man to fight.
Come stand beside me, old friend — watch my work:
180see whether all day long I prove the coward you call me,
or whether I stop many a Danaan too, however hot
his courage, from his defense of dead Patroclus."
So speaking, he called to the Trojans with a great shout:
"Trojans and Lycians and Dardanians who fight at close quarters —
185be men, my friends; remember your rushing courage,
while I put on the armor of blameless Achilles,
the fine armor I stripped from the strength of Patroclus when I killed him."
So speaking, Hector of the flashing helmet went off
out of the grim war; and running he overtook his companions,
190quickly, on swift feet, not yet far away —
the men carrying toward the city the famed armor of Peleus' son.
And standing apart from the battle of many tears, he changed his armor:12
his own he gave to the war-loving Trojans to carry
to holy Ilion; and he put on the immortal armor
195of Achilles, Peleus' son, which the heavenly gods
had given his dear father; and the father, grown old, passed it
to his son — but the son did not grow old in his father's armor.
And when Zeus the cloud-gatherer saw him from afar
arming himself in the gear of the godlike son of Peleus,
200he shook his head, and spoke to his own spirit:
"Ah, poor man — death is nowhere in your thoughts,13
and it stands close beside you. You are putting on the immortal
armor of the best of men — a man the others shudder at.
His companion you have killed, who was gentle and strong,
205and stripped the armor from his head and shoulders
not by right. Yet for now I will hand you great power —
as recompense for this: that never home out of the battle
will you come, nor Andromache take from you the famous armor of Peleus' son."
He spoke, and the son of Cronos bowed his head with his dark brows;
210and he fitted the armor to Hector's body, and Ares entered him,
the terrible war-god, and his limbs were filled inside
with courage and strength. He went out to the famed allies
with a great shout, and showed himself before them all,
blazing in the armor of the great-hearted son of Peleus.
215And going among them he stirred each man with his words —
Mesthles and Glaucus and Medon and Thersilochus,
Asteropaeus and Deisenor and Hippothous,
Phorcys and Chromius and Ennomus the bird-reader;
urging these on, he spoke winged words:
220"Hear me, you numberless tribes of allies who dwell around us:14
it was not for a crowd's sake — not because I lacked numbers —
that I gathered you here, each man from his own city,
but so that you would guard, with a will, the Trojans' wives
and little children from the war-loving Achaeans.
225With that in mind I wear down my own people
for gifts and provisions, to feed the courage in each of you.
So now — let every man turn straight ahead, and die
or live: that is the trysting-talk of war.
And whoever hauls Patroclus, dead though he is,
230in among the horse-taming Trojans, and Ajax yields to him —
half the spoils I will share out to that man, and half I keep
myself; and his glory shall be as great as mine."
So he spoke; and they marched straight down on the Danaans, heavy,
spears held high; and their hearts had great hope
235of hauling the body from under Ajax, Telamon's son —
fools: over that body he was to rob many of life.15
And then Ajax spoke to Menelaus, good at the war-cry:
"Old friend — Zeus-nurtured Menelaus — I no longer count
on the two of us, even ourselves, coming home from this war.
240It is not so much for the corpse of Patroclus I fear —
he will glut the dogs and birds of Troy soon enough —
as for my own head, that something may happen to it,
and yours: for Hector, that cloud of war, has covered
everything, and for us sheer destruction shows clear.
245Come — call the best of the Danaans, if any may hear."
So he spoke, and Menelaus, good at the war-cry, did not disobey,
and cried a piercing cry, to carry to the Danaans:
"Friends — leaders and lords of the Argives —
you who beside the two Atreus' sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus,
250drink at the public cost, and each give orders
to your people — from Zeus come honor and glory.
It is hard for me to pick out each one
of the leaders — so great is the strife of war ablaze —
so let each man come uncalled, and feel the outrage in his heart
255that Patroclus should be sport for the dogs of Troy."
So he spoke; and the swift Ajax, Oïleus' son, heard him sharp,
and came first to meet him, running through the combat,
and after him Idomeneus, and Idomeneus's aide
Meriones, the equal of Enyalius, slayer of men.
260But of the rest — who could speak their names out of his own mind,
all who came up behind and woke the Achaean battle?15
And the Trojans struck first, massed; Hector led them.
As when at the mouth of a sky-fed river
the great swell bellows against the current, and around it
265the jutting shores boom, as the salt sea belches beyond them:
with such a roar came the Trojans on. But the Achaeans
stood fast around Menoetius's son, one heart in all of them,
fenced with their bronze-faced shields. And over their bright
helmets the son of Cronos poured thick mist,16
270since never in the time before had he hated Menoetius's son,
while he was alive and the aide of Aeacus' grandson;
and he loathed that he become the prey of the dogs
of Troy — and so he roused his companions to defend him.
And at first the Trojans pushed back the bright-eyed Achaeans:
275they left the body and shrank away, and the high-hearted Trojans
took not one of them with their spears, for all their striving,
but set to hauling the corpse. Yet only a little while
were the Achaeans to hold off from it: they were rallied fast
by Ajax, who in build, and in what he wrought,
280surpassed all the Danaans after the blameless son of Peleus.
He swept straight through the front-fighters, like a wild boar
in his strength, that up in the mountains scatters hounds
and strong young men with ease, wheeling through the glens:
so the son of illustrious Telamon, shining Ajax,
285swept in and easily scattered the Trojan battle-lines
that had taken their stand over Patroclus, minded above all
to haul him to their own city and win the glory.
