Book XIX

The wrath is renounced from a seat; the blame is laid on a goddess; and the gifts nobody looks at are carried past a fasting man — who arms, mounts, and hears his own horse foretell his death.

Translator’s note on Book 19

Book 19 is called the Renunciation of the Wrath, and its business is to close the quarrel that opened the poem — which it does in the strangest scene of public reconciliation in literature. Achilles, who now wants only to kill, renounces the wrath in nine lines and wishes Briseis — the girl the quarrel was about — had died before it started (note 6). Agamemnon answers seated, "not standing up in their midst" (the ancient editors were so unsettled that Zenodotus's text made him stand; note 8), and delivers not an apology but a theology: "I am not to blame: Zeus is, and Fate, and the Erinys who walks in mist" — followed by the great parable of Ate, Blindness, the soft-footed eldest daughter of Zeus who walks on the heads of men, and whom Zeus himself, blinded over the birth of Heracles, hurled from heaven by her shining braids (notes [9], [10]). Book 9's Blindness was "strong and sound of foot"; this register keeps the one English name so the two portraits can argue with each other. And Achilles accepts the theology — "Father Zeus, great is the blindness you deal to men!" — so the quarrel ends with both parties agreeing that nobody human did it (note 19). The gifts so bitterly itemized in Book 9 are carried into the middle of the assembly, and the man they were meant to persuade tells Agamemnon to give them or keep them as he pleases.

The book's real argument is between grief and the belly. Odysseus — "I was born first and know more things" — insists twice that armies cannot mourn fasting: his harvest of bronze, "where the bronze strews the most straw on the ground and the crop is smallest," and his terrible discipline: bury the dead "keeping a pitiless heart, weeping for one day" (note 16). Achilles refuses — "slaughter, and blood, and the hard groaning of men" is the only food he wants (note 15) — and has to be fed like a wick, drop by drop, with nectar by Athena. Between the two positions stands the book's finest scene: Briseis, restored at last and given her only speech in the poem, keening over Patroclus who had promised to make her Achilles' wedded wife — "You were gentle, always" — while the narrator, in two lines as cold and true as anything in Homer, notes that the women wailed with her "for Patroclus in show; but each for her own sorrows" (note 20).

Then the arming — snowfall of helmets, the earth laughing at the lightning of bronze, the shield's light like a lonely mountain fire seen by sailors storm-driven away from their dear ones (the inverse of Book 18's rescue-beacon; note 25) — the Pelian ash only Achilles can swing (kept verbatim from Book 16, against Aristarchus; note 26), and the ending no other book has: the war-horse Xanthus, given voice by Hera, bows his head till his mane pours to the ground and tells his master he will die — "by a god, and by a man" — before the Erinyes shut his mouth. Achilles already knows. He says so, and drives.

Register notes: 19.2 = 11.2; 19.65-66 = 18.112-113; 19.78 = 2.110 ("squires of Ares"); 19.176-177 reuse the oath-wording of 9.133-134; 19.216 = 16.21; 19.224 = 4.84; 19.388-391 = 16.141-144; Ate is "Blindness" per 9.502-512; the gift-catalogue matches 9.122-130 item for item.

1Dawn in her saffron robe rose up from the streams of Ocean¹

to bring light to the immortals and to mortal men;

and she came to the ships carrying the god's gifts.

She found her dear son lying over Patroclus,

5wailing his piercing grief; and around him his many companions

mourned. The brilliant goddess stood among them,

and clung to his hand, and spoke a word, and named him:

"My child — we must let this man lie, for all our grief,²

since by the will of the gods, first of all, he was broken.

10Now you: take from Hephaestus this famed armor,

beautiful — such as no man has ever worn on his shoulders."

So speaking, the goddess laid the armor down³

in front of Achilles; and all the intricate work clashed aloud.

And trembling took all the Myrmidons: not one dared

15look at it straight on; they shrank away. But Achilles —

the more he looked, the deeper the anger sank in him, and his eyes

blazed out terribly under their lids like flame-glare;

and he delighted, holding the god's shining gifts in his hands.

And when he had taken his joy of looking at the intricate work,

20at once he spoke winged words to his mother:

"Mother, the god has given me arms: such work as is fitting⁴

for immortals — such as no mortal man could have made.

Now I will arm myself in them. But I am terribly

afraid that meanwhile, into the stout son of Menoetius,

25flies will enter by the bronze-cut wounds

and breed worms in him, and defile the body —

the life is slain out of it — and all the flesh will rot."

Then answered him the goddess, silver-footed Thetis:

"Child, do not let these things trouble your mind.

30I will undertake to beat away those savage tribes,

the flies, that feed on men killed in war.

Even if he lies here till a year runs to its end,

his flesh shall stay sound as it is — or better.

But you: call the Achaean heroes to assembly,

35renounce your wrath against Agamemnon, shepherd of the people,

and then arm quickly for the war, and put on your valor."

