Book XX

Zeus opens the gates and the gods go down to war — then sit and watch, while Achilles begins the killing that will not stop until Hector: Aeneas saved for empire, Hector saved for Book 22, and twelve men in a row not saved at all.

Translator’s note on Book 20

Book 20 begins the single continuous battle — one afternoon long, four books wide — that runs from here to Hector's death. It opens with the poem's fullest divine mobilization: Themis summons every god to assembly, rivers and nymphs included (only Ocean stays home), and Zeus, whose ban of Book 8 kept the gods in the stands, now reverses it: go down, help whichever side you love. His reasons are the poem's theology in two lines: "they matter to me, even as they perish" — and the fear that Achilles, unchecked, "may storm the wall itself, ahead of what is fated" (note 2). Fate, it turns out, needs defending; that is what gods are for this afternoon. The mobilization produces the Iliad's greatest seismic picture — Zeus thundering above, Poseidon shaking the mountain roots below, and Hades leaping from his throne with a scream, lest the crust crack open and his "terrible, mouldering houses, which the very gods abhor" stand naked to the daylight (note 5) — and then, superbly, anticlimax: the gods pair off, look at one another, and sit down. The Theomachy is postponed to Book 21; what we get instead is men fighting under divine spectatorship.

The core of the book is the duel that cannot happen: Achilles against Aeneas — pushed into the ring by Apollo wearing the voice of Lycaon (whose own meeting with Achilles, in Book 21, will be very different). Aeneas answers Achilles' magnificent taunting with the longest genealogy in the poem: Dardanus to Erichthonius — whose three thousand mares bore to the North Wind foals that ran over wheat-ears without breaking them — to Tros, to Ganymede taken up for his beauty, down the twin branches to Hector and to himself (note 15). It is a speech about why he cannot die here, and the poem agrees: when the boulder and the sword are about to decide it, Poseidon — a Greek partisan — saves Troy's enemy prince, because "it is destined for him to escape, so that the race of Dardanus not perish seedless": "the might of Aeneas shall be king over the Trojans — and his children's children" (note 19). The apparatus records the variant Strabo knew, "his race shall rule over all" — the reading Rome preferred; Virgil's epic grows out of this rescue. Hector too is saved — once by Apollo's word, once by Apollo's mist, after Athena turns his spear back with a breath — and Achilles' frustrated cry over him repeats, word for word, what Diomedes shouted at Hector in Book 11: "Dog! Again you have run out from under death" (note 29).

Everyone the gods do not save, dies. The book's last movement is the first panel of Achilles' aristeia, and this translation keeps its full brutality: Iphition's split skull and the chariots that shred him; Polydorus — Priam's youngest, forbidden the war, showing off his running — holding his own bowels; Tros of the refused supplication, "not a sweet-tempered man, not mild of mind" (the litotes that measures what Achilles has become; the theme will climax with Lycaon in 21 and Hector in 22); Deucalion beheaded with the marrow spurting from his spine. The closing similes — forest fire, and oxen threshing barley — end the book mid-carnage, blood on the axle, "spattering his invincible hands with gore": no cadence, because the aristeia has only begun.

Register notes: 20.196-198 reuse 17.30-32 ("When the thing is done, even the fool learns"); 20.449-454 = 11.362-367 verbatim; 20.431-433 repeat 20.200-202 (Aeneas's opening returned by Hector, kept identical); 20.287 "such as mortals are now"; 20.78 keeps 5.289's "Ares, the fighter under the ox-hide shield"; Ares borrows Hector's "flashing helmet" at 20.38 — the register's one loan of that epithet, as printed.

1So beside the beaked ships the Achaeans armed¹

around you, son of Peleus — insatiate of battle! —

and the Trojans on their side, on the rise of the plain.

And Zeus commanded Themis to call the gods to assembly

5from the crest of many-folded Olympus; and she went

everywhere, and commanded them to come to the house of Zeus.

Not one of the rivers was absent, except Ocean,

nor one of the nymphs, who haunt the beautiful groves

and the springs of rivers and the grassy water-meadows.

10And coming to the house of Zeus the cloud-gatherer

they sat down in the polished colonnades that Hephaestus

had built for father Zeus with his knowing craft.