Now Hippothous, the shining son of Pelasgian Lethus,17
was dragging him by the foot through the strong encounter,
290a shield-strap bound around the ankle-tendons,
doing a favor to Hector and the Trojans. But swiftly
the evil came on him that no one could hold off, wish it as they might:
the son of Telamon, springing at him through the crowd,
struck close-in, through the helmet's bronze cheek-pieces;
295and the horsehair-crested helmet split around the spear-point,
struck by the great spear and the heavy hand,
and the brain came running out of the wound along the socket,
bloody; and there and then his strength was unstrung, and from his hands
he let the foot of great-hearted Patroclus drop
300to lie on the ground; and he fell face-down on the corpse beside it,
far from deep-soiled Larisa; nor did he repay
his dear parents the price of his rearing: his life was short,
broken under the spear of great-hearted Ajax.
And Hector in turn cast at Ajax with his shining spear;
305but he saw it coming and dodged the bronze spear —
barely; and it struck Schedius, great-hearted Iphitus's son,
far the best of the Phocians, whose home was in famed
Panopeus, where he was king over many men:
it struck him under the middle of the collarbone, and through it
310the bronze point drove, and came out at the base of the shoulder.
He fell with a thud, and his armor clattered upon him.
And Ajax struck war-minded Phorcys, Phaenops's son,
full in the belly as he bestrode Hippothous,
and burst the plate of his corslet, and the bronze
315spilled his bowels through; and falling in the dust he clutched the earth in his palm.
And the front-fighters gave ground, and glorious Hector;
and the Argives shouted loud, and dragged away the corpses,
Phorcys and Hippothous, and loosed the armor from their shoulders.
And then once more the Trojans, before the Achaeans dear to Ares,
320would have climbed into Ilion, broken by their own weakness,
and the Argives would have won glory even beyond the portion of Zeus18
by their own power and strength — had not Apollo himself
stirred up Aeneas, in the likeness of the herald
Periphas, Epytus's son, who at his old father's side
325had grown grey in his heraldry, his heart a well of kindly counsel;
in his likeness Apollo, son of Zeus, spoke to him:
"Aeneas — how could you and yours hold steep Ilion
even against a god? — as I have seen other men do,
trusting their power and strength, their manhood
330and their own numbers, though their people were too few.
But Zeus wills the victory to us, far rather
than to the Danaans — and you flinch unspeakably, and will not fight."
So he spoke; and Aeneas knew Apollo who strikes from afar,
looking him in the face, and called aloud to Hector:
335"Hector — and you other leaders of Trojans and allies —
this now is disgrace: to climb back into Ilion
before the Achaeans dear to Ares, broken by our own weakness.
No — for a god has just now stood beside me and said
Zeus, highest deviser of battle, is still our helper.
340So let us go straight for the Danaans, and not let them
bring dead Patroclus to their ships at their ease."
So he spoke, and sprang far out beyond the front-fighters, and stood;
and they wheeled about, and stood to face the Achaeans.
Then Aeneas wounded Leiocritus with his spear,
345the son of Arisbas, brave companion of Lycomedes;
and as he fell, Lycomedes dear to Ares pitied him,
and came and stood very close, and cast with his shining spear,
and struck Apisaon, Hippasus's son, shepherd of the people,
in the liver below the midriff, and unstrung his knees on the instant —
350the man who had come out of deep-soiled Paeonia,
and was their best in battle after Asteropaeus.
And as he fell, warlike Asteropaeus pitied him,
and he too drove forward, willing to fight the Danaans;
but there was no way any longer: fenced with shields on every side
355they stood around Patroclus, spears held out before them.
For Ajax ranged among them all with strict command:19
no man to give back a step from the body,
no man to fight out in front of the other Achaeans,
but to stand close over him, and fight hand to hand.
360So gigantic Ajax commanded; and the earth grew soaked
with purple blood, and they fell in heaps together,
dead men of the Trojans and their overmastering allies
and Danaans too — for not without blood did these defend —
but far fewer of them perished: they remembered always
365to ward sheer ruin from one another in the crowd.
So they fought on, like fire; nor would you have said20
the sun was safe in the sky, or the moon:
for they were held in mist, all the best men in the battle
who stood around the dead son of Menoetius.
370But the other Trojans and strong-greaved Achaeans
fought at their ease under clear air: the piercing light
of the sun lay spread, and no cloud showed over all
the earth or the mountains; and they fought in pauses,
keeping well apart, dodging each other's
375missiles of groaning. But those in the middle suffered
in the mist and the war, worn down by the pitiless bronze —
all who were the best. And two men had not yet heard —
two famous men, Thrasymedes and Antilochus —
that blameless Patroclus was dead: they thought him
380living still, fighting Trojans in the front of the crowd;
and watching against the death and rout of their companions
they fought apart, since Nestor had so ordered them,
when he drove them to the war from the black ships.
But for the others, all day long the great struggle of grinding
385strife stood taut: with the weariness and the sweat of it,
without respite, the knees and shins, the feet beneath,
the hands and eyes of every man were spattered
in the fight around the brave aide of the swift-footed son of Aeacus.
As when a man gives his people the hide of a great bull21
390to stretch, soaked through with fat:
they take it and stand in a circle and stretch it
outward; and quickly the moisture goes, and the fat sinks in
with so many pulling, and the whole hide is stretched taut through:
so this way and that, in a little space, both sides hauled
395the corpse; and their hearts had great hope —
the Trojans, of dragging him to Ilion; the Achaeans,
to the hollow ships. And around him the brawl rose
savage: not Ares driver of armies, not Athena
could have looked at it and scorned it, however great their anger:
400such was the evil toil of men and horses Zeus
stretched taut over Patroclus on that day.
And brilliant Achilles knew nothing at all, yet, of Patroclus dead:22
for the battle was fought far from the swift ships,
under the wall of the Trojans. So never in his heart
405did he think him dead — but living, pressed hard on the gates,
and coming home again; since he never thought at all
that Patroclus would sack the city without him — nor with him:
for often he had learned as much from his mother, hearing her apart,
when she brought him word of the purpose of great Zeus.
410But now his mother told him nothing of the evil that had happened —
so great — that his far-dearest companion had perished.