So speaking, she sent daring strength into him;

and into Patroclus, through the nostrils, she distilled

ambrosia and red nectar, so his flesh might stay sound.

40And brilliant Achilles went along the beach of the sea⁵

shouting his terrible shout, and roused the Achaean heroes.

And even those who before had always stayed among the ships —

the helmsmen, the men who kept the steering-oars,

and the stewards who stayed aboard as dealers of bread —

45even they went then to the assembly, because Achilles

had appeared, who had long stayed out of the grievous fighting.

And two came limping, the squires of Ares:

war-staunch Tydeus's son and brilliant Odysseus,

leaning on their spears, for they still carried grievous wounds;

50and they went and sat down in the front of the assembly.

And last of all came the lord of men Agamemnon,

carrying his wound: for he too, in the strong encounter,

was stabbed by Coon, Antenor's son, with a bronze-fitted spear.

And when all the Achaeans were gathered together,

55swift-footed Achilles rose up among them and spoke:

"Son of Atreus — was this, then, in any way the better for us both,⁶

for you and for me, when the two of us, grieved at heart,

raged in heart-devouring strife for the sake of a girl?

I wish Artemis had killed her with an arrow at the ships

60on the day I chose her from the sack of Lyrnessus:

then not so many Achaeans would have bitten the boundless earth

under enemy hands, while I raged on in my wrath.

For Hector and the Trojans, the gain. The Achaeans, I think,

will long remember the strife of me and you.

65But we will let that be — a thing done and past, for all our grief,⁷

beating down the heart in our chests because we must.

Now I end my anger. There is no need for me

to rage on, relentless, forever. Come then: quickly

drive the long-haired Achaeans into the war,

70so that I can go out against the Trojans once again

and test them — whether they choose to spend the night by the ships.

Many a one of them, I think, will be glad to bend the knee,

whoever escapes out of the deadly war from under our spear."

So he spoke; and the strong-greaved Achaeans rejoiced

75that the great-hearted son of Peleus renounced the wrath.

And among them spoke also the lord of men Agamemnon —⁸

from the place where he sat, not standing up in their midst:

"Friends, Danaan heroes, squires of Ares:⁹

when a man stands to speak, it is right to listen, and unseemly

80to break in on him: that is hard even for a practiced speaker.

In a great uproar of men, how could anyone hear

or speak? Even a clear-voiced speaker is defeated there.

To the son of Peleus I will declare myself. But the rest of you

Argives, mark it, and each man know my word well.

85Often the Achaeans have said this thing against me,

and they would revile me for it. But I am not to blame:

Zeus is, and Fate, and the Erinys who walks in mist,

who cast wild blindness into my mind in the assembly

on that day when I myself stripped Achilles of his prize.

90But what could I do? A god carries all things to their end:

Blindness, the eldest daughter of Zeus, who blinds¹⁰

all men — the deadly one. Her feet are soft: not on the ground

does she walk, but over the heads of men

she moves, damaging mankind; and one after another she snares.

95For once she blinded even Zeus — and he, they say, is best

of men and gods alike; yet even Zeus

Hera, female as she is, deceived with her scheming

on the day when the might of Heracles was due to be born

of Alcmene, inside fair-crowned Thebes.

100For Zeus spoke out in triumph among all the gods:

'Hear me, all you gods and all you goddesses,

while I say what the heart in my chest commands me.

Today Eileithyia of hard labor will bring

into the light a man who shall rule all who dwell around him —

105of the race of men who are of my own blood.'

And scheming lady Hera answered him:

'You will prove a liar: you will set no fulfillment on your word.

Come then, Olympian: swear me now a strong oath

that he shall indeed be lord of all who dwell around him

110who on this day falls between the feet of a woman,

of those men who are of the race of your blood.'

So she spoke; and Zeus saw none of her scheming,

but swore the great oath — and was blinded to his cost.

And Hera darted down, leaving the peak of Olympus,

115and came quickly to Achaean Argos, where she knew

the sturdy wife of Sthenelus, Perseus's son.

She was pregnant with a dear son, and her seventh month was standing;

and Hera brought him out into the light before his month,

and stayed Alcmene's labor, and held back the Eileithyiai.

120Then she herself brought the news, and said to Zeus, Cronos's son:

'Father Zeus of the bright bolt — I will put a word in your mind.

Already a fine man is born who shall rule the Argives:

Eurystheus, son of Sthenelus, Perseus's son —

your stock. It is no disgrace for him to rule the Argives.'

125So she spoke; and sharp grief struck him deep in his mind.

And at once he seized Blindness by her shining-braided head,

raging in his heart, and swore a strong oath

that never again to Olympus and the starry heaven

would she come back — Blindness, who blinds all.

130So speaking, he whirled her in his hand and flung her

out of the starry heaven; and soon she came to the works of men.