So they gathered inside Zeus's house. Nor did the earth-shaker²

ignore the goddess's call: he came out of the sea among them,

15and sat in their midst, and asked what Zeus intended:

"Why, lord of the bright bolt, have you called the gods to assembly?

Are you deliberating something for the Trojans and Achaeans?

For now, at closest grip, their battle and war are blazing."

Then in answer spoke to him cloud-gatherer Zeus:

20"You know, earth-shaker, the counsel in my chest,

the reason I gathered you: they matter to me, even as they perish.

Yet I — I will stay here in a fold of Olympus,

sitting where I can watch and delight my mind. But the rest of you:

go now, till you come among the Trojans and Achaeans,

25and help both sides, as the mind of each of you inclines.

For if Achilles fights the Trojans alone,

not even briefly will they hold the swift-footed son of Peleus.

Even before, they trembled just to look at him;

now, with his heart raging terribly for his companion,

30I fear he may storm the wall itself, ahead of what is fated."

So spoke the son of Cronos, and woke unrelenting war.

And the gods went to the war, their hearts divided:³

Hera to the gathering-place of the ships, with Pallas Athena

and Poseidon who holds the earth, and the courier

35Hermes, unmatched in the shrewdness of his mind;

and with them went Hephaestus, glorying in his strength,

limping, and beneath him his slender legs moved quickly.

To the Trojans went Ares of the flashing helmet, and with him

Phoebus of the unshorn hair, and Artemis who showers arrows,

40and Leto, and Xanthus, and laughter-loving Aphrodite.

Now as long as the gods stayed apart from mortal men,⁴

the Achaeans triumphed greatly, because Achilles

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

and terrible trembling came up in the limbs of every Trojan,

45in dread, when they saw the swift-footed son of Peleus

blazing in his armor, the equal of Ares, bane of mortals.

But when the Olympians came down into the crowd of men,

up rose strong Strife, driver of armies, and Athena shouted,

now standing at the dug ditch outside the wall,

50now on the thundering headlands crying her great cry;

and Ares on the other side, like a black stormwind,

screamed his shrill commands to the Trojans from the citadel's height,

now running by Simoïs over Callicolone.

So the blessed gods, driving both sides on,⁵

55clashed them together — and broke out their own heavy strife.

And terribly, from on high, the father of men and gods

thundered; and from below Poseidon shook

the boundless earth and the steep heads of the mountains.

All the roots of many-springed Ida were shaken,

60and all her peaks, and the Trojans' city, and the Achaeans' ships.

And under the ground the lord of those below, Aïdoneus, took fright,

and in his fright leapt from his throne and screamed — lest above him

Poseidon the earth-shaker crack the earth wide open

and his houses stand exposed to mortals and immortals —

65terrible, mouldering houses, which the very gods abhor:

so great was the crash that rose as the gods came together in strife.

For there, facing the lord Poseidon,⁶

stood Phoebus Apollo with his winged arrows,

and against Enyalius the goddess grey-eyed Athena;

70against Hera stood the clamorous goddess of the golden shafts,

Artemis who showers arrows, sister of the far-striker;

against Leto the strong courier Hermes;

and against Hephaestus the great deep-eddying river

whom the gods call Xanthus, and men Scamander.

75So god went against god. But Achilles⁷

longed above all to come through the crowd against Hector,

Priam's son: with that man's blood beyond all others

his heart commanded him to glut Ares, the fighter under the ox-hide shield.

But Apollo, driver of armies, stirred Aeneas

80straight against the son of Peleus, and put strong fury in him.

He made his voice like the voice of Lycaon, Priam's son;

in his likeness spoke Apollo, son of Zeus:

"Aeneas, counselor of the Trojans — where are those threats

you made to the kings of Troy over your wine,

85that you would fight Achilles, Peleus's son, man to man?"

Then in turn Aeneas answered him and said:⁸

"Son of Priam, why do you order me, against my own will,

to stand and fight the overweening son of Peleus?

It would not be the first time I stand against swift-footed

90Achilles: once before now he chased me with his spear

off Ida, when he came down on our cattle

and sacked Lyrnessus and Pedasus. Zeus saved me,

rousing my strength and my quick knees —

else I had gone down under the hands of Achilles, and of Athena,

95who went before him setting the light of safety, and urged him on

to slaughter Lelegians and Trojans with his bronze spear.