And they around the corpse, holding their sharpened spears,
pressed close without respite, and killed each other;
and thus would one of the bronze-shirted Achaeans say:
415"Friends — no glory for us in going back23
to the hollow ships. Sooner let the black earth gape
for all of us here. That would be better by far, at once,
than to leave this man to the horse-taming Trojans
to haul to their own city, and win the glory."
420And thus in turn would one of the great-hearted Trojans say:
"Friends — even if it is fate that we be broken beside this man,
all of us alike, let no one yet give way from the war."
So a man would speak, and stir the fury of each.
So they fought on; and the iron din went up
425through the barren air to the brazen sky.24
But the horses of Aeacus' grandson, apart from the battle,25
were weeping, ever since they first had learned their charioteer
was fallen in the dust at the hands of man-slaughtering Hector.
Automedon, Diores' stout son, tried them —
430lashing them again and again with the quick whip's stroke,
again and again with honeyed words, and again with curses:
but the pair would not go back to the ships and the broad Hellespont,
nor into the battle after the Achaeans.
As a grave-stone stands unmoving, set on the barrow
435of a dead man or a woman,
so they stood, unstirring, with the beautiful chariot,
drooping their heads to the earth; and hot tears
ran from their eyelids to the ground as they mourned
in longing for their charioteer; and their rich manes were fouled,
440streaming down from the yoke-pad on both sides of the yoke.
And seeing the two of them mourning, the son of Cronos pitied them,
and he shook his head, and spoke to his own spirit:
"Ah, poor pair — why did we give you to king Peleus,26
a mortal — you who are ageless and deathless?
445Was it so that you too might have sorrows among unhappy men?
For there is nothing anywhere more pitiful than man,
of all things that breathe and creep upon the earth.
But not on you, at least, and your intricate chariot
shall Hector, Priam's son, ride. I will not allow it.
450Is it not enough that he has the armor, and vaunts in it — just so?
Into your knees and into your hearts I will throw fury,
so you may carry Automedon safe out of the war
to the hollow ships. For I will still hand the enemy glory,
to kill, until they reach the well-benched ships,
455and the sun goes down and the sacred darkness comes on."
So speaking, he breathed brave fury into the horses;
and the two of them, shaking the dust from their manes to the ground,
swiftly carried the quick chariot among Trojans and Achaeans.
And behind them Automedon fought, grieving for his companion,27
460swooping with the horses like a vulture on geese:
easily he would run back out of the Trojans' clamor,
and easily charge in again, pressing through the thick crowd.
But he took no men when he swept in pursuit:
it was not possible, alone in the sacred chariot,
465to go at them with the spear and hold the swift horses.
At last a companion saw him with his own eyes —
Alcimedon, the son of Laerces, Haemon's son;
he stood behind the chariot and spoke to Automedon:
"Automedon — which of the gods put this profitless plan
470in your chest, and took your good wits from you?
— fighting the Trojans alone, in the front of the crowd,
while your companion lies killed, and Hector himself
glories with the armor of Aeacus' grandson on his own shoulders."
And Automedon, Diores' son, answered him:
475"Alcimedon — what other Achaean is your equal
at holding the fury of immortal horses in hand —
except Patroclus, the equal of the gods in counsel,
while he lived? Now death and fate have overtaken him.
So: you take over the whip and the shining reins,
480and I will step down from the horses, and fight."
So he spoke; and Alcimedon, springing onto the rescue-chariot,
quickly caught up the whip and reins in his hands,
and Automedon leapt down. And glorious Hector saw it,
and at once he spoke to Aeneas, who was near:
485"Aeneas — counselor of the bronze-shirted Trojans —
I see the two horses of the swift-footed son of Aeacus
come out into the battle with feeble charioteers.
I could hope to take them, if you in your heart
are willing; since if the two of us charged, they would not
490dare stand against us face to face, and fight the war-god."
So he spoke, and the brave son of Anchises did not disobey.
The two went straight on, their shoulders wrapped in oxhides
dry and stiff, with heavy bronze hammered over them;
and with them went Chromius, and godlike Aretus,
495the two together; and their hearts had great hope
of killing the men, and driving off the strong-necked horses —
fools: not without blood were they to come away
again from Automedon. He, with a prayer to Zeus the father,
was filled with courage and strength in his darkened heart;
500and at once he spoke to Alcimedon, his trusted companion:
"Alcimedon — hold the horses not far off from me,
but breathing right on my back. For I do not think
Hector, Priam's son, will be checked in his fury
before he has mounted behind the fair-maned horses of Achilles —
505with the two of us killed — and routed the ranks of the Argive
men; or else been taken himself among the first.
So speaking he called the two Ajaxes and Menelaus:
"You two Ajaxes, leaders of the Argives, and Menelaus —
leave the corpse to the best men you have, to stand
510and bestride it and hold off the enemy ranks,
and from the two of us — living men — beat off the pitiless day.
For here they bear down hard through the war of tears,
Hector and Aeneas, the best men of the Trojans.
But these things lie on the knees of the gods:
515I too will let fly — and all the rest will be Zeus's care."
He spoke, and balanced his long-shadowed spear and hurled it,
and struck the shield of Aretus, balanced every way;
and the shield did not hold the spear: the bronze drove clean through,
and through the war-belt it tore into the pit of his belly.
520As when a strong-grown man with a sharp axe,27
striking behind the horns of an ox of the field,
shears the tendon clean through, and the ox springs forward and drops:
so Aretus sprang forward and fell on his back; and the spear,
quivering razor-sharp in his bowels, unstrung his limbs.
525And Hector cast at Automedon with his shining spear;
but he saw it coming and dodged the bronze spear,
ducking forward; and behind him the long spear
stuck fast in the ground, and the butt-end stood quivering;
and there at last massive Ares stilled its fury.
530And now they would have gone at each other with swords, close in,
had not the two Ajaxes parted them for all their heat,
coming through the crowd at their companion's call.