Over her he groaned forever, whenever he saw his dear son

doing shameful labor under Eurystheus's tasks.

So I too — when great Hector of the flashing helmet

135kept slaughtering Argives at the sterns of the ships,

I could not forget the Blindness that first blinded me.

But since I was blinded, and Zeus took my wits away,¹¹

I am willing to make amends, and to give ransom past counting.

Up, then, into the war — and rouse the rest of the army.

140The gifts: I am here to furnish all of them, as many

as brilliant Odysseus promised yesterday in your hut.

Or if you wish, hold back a while, pressed though you are for war,

and my attendants will fetch the gifts out of my ship

and bring them here — and you will see I give what contents your heart."

145Then in answer spoke to him swift-footed Achilles:

"Most glorious son of Atreus, lord of men Agamemnon:¹²

the gifts — furnish them if you wish, as is proper,

or keep them with you. But now let us remember our war-craft,

at once. There is no need to sit here bandying words,

150no need for delay: a great work is still undone —

so that men may see Achilles once again among the front-fighters,

wrecking the Trojan battalions with his bronze spear.

So let each of you remember this, and fight your man."

Then in answer spoke to him resourceful Odysseus:

155"Not so — brave though you are, godlike Achilles.¹³

Do not drive the sons of the Achaeans fasting toward Ilion

to fight the Trojans, since the press of battle will not last

a short time only, once the phalanxes of men

close with each other, and the god breathes fury into both.

160No — order the Achaeans by the swift ships to take

bread and wine: for that is fury, and that is valor.

No man will be able to fight the whole day through,

to the setting of the sun, fasting from bread:

for even if in his heart he is wild to make war,

165his limbs grow heavy on him unawares, and thirst

and hunger overtake him, and his knees fail as he goes.

But the man who has had his fill of wine and food

and fights the enemy men the whole day long —

his heart in his chest is daring, and his limbs

170do not tire before all break off from the war.

Come then: dismiss the army, and order the morning meal

made ready. And the gifts — let the lord of men Agamemnon

bring them into the middle of the assembly, so all the Achaeans

may see them with their eyes, and your heart be warmed.

175And let him stand up among the Argives and swear you an oath

that he never went up into her bed, he never lay with her,

as is the way, lord, of men and women;

and let the heart in your own chest be gracious.

And then let him appease you with a rich feast

180in his hut, so you may lack nothing of your due.

And you, son of Atreus, will be more just toward another man

hereafter. There is no cause for indignation when a king

makes amends to a man, when he was first to turn harsh."

Then answered him the lord of men Agamemnon:¹⁴

185"I am glad, son of Laertes, to hear your speech:

you have gone through it all in due measure, point by point.

The oath — I am willing to swear it; my heart commands me;

and I will not forswear myself before the god. But let Achilles

wait here so long, pressed though he is for the war-god's work;

190and wait, all the rest of you, together, until the gifts

come from my hut, and we cut the faithful oaths.

And to you yourself, Odysseus, I give this charge and order:

choose out the noblest young men of all the Achaeans

and carry the gifts from my ship, all that yesterday

195we promised to give Achilles — and lead the women too.

And let Talthybius, quickly, through the broad Achaean camp,

make ready a boar, to sacrifice to Zeus and to the Sun."

Then in answer spoke to him swift-footed Achilles:

"Most glorious son of Atreus, lord of men Agamemnon:¹⁵

200some other time were better for busying yourselves with this —

some pause in the fighting, whenever one may come,

some hour when the fury is not so great in my chest.

Now they lie torn — the men whom Hector, Priam's son,

broke, when Zeus was handing him the glory —

205and you two urge us to our food! For my part

I would command the sons of the Achaeans to fight now,

fasting, unfed, and at the setting of the sun

make a great supper — once we have paid off the outrage.

Before that, down my own throat, not a thing

210shall pass — no drink, no food — my companion being dead,

who lies in my hut torn by the sharp bronze,

turned toward the doorway, and around him our companions

mourn. So those things have no place in my thoughts —

but slaughter, and blood, and the hard groaning of men."

215Then in answer spoke to him resourceful Odysseus:

"Achilles, son of Peleus, far greatest of the Achaeans,¹⁶

you are stronger than I am, and mightier, not by a little,

with the spear; but in thought I would surpass you

by much, since I was born first and know more things.

220So let your heart endure to hear my words.

Quickly men have their fill of battle —

that harvest where the bronze strews the most straw on the ground

and the crop is smallest, once Zeus tilts his scales —

Zeus, the dispenser of war to men.

225With the belly the Achaeans cannot mourn a corpse:

too many men, one on another, day after day,

are falling: when could anyone breathe from the labor?

No — we must bury the man who dies,

keeping a pitiless heart, weeping for one day;

230and all who are left alive from the hateful war

must remember drink and food, so that all the more

we may fight the enemy without pause, forever,

our flesh clothed in unwearying bronze. And let no man

hang back, waiting for a second summons to the army:

235this is the summons — and it will go hard with the man who is left

behind at the ships of the Argives. All in one body,

let us wake the sharp war-god against the horse-taming Trojans."