That is why no man can fight Achilles face to face:

always one of the gods is beside him, beating ruin away.

And even without that, his weapon flies straight, and does not slacken

100till it has driven through human flesh. Yet if a god

stretched the war's issue level, he would not beat me

so easily — not though he boasts that he is bronze all through."

Then in turn the lord Apollo, son of Zeus, addressed him:⁹

"Hero — come then, you too: pray to the gods

105who live forever. You also, men say, were born

of Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus; his mother is the lesser goddess:

yours is a child of Zeus; his, of the old man of the sea.

Carry your unwearying bronze straight at him. Do not let him

turn you back with contemptuous words and threats."

110So speaking he breathed great fury into the shepherd of the people,

and he went through the front-fighters, helmed in gleaming bronze.

But the son of Anchises did not slip past white-armed Hera¹⁰

as he went through the press of men against the son of Peleus;

and she gathered the gods together and spoke among them:

115"Consider, you two — Poseidon and Athena —

consider in your minds how these things are to go.

Here is Aeneas, marching helmed in gleaming bronze

against the son of Peleus — and Phoebus Apollo set him on.

Come then: either let us turn him back again

120where he stands — or else let one of us

stand by Achilles too, and give him great strength; let his heart

lack nothing; let him know that they love him — the best

of the immortals — and that windy nothings are the ones who till now

have warded war and slaughter from the Trojans.

125We all came down from Olympus to take our part

in this battle, so that among the Trojans he suffer nothing

today. Later he will suffer whatever Fate

spun for him with her thread at his birth, when his mother bore him.

But if Achilles does not learn all this from a god's own voice,

130he will be afraid, when some god comes against him

face to face in the war. Gods seen in their true shapes are hard to bear."

Then answered her Poseidon the earth-shaker:¹¹

"Hera, do not rage beyond good sense. You need not.

I at least would not choose to drive the gods together

135in strife — us against the others — since we are far the stronger.

No: let us go and sit down out of the path,

on a lookout place, and leave the war to men.

But if Ares begins the fighting, or Phoebus Apollo,

or if they hold Achilles back and will not let him fight,

140then at once, on the spot, our own quarrel with them rises —

total war; and very soon, I think, they will break it off

and go back to Olympus, to the company of the other gods,

beaten down under our hands by force."

So speaking, the dark-haired god led the way¹²

145to the heaped-up wall of godlike Heracles —

the high wall the Trojans and Pallas Athena

had built him, so he might escape the sea-monster and elude it

whenever it chased him from the beach onto the plain.

There Poseidon sat down, and the other gods,

150and drew unbroken cloud around their shoulders;

and the others sat over against them on the brows of Callicolone

around you, archer Phoebus, and Ares sacker of cities.

So on either side they sat deliberating

their counsels; but both sides shrank from beginning

155the grinding war — and Zeus, seated on high, commanded it.

And the whole plain was filled with them, and blazed with the bronze¹³

of men and horses; and the earth rang under their feet

as they rushed together. And two men, the best by far,

came together in the middle ground, hot to fight:

160Aeneas, Anchises' son, and brilliant Achilles.

Aeneas came out first, with a threat, tossing

his heavy helmet as he strode; his rushing shield

he held before his chest, and he shook his bronze spear.

And the son of Peleus rose from the other side to meet him like a lion,

165a raider, whom men are wild to kill —

a whole district, gathered; and at first he comes on

heedless of them, but when one of the battle-quick young men

hits him with a spear, he crouches, jaws gaping, foam

gathering on his teeth, and the brave heart in him groans,

170and with his tail he lashes his ribs and flanks

on both sides, and whips himself on to fight,

and glaring he drives straight in, to see whether he will kill

some man, or die himself in the front of the crowd:

so his fury and his proud heart drove Achilles

175to go against great-hearted Aeneas.

And when they had come close, advancing on each other,

the first to speak was swift-footed brilliant Achilles:

"Aeneas — why have you come so far out of the crowd¹⁴

to stand here? Does your heart command you to fight me

180in hope of ruling the horse-taming Trojans

with Priam's honor? Even if you killed me,

Priam would not lay that prize in your hand:

he has sons; and he is steady, not weak in the head.