In dread of them the others drew back again —
Hector and Aeneas and godlike Chromius —
535and left Aretus lying there, torn through the heart.
And Automedon, the equal of swift Ares,
stripped the armor, and spoke his triumph over him:
"Now I have eased my heart a little of its grief
for Menoetius's dead son — though the man I killed was worse."
540So speaking, he took up the bloody spoils and set them
in the chariot, and mounted, feet and hands
all bloody, like a lion that has fed on a bull.
And back over Patroclus the strong encounter was stretched again,
grinding, of many tears; and Athena woke the struggle,
545come down from heaven: for wide-seeing Zeus had sent her
to drive on the Danaans — for now his mind was turned.
As Zeus stretches a shimmering rainbow out of heaven28
for mortals to see, a portent either of war
or of a chill storm — the kind that stops men's work
550on the face of the earth, and troubles the flocks:
so she, wrapping herself in a shimmering cloud,
sank into the Achaean host, and woke each man.
First she spoke to Atreus' son, urging him on —
strong Menelaus, for he was nearest her —
555likened to Phoenix in body and tireless voice:
"Yours will be the hanging head, Menelaus, yours the disgrace,
if under the wall of the Trojans the running dogs
drag the trusted companion of illustrious Achilles.
Hold on with all your strength, and drive on the whole army."
560Then answered her Menelaus, good at the war-cry:
"Phoenix — old father, elder born long ago — if only Athena
would give me strength, and hold off the rush of missiles!
Then I would be willing indeed to stand and defend
Patroclus: for his death has touched me to the heart.
565But Hector has the terrible fury of fire, and will not stop
cutting men down with the bronze; for Zeus hands him the glory."
So he spoke; and the goddess grey-eyed Athena was glad
that he had prayed to her first of all the gods.
She put strength into his shoulders and his knees,
570and set in his chest the boldness of the fly,29
which — beaten off again and again from a man's skin —
persists in biting; and human blood is sweet to it:
with boldness like that she filled his darkened heart,
and he strode over Patroclus and cast with his shining spear.
575Now there was among the Trojans one Podes, Eëtion's son,30
a rich man and a brave one; and Hector honored him
above the people, for he was his dear companion at the feast.
Him tawny-haired Menelaus struck on the war-belt
as he sprang away in flight, and drove the bronze clean through:
580he fell with a thud; and Atreus' son Menelaus
dragged the corpse away from the Trojans into the band of his companions.
But Apollo came and stood by Hector, and stirred him,
in the likeness of Phaenops, Asius's son, who of all
his guest-friends was dearest to him, with his house at Abydos;
585in his likeness Apollo the worker-from-afar spoke to him:
"Hector — what other Achaean will fear you now?
Look how you flinched from Menelaus, who before this
was a soft spearman — and now he is gone, alone, lifting
the corpse away from under the Trojans: he has killed your trusted
590companion, brave among the front-fighters — Podes, Eëtion's son."
So he spoke; and the black cloud of grief wrapped Hector round,
and he came through the front-fighters helmed in blazing bronze.
And then the son of Cronos took up the tasseled aegis,31
glittering, and hid Ida under clouds,
595and lightened and thundered hugely, and shook it,
and gave victory to the Trojans, and routed the Achaeans.
First to lead the rout was Peneleos the Boeotian:32
turned forever toward the enemy, he was hit in the shoulder,
a grazing hit on the crest of it; but the spear-point of Polydamas
600scored clean to the bone — for he had come close when he threw.
Then Hector wounded Leïtus, close in, on the wrist —
the son of great-hearted Alectryon — and stopped his fighting;
he shrank back, glancing round, for his heart no longer hoped
to hold a spear steady in hand and fight the Trojans.
605And as Hector chased Leïtus, Idomeneus
struck him on the corslet, on the chest beside the nipple;
but the long spear snapped at the socket, and the Trojans
shouted. And Hector cast at Idomeneus, Deucalion's son,
standing in his chariot; and missed him by a little,
610but struck the aide and charioteer of Meriones,
Coeranus, who had followed him from well-founded Lyctus.
(Idomeneus had come on foot at first, leaving the double-ended
ships, and would have handed the Trojans a great triumph
had not Coeranus driven up fast with the swift horses:
615to him he came as light, and beat off the pitiless day —
and lost his own life under man-slaughtering Hector.)
Him Hector struck below the jaw, under the ear, and the spear-butt
dashed his teeth out at the roots, and cut the tongue through the middle:
he crashed from the chariot, and poured the reins to the ground.
620And Meriones stooped and gathered them up off the plain
in his own hands, and called to Idomeneus:
"Lay on the whip now, till you come to the swift ships!
You see it yourself: the power is no longer with the Achaeans."
So he spoke; and Idomeneus whipped the fair-maned horses
625back to the hollow ships; for fear had fallen on his heart.
Nor did great-hearted Ajax fail to see it, and Menelaus —
that Zeus was giving the Trojans the tide-turning victory;
and great Telamonian Ajax began to speak among them:
"Shame! By now even a man who was a great fool33
630could see that father Zeus himself is helping the Trojans.
Every missile of theirs strikes home, whoever lets fly,
coward or brave man: Zeus guides them all alike;
and ours drop to the ground, every one, spent for nothing.
Come then — let us ourselves think out the best plan,
635both how to haul the corpse away, and how we ourselves
may come home to be a joy to our dear companions,
who look this way, grieving, and say that no longer
can the fury of man-slaughtering Hector and his invincible
hands be held — that he will fall on the black ships.
640And would there were some companion to carry word quickly
to Peleus' son; for I do not think he has even heard
the wretched news — that his dear companion has perished.
But nowhere can I see such a man among the Achaeans:
they are held in the mist, themselves and their horses alike.
645Father Zeus — deliver the sons of the Achaeans out of the mist;
make clear sky; grant our eyes to see;
and in the light — kill us, since that is now your pleasure."