He spoke, and took with him the sons of glorious Nestor,¹⁷

and Meges, Phyleus's son, and Thoas, and Meriones,

240and Lycomedes, Creon's son, and Melanippus;

and they went to the hut of Agamemnon, Atreus's son.

Then no sooner was the word said than the thing was done:

seven tripods they carried out of the hut, as he had promised him,

and twenty gleaming cauldrons, and twelve horses;

245and they led out at once the women skilled in blameless work,

seven, and the eighth was fair-cheeked Briseis.

Then Odysseus weighed out ten full talents of gold

and led the way; and the young Achaean men behind him carried the gifts.

And they set them in the middle of the assembly; and Agamemnon¹⁸

250stood up. Talthybius, his voice like a god's,

holding the boar in his hands, stood beside the shepherd of the people.

And the son of Atreus drew out with his hands the knife

that always hung beside the great scabbard of his sword,

cut the first hairs from the boar, and lifting his hands

255to Zeus he prayed. And all the Argives sat by in silence,

in due order, listening to the king.

And praying, he spoke, looking up into the wide heaven:

"Let Zeus be witness first — highest of the gods, and best —

and Earth, and the Sun, and the Erinyes, who under the earth

260exact payment from men, whoever swears a false oath:

I never laid a hand on the girl Briseis,

neither desiring her for my bed nor for anything else;

untouched she has remained inside my huts.

If any of this is falsely sworn, may the gods give me pains

265in plenty — all they give a man who sins against them in his oath."

He spoke, and cut the boar's throat with the pitiless bronze.

And Talthybius whirled it and threw it into the great gulf

of the grey sea, food for fish. Then Achilles

rose up and spoke among the war-loving Argives:

270"Father Zeus — great is the blindness you deal to men!¹⁹

Never otherwise would the son of Atreus have stirred

the heart in my chest so thoroughly, nor led the girl off

against my will, unbending. No: it was Zeus, somehow,

who willed that death should come to many Achaeans.

275Now go to your meal, so we may join the war-god together."

So he spoke, and dissolved the assembly quickly.

They scattered then, each man to his own ship;

but the great-hearted Myrmidons busied themselves with the gifts

and went carrying them to the ship of godlike Achilles.

280They laid them in the huts, and seated the women there,

and proud attendants drove the horses to the herd.

Then Briseis, like golden Aphrodite,²⁰

when she saw Patroclus torn by the sharp bronze,

flung herself on him with a piercing wail, and with her hands tore

285her breasts and her soft throat and her beautiful face.

And weeping, the woman like the goddesses said:

"Patroclus — dearest of all to my unhappy heart —

alive I left you when I went out of this hut;

now I come back, leader of the people, and find you

290dead. So evil follows evil for me, always.

The husband to whom my father and lady mother gave me

I saw torn by the sharp bronze before our city,

and my three brothers, whom one mother bore with me,

beloved — all of them met their day of destruction.

295And you would not let me — not even when swift Achilles

killed my husband, and sacked the city of godlike Mynes —

you would not let me weep: you kept saying you would make me

the wedded wife of godlike Achilles, and take me in the ships

to Phthia, and hold my marriage-feast among the Myrmidons.

300So I weep your death without ceasing. You were gentle, always."

So she spoke, weeping; and the women wailed in answer —

for Patroclus in show; but each for her own sorrows.

And around Achilles the elders of the Achaeans gathered,²¹

begging him to eat; but he refused them, groaning:

305"I beg you — if any of my dear companions will hear me —

do not bid me, before it is time, with food and drink

to sate my own heart, since terrible grief has come to me.

Until the sun goes down I will hold out, and endure regardless."

So speaking, he sent the other kings away,

310but the two sons of Atreus stayed, and brilliant Odysseus,

and Nestor, and Idomeneus, and the old horseman Phoenix,

trying to comfort his thick grief. But his heart would not

be comforted, before he entered the mouth of bloody war.

Remembering, he heaved a deep sigh, and spoke aloud:

315"There was a time — unhappy man, dearest of my companions —²²

when you yourself would set the savory meal before me in this hut,

quickly and deftly, whenever the Achaeans were rushing

to carry the war of many tears against the horse-taming Trojans.

Now you lie torn; and my heart goes

320without taste of the drink and food that are here in plenty,

for want of you. Nothing worse could I suffer —

not even if I learned my father had died,

who now in Phthia, I suppose, is letting soft tears fall

for lack of a son like me — while I, in a strange country,

325fight the Trojans for blood-chilling Helen's sake —

or the death of my dear son, who is being reared for me on Scyros:

if he still lives somewhere — godlike Neoptolemus.