Or have the Trojans cut you a private estate, finest of all,

185fair land of orchard and plowland, to enjoy

if you kill me? You will find that killing hard, I think.

Once before now, I say, my spear has made you run.

Do you not remember when you were alone with the cattle, and I

chased you down the mountains of Ida on my quick feet —

190headlong? You did not turn to look back once as you ran.

From there you fled to Lyrnessus; and I wrecked it,

storming after you with Athena and father Zeus,

and took the women captive, their day of freedom gone —

though you Zeus rescued, and the other gods.

195But now I think they will not save you, as in your heart

you reckon. No — 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."

Then in turn Aeneas answered him and said:¹⁵

200"Son of Peleus — do not hope to frighten me with words,

as if I were a silly child, since I too know well enough

how to sling insults, and how to speak outrage.

We know each other's lineage, we know each other's parents,

hearing the famous tales of mortal men —

205though you have never set eyes on mine, nor I on yours.

They say you are the son of blameless Peleus,

and your mother Thetis of the lovely braids, the sea-born;

I claim to be the son of great-hearted Anchises,

and my mother is Aphrodite.

210Of those two houses, one pair will mourn their dear son

today: for I tell you, we two will not part from battle

and go our ways on the strength of silly words.

But if you care to learn this too, and know for certain

our lineage — and many men know it already:

215Dardanus first was begotten by cloud-gatherer Zeus,

and he founded Dardania — for holy Ilion

was not yet built on the plain, a city of mortal men,

and they still lived on the lower slopes of many-springed Ida.

And Dardanus in turn had a son, Erichthonius the king,

220who became the richest of mortal men:

three thousand mares of his grazed the water-meadow,

mothers, delighting in their tender foals.

And Boreas desired them as they pastured,

and covered them in the likeness of a dark-maned stallion;

225and they conceived, and bore twelve foals.

And these, when they frisked over the grain-giving plowland,

would run along the tips of the wheat-ears and never break them;

and when they frisked over the broad back of the sea,

they would run along the crests of the breakers of the grey salt water.

230And Erichthonius fathered Tros, lord of the Trojans;

and from Tros in turn three blameless sons were born:

Ilus, and Assaracus, and godlike Ganymede,

who was born the most beautiful of mortal men —

and the gods caught him up to be the wine-pourer of Zeus,

235for his beauty's sake, so he might live among the immortals.

And Ilus in turn had a son, blameless Laomedon;

and Laomedon fathered Tithonus and Priam

and Lampus and Clytius and Hicetaon, sprig of Ares;

and Assaracus, Capys — whose son was Anchises;

240and Anchises fathered me, and Priam brilliant Hector.

That is the lineage and the blood I claim to come of.

As for worth — Zeus increases it in men and diminishes it

however he wills: for he is the strongest of all.

Come then, let us stand no longer talking of this like children,

245here in the middle of the grind of battle.

There are insults enough for both of us to speak —

so many, a ship of a hundred benches could not carry the load.

The tongue of mortals is a twisty thing; the words in it are many,

of every kind; and the range of speech is wide, this way and that:

250whatever sort of word you speak, that is the sort you will hear.

But what need have we two of strife and quarreling,

wrangling face to face like women,

who in the anger of some heart-devouring feud

go out and wrangle with each other in the middle of the street,

255and much is true, and much is not: the anger orders that too.

Words will not turn me back from the valor I burn with —

not before we have fought it out, bronze against bronze. Come then:

let us taste one another with our bronze-fitted spears."

He spoke, and drove his heavy spear into the terrible,¹⁶

260dreadful shield; and the great shield rang round the spear's point.

And the son of Peleus with his thick hand thrust the shield

out from his body, afraid: he thought the long-shadowed spear

of great-hearted Aeneas would drive clean through it —

the fool: he did not consider in mind and heart

265that the glorious gifts of the gods do not lie down easily

under mortal men, do not give way before them.

So the heavy spear of war-minded Aeneas did not

break the shield: the gold held it, the god's gift.

Through two folds he did drive it; but three were still

270left, since the crook-footed god had hammered five:

two of bronze, and inside them two of tin,

and one of gold — and in the gold the ash spear was held.