So he spoke; and the father pitied him as he wept,34
and at once he scattered the mist and thrust the fog away,
650and the sun blazed out, and the whole battle came clear.
And then Ajax spoke to Menelaus, good at the war-cry:
"Look about you now, Zeus-nurtured Menelaus — see if you can
sight Antilochus alive, great-hearted Nestor's son,
and send him running to war-minded Achilles
655with word that his far-dearest companion has perished."
So he spoke, and Menelaus, good at the war-cry, did not disobey,
and set out — like a lion from a farmstead35
that has grown weary at last of provoking the dogs and the men,
who will not let him take the fat of the herd,
660watching all night long; and he, craving the meat,
charges in but gets nowhere, for javelins thick and fast
fly out to meet him from daring hands,
and burning brands besides, and he flinches at those for all his fury,
and at dawn he goes off apart, sullen at heart:
665so from Patroclus went Menelaus, good at the war-cry,
much against his will; for he feared the Achaeans
in the grim rout would leave him, prey for the enemy;
and long he charged Meriones and the two Ajaxes:
"You two Ajaxes, leaders of the Argives, and Meriones —
670now let each man remember the gentleness
of poor Patroclus: to every one of us he knew how
to be kind, while he lived. Now death and fate have overtaken him."
So speaking, tawny-haired Menelaus went off,
glancing on every side, like an eagle — the bird
675men say has the sharpest sight of all things under heaven:
high as he rides, the swift-footed hare does not escape him
crouched under a leafy bush, but down upon it
he swoops, and seizes it fast, and takes its life:
so then, Zeus-nurtured Menelaus, your shining eyes
680went ranging everywhere across the crowd of your companions,
hunting Nestor's son, if you might see him still alive.
And he saw him quickly, on the far left of the whole battle,
heartening his companions and driving them to fight;
and standing close, tawny-haired Menelaus spoke:
685"Antilochus — come here, Zeus-nurtured; hear
the wretched news — the thing that should never have happened.
Already, I think, you see it with your own eyes
and know it: a god is rolling calamity on the Danaans,
and victory is the Trojans'. And killed is the best of the Achaeans —
690Patroclus; and a great longing is built for the Danaans.
Run to the ships of the Achaeans, quick, and tell
Achilles — he may yet bring the body safe to his ship,
naked: for Hector of the flashing helmet has the armor."
So he spoke; and Antilochus heard the word with horror.35
695For a long time speechlessness held him: his eyes
filled with tears, and his strong voice was checked.
Yet not even so did he neglect Menelaus's charge:
he set off at a run, and gave his armor to his blameless companion
Laodocus, who wheeled the whole-hoofed horses close beside him.
700And his feet carried him weeping out of the battle,
bearing the evil word to Achilles, Peleus' son.
And your heart, Zeus-nurtured Menelaus, had no will36
to defend the worn companions there where Antilochus
had left them, and great longing was built for the Pylians;
705but he sent them brilliant Thrasymedes,
and himself went back again to bestride the hero Patroclus;
and running he stood beside the two Ajaxes, and spoke at once:
"That man I have sent off to the swift ships,
to go to Achilles of the swift feet. But I do not think
710Achilles will come now, however great his anger at brilliant Hector:
there is no way he could fight the Trojans naked.
So let us ourselves think out the best plan,
both how to haul the corpse away, and how we ourselves
may escape death and doom out of the Trojans' clamor."
715Then great Telamonian Ajax answered him:
"All you have said is right and true, far-famed Menelaus.
You and Meriones — stoop down, quickly, get under him,
lift the corpse and carry him out of the toil. And behind you
we two will fight the Trojans and brilliant Hector,
720one heart in us as we share one name, we two who before now
have stood the sharp war-god side by side, together."
So he spoke; and they took the corpse up off the ground in their arms,
high and mightily; and behind them the Trojan army
screamed, when they saw the Achaeans lifting the body,
725and charged like hounds that spring on a wounded boar37
ahead of the young hunters:
for a while they race in, furious to tear him —
but when he wheels among them, sure of his strength,
back they shrink, and scatter in terror this way and that:
730so the Trojans for a while kept up the chase in a mass,
stabbing with swords and double-curved spears;
but whenever the two Ajaxes turned about and stood
against them, their color changed, and not one dared
dart forward and fight for the corpse.
735So the two of them, straining, carried the body out of the battle
toward the hollow ships; and the war stretched taut behind them,
savage as fire that leaps on a city of men,
rising suddenly, and blazes, and the houses crumble
in the great glare, and the wind's strength roars across it:
740so the relentless din of horses and of spearmen
came on behind them as they went.
And they — like mules who have thrown their great strength into the work,
dragging down from the mountain along a rugged track
a roof-beam or a huge ship-timber, and inside them the heart
745is worn with weariness and sweat together as they strain:
so the two of them, straining, carried the body. And behind them
the two Ajaxes held the enemy — as a wooded ridge
holds back water, a ridge lying clean across a plain,
which checks even the punishing currents of powerful rivers,
750and at once turns the flood of them all to wander
loose across the lowland; and all their strength cannot break it:
so the two Ajaxes, behind, kept fending off the battle
of the Trojans. But they followed hard, and two above all,
Aeneas, Anchises' son, and glorious Hector.
755And as a cloud of starlings goes, or of jackdaws,38
shrieking ruin, when they see coming at them
a falcon, that carries death to small birds:
so before Aeneas and Hector the young Achaean men
went shrieking ruin, and forgot their war-craft.
760And much fine armor fell around and about the ditch
as the Danaans fled; and there was no pause in the war.