For until now the heart in my chest had hoped

that I alone would die far from horse-pasturing Argos,

330here in Troy, and that you would come home to Phthia,

so you might take my child in the swift black ship

out of Scyros, and show him everything of mine —

my possessions, my slaves, my great high-roofed house.

For Peleus by now, I think, is either altogether

335dead, or — barely living still — he grieves on

in hateful old age, forever waiting the bitter

news of me: when he shall hear that I am dead."

So he spoke, weeping; and the elders groaned in answer,²³

each remembering what he had left behind in his own halls.

340And seeing them mourning, the son of Cronos pitied them,

and quickly he spoke winged words to Athena:

"My child, you have deserted your man completely.

Is Achilles, then, no longer any care to your mind?

There he sits, in front of his ships with their upright horns,

345mourning his dear companion. The others

have gone to their meal; he is fasting, and will not eat.

Go — distill nectar and lovely ambrosia

into his chest, so hunger does not reach him."

So speaking, he urged on Athena, eager already;

350and like a falcon, wide-winged and shrill-voiced,

she dropped from heaven through the upper air. And the Achaeans

were arming there and then throughout the camp. To Achilles

she distilled nectar in his chest, and lovely

ambrosia, so joyless hunger would not reach his knees;

355and she was gone, back to the close-built house of her mighty

father. And they poured out away from the swift ships.

As when thick snowflakes flutter down from Zeus,²⁴

cold under the blast of Boreas born in the clear sky,

so thick then the helmets, glittering bright,

360streamed out of the ships, and the bossed shields,

the strong-plated corslets and the ash-wood spears.

The gleam went up to heaven; and all the earth around laughed

at the lightning-flash of bronze; and a thunder rose from under

the feet of men. And in their midst brilliant Achilles armed.

365His teeth ground loud against each other; and his two eyes²⁵

blazed as if they were flame-glare; and into his heart

sank grief past bearing. Raging against the Trojans,

he put on the gifts of the god that Hephaestus had labored to forge.

First he set the greaves along his shins,

370fine greaves, fitted with silver ankle-pieces;

second, he put the corslet about his chest;

and around his shoulders he threw the sword, silver-studded,

bronze; and after that the shield, great and heavy,

he took up, and its light went out far, like the moon's.

375As when out at sea a light shows to sailors,

the glare of a burning fire, that burns high in the mountains

at a lonely steading — while the storm-winds carry them,

unwilling, over the fish-filled sea away from their dear ones:

so from Achilles' shield the light went up to the upper air,

380the beautiful, intricate shield. And lifting the heavy helmet

he set it on his head; and it shone out like a star,

the horse-haired helmet; and around it shook the plumes

of gold that Hephaestus had set thick along the crest.

And brilliant Achilles tried himself in the armor,²⁶

385whether it fitted him, and his shining limbs ran free in it;

and it became like wings to him, and lifted the shepherd of the people.

And out of its case he drew his father's spear —

heavy, huge, compact — no other of the Achaeans

could swing it; Achilles alone knew how to swing it —

390the Pelian ash that Chiron gave his dear father

from the peak of Pelion, to be death for heroes.

And Automedon and Alcimus tended the horses²⁷

and yoked them: they put the fine breast-straps on, cast the bits

into their jaws, and drew the reins back tight

395to the jointed chariot. And taking up the shining whip,

fitted to his hand, Automedon sprang up

behind the horses; and behind him, armed, mounted Achilles,

blazing in his gear like Hyperion the shining sun,

and terribly he called to the horses of his father:

400"Xanthus and Balius, far-famed children of Podarge:

take thought, this time, to bring your charioteer back safe

into the crowd of the Danaans, when we have had our fill of war —

do not leave him there, like Patroclus, dead."

Then from under the yoke the glancing-footed horse answered him —

405Xanthus. He dropped his head, suddenly, and all his mane,

spilling from the yoke-pad by the yoke, came down and reached the ground;

and the goddess white-armed Hera gave him voice:

"This time, yes — we will bring you back safe, mighty Achilles.

But the day of your destruction is near. And it is not we

410who are to blame, but a great god, and strong Fate.

It was not by our slowness, not by any sloth of ours,

that the Trojans stripped the armor from Patroclus's shoulders:

the best of the gods, whom lovely-haired Leto bore,

killed him among the front-fighters, and gave the glory to Hector.

415We two could run with the very breath of the West Wind,

which men say is the lightest thing that flies; but for you yourself

it is fated to be broken by force — by a god, and by a man."

When he had spoken so, the Erinyes stopped his voice.

Then, deeply troubled, swift-footed Achilles answered him:

420"Xanthus, why prophesy my death? You need not.

I know it well myself: it is my portion to die here,

far from my dear father and my mother. Even so,

I will not stop before I have driven the Trojans to their fill of war."

He spoke; and shouting he held his single-hoofed horses in the front rank.