Second in turn Achilles let fly his long-shadowed spear¹⁷

and struck the balanced round shield of Aeneas

275under the outermost rim, where the bronze ran thinnest

and the oxhide thinnest over it; and straight on through

shot the Pelian ash, and the shield shrieked under it.

And Aeneas crouched, and held the shield up and away,

in dread; and the spear passed over his back and stood

280planted in the earth, still hungry, having torn through both circles

of the man-covering shield. He had dodged the long spear;

he stood, and grief past measure flooded down over his eyes,

in terror at how close the point was planted. But Achilles

drew his sharp sword and leapt on him, furious,¹⁸

285shouting his terrible shout. And Aeneas caught up a stone in his hand —

a great feat — which no two men could carry,

such as mortals are now; but he swung it easily, even alone.

And now Aeneas would have struck him with the rock as he charged,

on helmet or shield, which had fended grim death from him,

290and the son of Peleus, closing, would have taken his life with the sword,

had not Poseidon the earth-shaker seen it sharply.

And at once he spoke among the immortal gods:¹⁹

"Oh shame — my grief for great-hearted Aeneas,

who will quickly go down to Hades, broken by the son of Peleus,

295because he listened to the words of far-striker Apollo —

the fool: Apollo will not help him against grim death.

But why should this man, guiltless, suffer sorrows

for no reason — for griefs that belong to others — he who always

gives welcome gifts to the gods who hold the wide heaven?

300Come: let us ourselves lead him out from under death,

for fear the son of Cronos too be angered, if Achilles

cuts this man down. It is destined for him to escape,

so that the race of Dardanus not perish seedless, blotted out —

of Dardanus, whom the son of Cronos loved beyond all the children

305born to him from mortal women.

For the son of Cronos has come to hate the line of Priam;

and now the might of Aeneas shall be king over the Trojans —

and his children's children, who shall be born hereafter."

Then answered him the ox-eyed lady Hera:²⁰

310"Earth-shaker, take counsel with your own mind

about Aeneas: whether to pull him out, or let him

be broken by Achilles, Peleus's son, brave as he is.

We two have sworn oaths, many of them,

before all the immortals — I and Pallas Athena —

315never to ward the evil day away from the Trojans,

not even when all Troy is burning in ravening fire —

burning, and the warlike sons of the Achaeans light it."

Now when Poseidon the earth-shaker heard that,²¹

he went up through the battle and the clatter of spears

320and came where Aeneas was, and famed Achilles.

And at once he poured a mist over the eyes

of Achilles, Peleus's son; and the ash spear, well-shod in bronze,

he drew out of the shield of great-hearted Aeneas

and laid it down in front of Achilles' feet;

325and Aeneas he swept off the ground and swung high in the air.

Over many ranks of heroes, many ranks of horses,

Aeneas vaulted, launched from the god's hand,

and came down at the outermost edge of the surging battle,

where the Caucones were arming themselves for war.

330And Poseidon the earth-shaker came up close beside him,

and speaking winged words he addressed him:

"Aeneas, which of the gods commands you to such madness —

fighting face to face with the overweening son of Peleus,

who is at once stronger than you and dearer to the immortals?

335No: draw back whenever you find yourself against him,

or you will enter the house of Hades even beyond your portion.

But when Achilles has met his death and doom,

then take courage, and fight among the front-fighters:

no other of the Achaeans will ever strip your armor."

340So speaking he left him there, when he had told him everything,²²

and quickly scattered the unearthly mist from the eyes

of Achilles; and he stared out hard with his eyes,

and troubled, he spoke to his own great-hearted spirit:

"Shame! — a great marvel is this I see with my eyes:

345my spear lying on the ground, and no sight anywhere

of the man I hurled it at, hot to kill him.

So Aeneas really was dear to the immortal gods —

and I thought his boasting empty wind.

Let him go, and good riddance. He will find no heart

350to test me again — glad enough, this time, to escape death.

Come then: I will call on the war-loving Danaans

and go against the rest of the Trojans, and test them."

He spoke, and leapt along the ranks, and called to every man:²³

"No longer stand off from the Trojans, brilliant Achaeans!

355Come — man against man, and let each be hot to fight!

It is a hard thing for me, strong as I am,

to deal with so many men and fight them all:

not even Ares, immortal god though he is, not even Athena

could work the mouth of a battle-line so wide, and labor it through.