1 lines 1–6 — Menelaus over the body "as a mother-cow, lowing, stands over her first calf, who never knew birth before" (πρωτοτόκος κινυρή — the lowing of a first-time mother). The poem opens its longest battle with its most maternal image: the corpse-defense that will consume the book is presented first not as war but as instinct — and given to Menelaus, the poem's specialist in loyal, unglamorous care. ↩
2 lines 9–32 — Euphorbus claims the spoils by right of first blood (his dart at 16.806-815); Menelaus's answer settles the Hyperenor account opened at 14.516 — with details the earlier narrative never gave (the mockery, "sorriest fighter of the Danaans"): the poem's ledgers, as at 17.24-28, remember more than they recorded. His closing proverb — "When the thing is done, even the fool learns" (ῥεχθὲν δέ τε νήπιος ἔγνω) — became Greek proverbial stock permanently. ↩
3 lines 33–42 — Euphorbus's revenge-speech is a family portrait: the brother's widow "in the depth of her new bridal chamber," the parents' "cursed mourning," and the imagined homecoming — your head and armor "in the hands of Panthous and brilliant Phrontis." He is the third Panthoid the war has engaged (Polydamas, Hyperenor); by naming his own parents he writes the address on his own death-notice. ↩
4 lines 43–60 — The kill and the double image. First the hair: "soaked with blood — hair like the Graces', and the braids pinched tight in gold and silver" — the poem's dandy-warrior, beautiful even in the detail of his hair-clasps. Then the olive sapling: reared by hand in a lonely place by welling water, rocked by every breathing of wind, white with blossom — torn out by one squall and laid flat. The most tender death-simile in the Iliad, spent on a minor Trojan — and made immortal twice over: Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras quotes the passage because Pythagoras claimed to have been Euphorbus (16.[43]); the sage's remembered death arrived pre-fitted with the loveliest lines in Homer. ↩
5 lines 61–69 — The lion takes the finest heifer: lines 63-64 repeat 11.175-176 verbatim (our English kept) — the neck broken first, the blood and inward parts gulped down — while dogs and herdsmen clamor "from a distance," held by green fear. Menelaus, so often the poem's second-rank fighter, is for once the beast nobody dares approach. ↩
6 lines 70–105 — Apollo-as-Mentes turns Hector back with the horses-taunt that reuses Dolon's dream (10.402-404, our English kept): the unattainable team as the measure of Trojan overreach, third time offered, never possessed. Menelaus's soliloquy that follows is the poem's clearest statement of the shame-calculus (fixed frame lines kept: "Troubled, he spoke..."; "But why does my own heart argue..."): abandoning the body is disgrace, fighting a god-backed man is doom — "When a man wills, against the god's face, to fight a man whom a god honors, a great woe rolls down on him quickly" — and the resolution is neither: withdraw, find Ajax, return. Prudence with a plan is not cowardice; the poem lets the calculation stand unmocked. ↩
7 lines 109–113 — The reluctant lion — driven from the fold, "the brave heart in his chest goes stiff with the cold" — the first of the book's two borrowings from Ajax's great retreat- simile family of Book 11 (see note [35] for the second): the poem now clothes Menelaus in the images it minted for its strongest defender. ↩
8 lines 125–127 — Hector's intention, stated flat: to shear the head from the shoulders and give the trunk "to the dogs of Troy." The corpse-outrage theme crosses a line no one has yet crossed in act — and it is Hector, the poem's most humane warrior, who first conceives it. Books 22-24 will weigh everything that follows against these three lines. ↩
9 lines 132–139 — Ajax over the corpse as a lion over his cubs, the whole scowl of his brows drawn down over his eyes — guardianship again (note [1]), now paternal; and Menelaus beside him "nursing great grief." The two images of the book's opening — mother-cow and lion-father — bracket the dead man like parents. ↩
10 lines 140–168 — Glaucus's rebuke — the harshest any ally gives Hector — climaxes in the book's most startling proposal: haul Patroclus into Ilion and trade him — "the Argives would quickly ransom back the fine armor of Sarpedon, and we would bring the man himself into Ilion." Corpse for corpse, gear for gear: the dead as exchangeable stores of value. The poem's whole final movement (Hector's body ransomed for weighed gold) is glimpsed here first as an ally's grievance; and the grievance itself — "there was never any thanks" — is the mercenary's ledger Hector must answer with his own accounting at 220-232. ↩
11 lines 169–182 — Hector's answer reuses the theology of 16.688-692 (our English kept): "always the mind of Zeus... is stronger: he sends even the brave man running... and then again himself drives a man to fight." True doctrine — and, as ever with Hector, deployed exactly where it excuses him. The challenge ("stand beside me, old friend — watch my work") converts the quarrel into witness. ↩
12 lines 183–197 — The changing of the armor, staged "apart from the battle of many tears" like a rite: his own gear sent into Ilion, the immortal gear put on — and the poem recites its provenance as elegy: gods to Peleus; Peleus, "grown old," to his son; "but the son did not grow old in his father's armor." The line every reader remembers: the armor's history is a history of interrupted inheritance, and Hector is now inside it. ↩
13 lines 198–214 — Zeus's head-shake over Hector is the poem's theology of recompense at its most precise: the armor taken "not by right" (οὐ κατὰ κόσμον); the grant of "great power" made explicitly τῶν ποινήν — as blood-price, compensation paid in advance for the death already decreed: "never home out of the battle will you come, for Andromache to take from you the famous armor of Peleus' son." Andromache, who begged him to fight from the wall (6.431), enters the sentence as the person who will not perform the homecoming ritual. Then the uncanny grace-note: the armor fits — Zeus himself "fitted the armor to Hector's body, and Ares entered him." The gift, the doom, and the ecstasy are one act. ↩