Notes

1 lines 1–7 — Dawn "in her saffron robe" (κροκόπεπλος, the register's fixed rendering) rises from Ocean to light a day that will end with Hector dead; line 2 repeats 11.2 exactly (our English kept), binding this dawn to the one that opened the poem's longest day. Thetis arrives to find her son not waiting for the armor but "lying over Patroclus" — the delivery of the most beautiful object in literature interrupts an embrace of a corpse. ↩

2 lines 8–11 — Thetis's consolation is the poem's hardest kind: "we must let this man lie, for all our grief, since by the will of the gods, first of all, he was broken" — the same verb-frame Achilles used of the quarrel at 18.112. Grief is to be set down the way a settled thing is set down. Then the gift: armor "such as no man has ever worn on his shoulders" — literally true; it was forged for one wearing. ↩

3 lines 12–18 — The armor "clashed aloud" (ἀνέβραχε) — its first act is a war-sound — and the Myrmidons cannot look at it: Hephaestus promised that "any man of the many who see it hereafter will marvel" (18.466-467), and the marvel arrives as terror. Only Achilles can face it, and the poem's psychology is exact: "the more he looked, the deeper the anger sank in him." Beauty does not soothe him; it fuels him. His eyes blaze "like flame-glare" — the fire Athena lit over his head at the ditch (18.206-227) has moved inside. ↩

4 lines 21–39 — Achilles' first thought after accepting the arms is the flies. The realism is unblinking — "flies will enter by the bronze-cut wounds and breed worms... and all the flesh will rot" — and the divine answer matches it: ambrosia and red nectar distilled through the nostrils, the body kept "a year entire... sound as it is, or better." Embalming, in the poem's idiom: the gods' food, which makes the immortals deathless, here holds one mortal body just short of decay. (Line 39's placement was doubted by some ancient editors; a few copies added an extra line after 38 on Thetis's departure — the apparatus records it.) ↩

5 lines 40–53 — The muster of everyone: even the helmsmen and the ships' bread-stewards — the poem's only census of the noncombatants — come to see Achilles reappear. The wounded kings arrive as casualties of Book 11: Diomedes and Odysseus "leaning on their spears," Agamemnon last, still carrying Coön's spear-wound (11.251-253). The assembly that ends the quarrel physically displays what the quarrel cost. ↩

6 lines 56–64 — The renunciation begins with a wish that undoes the poem: better Artemis had shot Briseis "on the day I chose her from the sack of Lyrnessus" — the prize whose taking launched the wrath now wished dead by the man who fought for her honor... or rather for his. The accounting is pitiless: "For Hector and the Trojans, the gain." Briseis herself will be standing in the assembly within two hundred lines; the poem lets the wish and the woman meet. ↩

7 lines 65–75 — The formal close of the wrath: 65-66 repeat 18.112-113 verbatim (our English kept) — the renunciation rehearsed to his mother now performed in public. The narrator seals it with the poem's own thematic word: "the great-hearted son of Peleus renounced the wrath" (μῆνιν ἀπειπόντος) — the μῆνις of line 1.1, formally discharged. What replaces it is not peace: it is a purer anger with a different object. ↩

8 lines 76–77 — The strangest stage-direction in the poem: Agamemnon speaks "from the place where he sat, not standing up in their midst." Ancient editors were so unsettled that Zenodotus's text (with the Massaliot and Chian editions) substituted a standing formula — "rising up among them spoke the wide-ruling Agamemnon" — and the Massaliot text added a line about him "groaning over his wound." The vulgate's seated king is better: whether he sits as an invalid, or to avoid the exposed stance of a formal orator (his next lines fret about hecklers), or because he cannot bring himself to perform deference standing, the poem's great authority-figure ends the quarrel without ever getting to his feet. ↩

9 lines 78–94 — The apology that is not one. After a nervous exordium on heckling ("even a clear-voiced speaker is defeated"), the thesis: "I am not to blame: Zeus is, and Fate, and the Erinys who walks in mist." The word rendered "blindness" is ἄτη — the divinely-sent infatuation that makes disaster feel reasonable. This register keeps "Blindness" from Phoenix's allegory (9.502-512), where she is "strong and sound of foot" and outruns the limping Prayers; here her feet are "soft: not on the ground does she walk, but over the heads of men." Two portraits, one goddess: fast as rumor, soft as a thought. Aristarchus athetized line 94 as an over-explaining tag. Line 77's opening ("when a man stands to speak...") was read by some ancients as a rebuke of Achilles' brevity; more likely it is anxiety dressed as etiquette. ↩