360But whatever I can do with hands and feet

and strength, I promise I will not slacken — not one least bit:

straight through the line I will go; and no Trojan, I think,

will be glad who comes within reach of my spear."

So he spoke, urging them on. And glorious Hector²⁴

365called to the Trojans, shouting; he said he would go against Achilles:

"High-hearted Trojans — do not fear the son of Peleus!

I too could fight the very immortals — with words;

with the spear it is harder, since they are far stronger.

Not even Achilles will bring all his words to fulfillment:

370one part he will accomplish; the other he cuts short half-done.

I will go against him, though his hands are like fire —

though his hands are like fire, and his fury like burning iron."

So he spoke, urging them; and the Trojans raised their spears²⁵

to face them; and fury met mingled fury, and the war-cry rose.

375And then Phoebus Apollo stood beside Hector and said:

"Hector — do not fight Achilles out in front any longer.

Wait for him in the mass, out of the battle's roar,

or he will hit you with a cast — or close, and cut you down with the sword."

So he spoke; and Hector sank back into the crowd of men,

380shaken, when he heard the voice of the god speaking.

But Achilles leapt in among the Trojans, his heart clothed in valor,²⁶

shouting his terrible shout. And first he killed Iphition,

Otrynteus's stout son, a leader of many men,

whom a naiad nymph bore to Otrynteus, sacker of cities,

385under snowy Tmolus, in the rich district of Hyde.

As he came straight on, brilliant Achilles caught him with the spear

full in the middle of the head; and the whole skull split in two,

and he fell with a thud; and brilliant Achilles cried over him:

"Lie there, son of Otrynteus — most terrifying of all men!

390Here is your death. Your birth was by the Gygaean lake,

where your father's estate lies, by fish-filled

Hyllus and eddying Hermus."

So he cried in triumph; and darkness covered his eyes,

and the wheel-rims of Achaean chariots tore him apart

395in the front of the struggle. And after him, Demoleon —²⁷

a stout warder-off of battle, Antenor's son —

he stabbed in the temple, through the bronze-cheeked helmet.

The bronze helmet did not hold it: straight through

drove the point, hungry, and broke the bone; and the brain

400was all spattered inside it. He broke him in mid-charge.

Then Hippodamas: as he sprang down from his horses

and fled before him, he stabbed him in the back with the spear;

and he gasped out his life, bellowing — as a bull

bellows when he is dragged for the Heliconian lord,

405young men dragging him, and the earth-shaker delights in them:

so, as he bellowed, the proud life left his bones.

Then with his spear he went for godlike Polydorus,²⁸

Priam's son. His father had forbidden him to fight,

because among his children he was youngest-born

410and dearest; and he beat them all at running.

And just then, in his boy's folly, showing off the speed of his feet,

he was darting through the front-fighters — till he lost his dear life.

As he flashed past, swift-footed brilliant Achilles hit him: the javelin

square in the back, where the golden clasps of his war-belt

415fastened, and the corslet doubled over;

and the spear-point held straight on through, out beside the navel,

and he dropped to his knees with a scream, and a cloud of darkness

wrapped him round, and he clutched his bowels to him with his hands as he sank.

And when Hector saw his brother Polydorus²⁹

420clutching his bowels in his hands, sinking to the earth,

a mist poured down over his eyes. He could no longer bear

to range apart; he came out against Achilles,

shaking his sharp spear, like a flame. And Achilles —

the instant he saw him, he sprang, and spoke his word of triumph:

425"Near me — the man who beyond all others has stung my heart,

who killed my honored companion! No longer now

shall we cower from each other down the lanes of war."

He spoke, and glaring darkly he said to brilliant Hector:

"Come closer — and come the sooner to the borders of destruction."

430And unshaken, Hector of the flashing helmet answered him:

"Son of Peleus — do not hope to frighten me with words,

as if I were a silly child, since I too know well enough

how to sling insults, and how to speak outrage.

I know that you are brave, and that I am far weaker than you.

435But these things lie on the knees of the gods:

whether I, the weaker man, may still take the life out of you

with a cast of my spear — since my weapon too has been sharp before now."