14 lines 215–232 — Hector's speech to the allies is the epic's frankest look at coalition warfare: "it was not for a crowd's sake I gathered you... I wear down my own people for gifts and provisions, to feed the courage in each of you" — the war economy Glaucus invoked (147-148) conceded in full. Then the third and strangest use of the intimacy-word: die or live — "that is the trysting-talk of war" (πολέμου ὀαριστύς; 13.291, 14.216). And the bounty: half-shares with Hector for whoever drags Patroclus in — glory made divisible and priced. ↩
15 lines 233–261, 260–261 — The advance is stamped "fools" (over that body Ajax "was to rob many of life"); Ajax's grim realism ("It is not so much for the corpse I fear... as for my own head"); Menelaus's call to the leaders "who drink at the public cost" — rank invoked through its perquisites; and then the narrator's own confession, athetized by Zenodotus: "But of the rest — who could speak their names out of his own mind...?" The inverted Muse-invocation: where 2.484 called on the goddesses because memory fails, here the singer simply shows the failure. The ancients heard a lapse; it reads as the book's honesty about crowds. ↩
16 lines 262–273 — Zeus pours mist over the body's defenders with the poem's most carefully argued motive: "never in the time before had he hated Menoetius's son, while he was alive... and he loathed that he become the prey of the dogs of Troy." The god who engineered the death (16.644-655) now spends the day protecting the corpse: the two attitudes are not reconciled — they are both true, and the poem leaves them side by side. ↩
17 lines 274–318 — The first full swing of the tug: Hippothous drags the body by a shield-strap bound round the ankle- tendons — the technical, butcher's detail — and dies across it, "far from deep-soiled Larisa; nor did he repay his dear parents the price of his rearing" (θρέπτρα — child-care as a debt the dead leave unpaid; cf. 4.477-478). Schedius the Phocian falls to Hector — the death our register logged when his namesake died at 15.515: the poem keeps both Schedii and spends them in different books. The exchange ends with the Argives dragging away not Patroclus but the Trojan dead: every body on this field is now cargo. ↩
18 lines 319–334 — The counterfactual — Troy broken "even beyond the portion of Zeus" (ὑπὲρ Διὸς αἶσαν) by mortal strength alone — is the strongest such clause in the poem: fate has slack in it, and only Apollo's intervention takes it up. The god borrows the shape of Periphas the herald, "grown grey in his heraldry" beside old Epytus — the poem's tenderness for professions again — and Aeneas knows him at once ("looking him in the face"): the recognition granted to the pious Aeneas and almost no one else. ↩
19 lines 356–365 — Ajax's field-order is the tactical heart of the book: no retreat from the body, no heroics out in front, "stand close over him, and fight hand to hand." The result the poet audits precisely: the ground purple, dead on both sides — "but far fewer of them perished: they remembered always to ward sheer ruin from one another in the crowd." The phalanx-discipline of Books 13 and 16 has become doctrine, stated and costed: cohesion is casualty-arithmetic. ↩
20 lines 366–383 — The doubled sky: over Patroclus, mist and night — "you would not have said the sun was safe, or the moon"; everywhere else "the piercing light of the sun lay spread, and no cloud showed over all the earth or the mountains," where men fight "in pauses, keeping well apart." A private midnight for the best, sunshine for the rest — the poem's most surreal battlefield image, ending on the two who fight in the light and do not know (Thrasymedes and Antilochus): light as ignorance, darkness as the place where the truth is. ↩
21 lines 384–401 — The tanning simile: the great bull's hide, soaked in fat, stretched in a circle by many hands "until the moisture goes and the fat sinks in... and the whole hide is stretched taut through" — the day's whole war compressed into a work-yard: the corpse pulled "this way and that, in a little space," by professionals, patiently. Even Ares and Athena "could not have scorned" the toil — the gods invoked as connoisseurs of labor. Nothing in the poem is grimmer than the craftsmanship of this comparison. ↩
22 lines 401–411 — And Achilles does not know. The passage Zenodotus cut (404-425 in his edition): Thetis "often" told him the purpose of Zeus, "but now his mother told him nothing of the evil that had happened." Inside it, the strangest clause in the poem's plotting: Achilles never hoped Patroclus would sack the city "without him — nor with him": he has carried his mother's prophecies far enough to know Troy is not theirs to take together. The ignorance is thus doubly cruel: he knows the large doom and not the small one that is running toward him on Antilochus's feet. ↩
23 lines 412–425 — The paired anonymous vows (τις-speeches): the Achaean — "Sooner let the black earth gape for all of us here"; the Trojan — "even if it is fate that we be broken beside this man, all of us alike, let no one yet give way." The two armies, nameless, say the same sentence from opposite sides. ↩
24 lines 424–425 — "the iron din went up through the barren air to the brazen sky" — iron, bronze, and the barren middle air (ἀτρύγετος, the sea's own epithet lent to the ether): the war as metallurgy filling the whole space between earth and heaven. ↩
25 lines 426–440 — The weeping horses. Immortal Xanthus and Balius stand apart from the battle "as a grave-stone stands unmoving, set on the barrow of a dead man or a woman" — creatures of wind become their charioteer's own monument — heads to the earth, "hot tears" running, "their rich manes fouled, streaming down from the yoke-pad." Automedon tries whip, honey, and curses; grief does not answer to any of the three. It is the poem's only animal mourning, and among its greatest inventions: sorrow without speech, loyalty without hope, in bodies that cannot die. ↩
26 lines 441–455 — Zeus's pity — the sentence at the poem's center of gravity: "why did we give you to king Peleus, a mortal — you who are ageless and deathless? Was it so that you too might have sorrows among unhappy men? For there is nothing anywhere more pitiful than man, of all things that breathe and creep upon the earth." The god who runs the war states its final metaphysics: mortality itself, not any battle, is the pity of it; the immortal horses' one flaw is contact with us. Then the practical rider: Hector shall not have them ("Is it not enough that he has the armor...?"), and the sunset clause of the day repeated word for word from 11.193-194 — the doom still running on schedule beneath the compassion. ↩