10 lines 95–133 — The parable of Ate: even Zeus was blinded — on the day of Heracles' birth, when Hera extracted the unguarded oath, held back the Eileithyiai to delay Alcmene, and rushed Eurystheus into the light at seven months: the poem's most consequential act of obstetric sabotage, making the strongest man ever born the servant of the weakest king. Zeus's response founds the theology Agamemnon needs: he threw Blindness out of heaven by her "shining-braided head" — so she now lives here, "among the works of men." Delusion is a permanent resident of earth by divine eviction: whatever we wreck, we wreck in her company. The self-serving use is patent — if Zeus could be blinded, the king's surrender of judgment is company for gods — and the poem neither endorses nor mocks it; it lets Achilles accept the same doctrine at 270-274. ↩

11 lines 134–144 — The amends: 138 repeats 9.120 exactly ("I am willing to make amends, and to give ransom past counting") — Agamemnon's position has not moved one line in ten books; what has moved is everything around it. One ancient text (quoted by Athenaeus from Dioscurides) added a line after 137: "either drunk with wine, or the gods themselves hurt me" — a plus-line that makes the king blame the cup as well as the goddess; the vulgate rightly refuses it. ↩

12 lines 145–153 — Achilles' answer prices the gifts at nothing: "furnish them if you wish, as is proper, or keep them with you." The catalogue that Book 9 built across forty lines and Book 19 will parade through the assembly is waved off in a line and a half — the entire heroic economy of compensation dismissed by the man it was designed to persuade. What he wants now cannot be paid in tripods. ↩

13 lines 154–183 — Odysseus's first meal-speech, and a small masterpiece of practical authority: "bread and wine — for that is fury, and that is valor." The physiology is exact (the limbs "grow heavy unawares"; the knees fail), and the procedure he lays out — gifts displayed in mid-assembly, the oath about Briseis' bed sworn standing (176-177 reuse the wording of 9.133-134), the feast of appeasement, so Achilles "may lack nothing of your due" (δίκης — of justice) — is a complete protocol for ending a feud, dikē made procedural. His closing sentence dares what no one else has: "you, son of Atreus, will be more just toward another man hereafter" — the king corrected to his face, inside a compliment. ↩

14 lines 184–197 — Agamemnon accepts everything, gladly — the management of the reconciliation has passed entirely to Odysseus ("to you yourself I give this charge"). The king's one initiative is liturgical: Talthybius and the boar for Zeus and the Sun. ↩

15 lines 198–214 — Achilles' refusal of food is the book's center of gravity. His counter-proposal — fight fasting, feast at sundown "once we have paid off the outrage" — makes eating itself a thing that must be earned by vengeance; and the personal vow beneath it is absolute: "down my own throat, not a thing shall pass." The speech ends on the book's most famous line, the fast's true diet: "but slaughter, and blood, and the hard groaning of men." Grief has reorganized appetite itself. ↩

16 lines 215–237 — Odysseus's second speech is the Iliad's ethics of endurance. The opening claim of eldership (216 = 16.21, our English kept — the vocative Patroclus once used to beg) licenses the great agricultural figure: battle as the harvest "where the bronze strews the most straw on the ground and the crop is smallest, once Zeus tilts his scales" — maximum cutting, minimum grain; and 224 = 4.84, "Zeus, the dispenser of war to men" (our English kept). Then the doctrine: "With the belly the Achaeans cannot mourn a corpse... we must bury the man who dies, keeping a pitiless heart, weeping for one day." An army that loses men daily must ration grief like food — the survivor's discipline stated once for the whole tradition. Achilles is not persuaded; he is overruled by everyone else's hunger. ↩

17 lines 238–248 — The gifts pass in review, matching the Book 9 pledge item for item (9.122-130, renderings kept): seven tripods, twenty cauldrons, twelve horses, seven women of Lesbos — "and the eighth was fair-cheeked Briseis." The woman the poem began over enters as the last item in an inventory, between the women and the gold. Lycomedes and Melanippus and the young nobles carry the treasure; nobody in the text so much as looks at it. ↩

18 lines 249–268 — The oath-rite, in exact ritual order: the herald holding the boar; the knife kept beside the sword's scabbard (a sacrificial implement carried into battle); the first-cut hairs; the invocation of Zeus, Earth, Sun, and the Erinyes "who under the earth exact payment from men" — the oath-police of the cosmos; the oath itself ("I never laid a hand on the girl Briseis" — confirming 9.133 was true when sworn); and the disposal: the boar whirled into the sea, "food for fish." An oath-victim is not eaten — it has absorbed the conditional curse — so the carcass goes to the element that swallows everything. ↩

19 lines 270–275 — Achilles' response accepts Agamemnon's theology wholesale: "Father Zeus — great is the blindness you deal to men!" — the wronged man agreeing that Zeus, not the king, "willed that death should come to many Achaeans." The quarrel thus closes with both parties blaming heaven: a settlement, not a reckoning — and the poem quietly files it against Zeus's own protest in the Odyssey (1.32-34) that mortals blame the gods for what their own recklessness earns. The last line is pure Achilles: dismissal, meal, war — "so we may join the war-god together." ↩

20 lines 282–302 — Briseis's only speech in the poem — the prize speaks. Her lament gives her, at last, a biography: husband cut down before the city, three full brothers dead in one day, and the man who did it — Achilles — the man whose wife Patroclus promised she would become, "with the marriage-feast among the Myrmidons." Her grief for Patroclus is grief for the one person who converted her catastrophe into a future; "You were gentle, always" (μείλιχον αἰεί) is the poem's whole portrait of the dead man in three words. Then the narrator's terrible widening: the captive women wail with her "for Patroclus in show; but each for her own sorrows" — every slave in the camp mourning her own dead under cover of the master's. Two lines that contain the entire suppressed grief of the war's losers. ↩

21 lines 303–313 — The comforters: both Atreidae, Odysseus, Nestor, Idomeneus, Phoenix — the embassy of Book 9 enlarged — around a man who again refuses what they offer; but where Book 9's refusal was rage, this is grief with a deadline: "Until the sun goes down I will hold out." He cannot be comforted "before he entered the mouth of bloody war" — battle as the only door out of mourning. ↩

22 lines 314–337 — The lament for a lost future. It begins at the table — Patroclus remembered not in arms but serving dinner "quickly and deftly": intimacy measured in housework — and opens into the poem's geography of bereavement: Peleus in Phthia weeping for a son who will not return, "while I, in a strange country, fight the Trojans for blood-chilling Helen's sake"; and on Scyros the son, Neoptolemus, named only here in the Iliad — "if he still lives" — whom Patroclus was to fetch home and show "my possessions, my slaves, my great high-roofed house." Aristophanes and Aristarchus athetized line 327 (the Neoptolemus line); it should stand: the dead man's assignment was to be the bridge between Achilles' father and Achilles' son, and with him dies the family's last connected future. Achilles imagined one exemption — "that I alone would die" — and Troy has refused even that. ↩

23 lines 338–356 — Zeus's pity and the strangest feeding in the poem: Athena, falcon-swift, distills nectar and ambrosia into the chest of a man who must not know he is being fed — the fast kept and the body sustained, both at once. The gods honor his vow by cheating it. The elders' tears ("each remembering what he had left behind in his own halls") make Achilles' singular grief, for one moment, the army's common one. ↩

24 lines 357–364 — The arming of the host as weather: helmets thick as snowflakes "under the blast of Boreas born in the clear sky" — cold light, innumerable, wind-driven — "and all the earth around laughed at the lightning-flash of bronze." The laughing earth (γέλασσε... χθών) is the poem's boldest pathetic figure: the world itself amused, or gleaming — the Greek means both — at what is coming. ↩

25 lines 365–383 — The fourth and last full arming scene of the poem (Paris 3.330-338; Agamemnon 11.17-45; Patroclus 16.131-139; now this), each item in the canonical order — greaves, corslet, sword, shield, helmet — and everything scaled up: teeth grinding, eyes as flame-glare, the shield's light "like the moon's." The great simile turns Book 18 inside out: there, beacon-fires promised rescue to a besieged island; here the mountain fire is seen by sailors "storm-driven, unwilling, over the fish-filled sea away from their dear ones" — light as pure distance, home visible and unreachable. It is the truest emblem in the poem of what Achilles' return actually is: he shines, and he is not coming home. ↩

26 lines 384–391 — The test: the armor fits so perfectly it "became like wings to him, and lifted the shepherd of the people" — Hephaestus's craft answering the body it was made for. Then the one weapon the god did not make: the Pelian ash of Chiron, which "no other of the Achaeans could swing" — 388-391 repeat 16.141-144 verbatim (our English kept), where Patroclus, taking everything else, left precisely this spear behind. Aristarchus athetized the lines here as an importation ("they were not even in the other editions"); kept, they complete the Book 16 figure: the borrowed armor is gone with the borrower, and what remains, inimitable, is the father's spear — the one piece of Achilles no one else could carry. ↩

27 lines 392–424 — The ending no other book has. Achilles charges his horses to bring their driver back — "do not leave him there, like Patroclus, dead" — and Xanthus answers: Hera gives him voice (line 407, athetized by Aristarchus), and the horse first bows till his mane pours from the yoke-pad to the ground: the animal's grief-gesture the poem showed at 17.426-440, the weeping horses, now given language. His speech is exact prophecy: not our slowness but "the best of the gods" killed Patroclus; "we two could run with the very breath of the West Wind" — their sire (16.150) — "but for you yourself it is fated to be broken by force — by a god, and by a man" (Apollo and Paris, 22.359-360, though Aristarchus athetized 416-417). Then "the Erinyes stopped his voice" — the same powers invoked at 259 as oath-police: guardians of the order of things, for whom a speaking horse is a breach to be closed. Achilles' reply is the book in miniature: "I know it well myself." Foreknowledge changes nothing; that is what makes him Achilles. The book ends with the shout and the horses held "in the front rank" — the wrath's second life, pointed at Troy at last. ↩