27 lines 456–542 — The Automedon sequence: the charioteer fights "like a vulture among geese," is talked into sense by Alcimedon (the Myrmidon fifth-captain of 16.197), and the two-man crew re-forms — driver breathing on his back — against Hector, Aeneas, Chromius, and Aretus. Aretus takes the spear "as when a strong-grown man with a sharp axe, striking behind the horns of an ox of the field, shears the tendon clean through, and the ox springs forward and drops" — the sacrificial slaughter-stroke on the battlefield. And Automedon's vaunt is the book's grief-economy in one line: "Now I have eased my heart a little of its grief... though the man I killed was worse." Vengeance as approximate payment; the ledger never balances, and he says so. ↩
28 lines 543–552 — Athena comes down wrapped in "a shimmering cloud" like the rainbow Zeus stretches "for mortals to see, a portent either of war or of a chill storm that stops men's work on the face of the earth, and troubles the flocks." The rainbow as omen (11.27-28 made it armor- decoration) — beauty that means interruption: war for men, weather for the sheep, the two disasters given equal standing in the farmer's sky. ↩
29 lines 553–573 — Athena-as-Phoenix, and the fly. She fills Menelaus "with the boldness of the fly, which — beaten off again and again from a man's skin — persists in biting; and human blood is sweet to it." The smallest courage-simile in epic and the most audacious: persistence stripped of all dignity and honored anyway — appetite as valor. Plutarch and Galen both quote it; no other poet would have dared attach it to a king at the moment a goddess strengthens him. ↩
30 lines 575–591 — Podes, Eëtion's son — "his dear companion at the feast" (εἰλαπιναστής): Hector's table-intimate, rich and brave, killed in flight by the man Apollo then calls "before this a soft spearman" (μαλθακὸς αἰχμητής). The grief-cloud that wraps Hector is personal — the war has finally reached his own mess-table. The name Eëtion tolls again (Andromache's father, 6.396; Pedasus's city, 16.153): everything Hector loves seems to descend from men of that name. ↩
31 lines 593–596 — Zeus ends the argument by hand: the tasseled aegis taken up, Ida hidden in cloud, lightning, thunder, the shake — "and gave victory to the Trojans, and routed the Achaeans." The instrument Apollo borrowed at 15.229 is back with its owner; four verbs, and the day tilts. ↩
32 lines 597–625 — The rout ledger: Peneleos and Leïtus wounded (the two Boeotian catalogue-leaders of 2.494 subtracted in two lines); Idomeneus's spear snapping on Hector's corslet; and Coeranus of Lyctus, who dies taking the cast meant for his king — "to him he came as light, and beat off the pitiless day — and lost his own life": the poem's formula of salvation (φάος, light) priced at one charioteer. Meriones stooping to gather the fallen reins off the plain while the world collapses is the kind of detail this poet never omits: someone must always pick up the reins. ↩
33 lines 626–647 — Ajax's prayer. First the observation ("even a man who was a great fool could see that father Zeus himself is helping the Trojans — every missile of theirs strikes home... and ours drop to the ground, every one"), then the double need (save the body; send word to Achilles), and then the request that Longinus (On the Sublime 9.10) set above nearly everything in literature: "Father Zeus — deliver the sons of the Achaeans out of the mist; make clear sky; grant our eyes to see; and in the light — kill us, since that is now your pleasure" (ἐν δὲ φάει καὶ ὄλεσσον). He does not pray to live; he prays to see. The demand is worthy of the fighter the poem has built across seventeen books: no complaint, no bargain — visibility, and then whatever Zeus likes. ↩
34 lines 648–650 — "And the father pitied him as he wept" — the tears are Ajax's (the strongest man in the army weeping inside his prayer, a detail easy to miss and impossible to forget), and Zeus's answer is instant and exact: mist scattered, fog thrust away, "the sun blazed out, and the whole battle came clear." He grants the seeing. The killing he keeps on its schedule. ↩
35 lines 651–701 — The message chain. Menelaus leaves the body "much against his will," in the reluctant-lion simile repeated from 11.550-555 (our English kept — the simile that carried Ajax's retreat now carries Menelaus's errand); his charge to the defenders is the dead man's true eulogy: "let each man remember the gentleness of poor Patroclus: to every one of us he knew how to be kind, while he lived." Then the eagle-eye search, and the delivery to Antilochus — who answers with the poem's most complete silence: "For a long time speechlessness held him: his eyes filled with tears, and his strong voice was checked." He hands his armor to Laodocus and runs weeping — the fastest of the young Achaeans carrying the heaviest sentence in the poem, unarmed, "bearing the evil word." Book 18 opens on his arrival. ↩
36 lines 702–721 — Menelaus returns — the apostrophe turned on him twice in fifty lines (679, 702): the book's faithful laborer earns the second person too. Ajax's plan divides the last work: Menelaus and Meriones to carry, the two Ajaxes — "one heart in us as we share one name" — to hold the rear: the pun on Αἴαντε as a fighting unit, two men conjugated as a dual. ↩
37 lines 722–753 — The carry: the body hoisted "high and mightily"; the boar wheeling on the hounds; the fire engulfing a city ("the houses crumble in the great glare"); and then the pair of similes that turn rescue into labor and landscape — the mules dragging beam or ship-timber "down from the mountain along a rugged track... the heart worn with weariness and sweat"; the Ajaxes as "a wooded ridge... lying clean across a plain," damming the flood of powerful rivers and turning it loose over the lowland. Men as terrain: the defensive fighter's apotheosis is to become geography. ↩
38 lines 755–761 — The end: starlings and jackdaws "shrieking ruin" before the falcon — the young Achaeans in flight before Aeneas and Hector — "and much fine armor fell around and about the ditch as the Danaans fled; and there was no pause in the war." The book that fought all day for one man's body closes with armor strewn like litter and the fighting unpaused: no cadence, no rest — because the poem's next sound is Antilochus's voice in Achilles' hearing, and nothing in the war will ever be the same after it. ↩