He spoke, and poised and hurled his spear; and Athena

turned it back from glorious Achilles with a breath —

440the gentlest breathing; and it came back to brilliant Hector

and fell there in front of his feet. And Achilles

leapt on him, furious, wild to kill him,

shouting his terrible shout. But Apollo snatched Hector away —

easily, as a god does — and hid him in thick mist.

445Three times swift-footed brilliant Achilles charged

with his bronze spear, and three times he struck the deep mist.

But when for the fourth time he came on like more than man,

with a terrible shout he spoke winged words at him:

"Dog! Again you have run out from under death — and yet the evil

450came close. Now once more Phoebus Apollo has pulled you out —

to him you must pray whenever you go into the thud of javelins.

I will finish you yet, meeting you later,

if any god anywhere stands helper to me too.

For now I will go after the others, whoever I can catch."

455So speaking, he stabbed Dryops full in the neck with the javelin,³⁰

and he crashed down in front of his feet. He left him there,

and Demuchus, Philetor's son, a good man and a big one,

he stopped with a spear-cast to the knee; and then

he took his life away with a stroke of the great sword.

460Then Laogonus and Dardanus, the two sons of Bias:

rushing both, he tumbled them from their horses to the ground,

one with a spear-throw, one with the sword at close quarters.

Then Tros, Alastor's son — who came at him to clasp his knees,

hoping he might spare him, take him and let him go alive,

465might pity a man of his own age and not kill him —

the fool: he did not know there would be no persuading.

This was not a sweet-tempered man, not mild of mind,

but all raw fury. Tros reached with his hands for his knees,

desperate to plead; and he stabbed him in the liver with the sword,

470and the liver slid out, and the black blood pouring from it

filled the fold of his tunic; and darkness covered his eyes,

and the life failed. And next, standing over Mulius, he drove

the spear into his ear, and out through the other ear

the bronze point passed. Then Agenor's son Echeclus:

475he struck him full mid-head with the hilted sword,

and the whole blade ran hot with blood, and down over his eyes

came purple death, and fate the overpowering.

Then Deucalion: just where the tendons of the elbow

join, there he pierced him through the arm

480with the bronze point; and he stood and waited, his arm hanging heavy,

looking at death before him; and with the sword Achilles struck his neck

and sent head and helmet flying far together; and the marrow

spurted up out of the spine, and the trunk lay stretched on the earth.

Then he went after the blameless son of Peiros —³¹

485Rhigmus, who had come from deep-soiled Thrace:

him he hit square with the javelin, and the bronze stuck in his belly,

and he crashed from his chariot. And Areithous his aide,

as he wheeled the horses around, he stabbed in the back

with the sharp spear, and thrust him from the car; and the horses ran wild.

490As unearthly fire rages through the deep glens

of a parched mountain, and the deep forest burns,

and the wind, driving it everywhere, whirls the flame around:

so everywhere he stormed with his spear, like more than man,

harrying the men he killed; and the black earth ran with blood.

495And as when a man yokes broad-browed bull oxen

to tread white barley on a well-built threshing-floor,

and quickly the grain is husked under the feet of the bellowing oxen:

so under great-hearted Achilles the single-hoofed horses

trampled corpses and shields together; and with blood the axle

500beneath was all spattered, and the rails that ran round the car,

struck by the drops thrown up from the horses' hooves

and from the wheel-rims. And on he pressed to win glory —

the son of Peleus — spattering his invincible hands with gore.

Notes

1 lines 1–12 — The opening apostrophe — "around you, son of Peleus" — puts the poet's own voice in the second line: the book that begins Achilles' aristeia begins by addressing him. Themis, Right herself, is the summoner (her one act in the poem), and the invitation-list is total: every river but Ocean (who anchors the world and cannot leave it), every nymph of grove and spring and meadow. The whole animate landscape is called in to watch what Achilles does to the plain it lives in. ↩

2 lines 13–30 — Zeus's convocation speech is the poem's theology at its most compressed. Asked why he has called them, he answers: "they matter to me, even as they perish" (μέλουσί μοι ὀλλύμενοί περ) — care and destruction in one clause, the whole divine economy of the Iliad. He will watch from a fold of Olympus and "delight my mind" — the god as spectator at the theater he financed — but the license he gives the gods is practical: without divine interference on both sides, Achilles "may storm the wall itself, ahead of what is fated" (ὑπέρμορον). Fate in Homer is not self-enforcing: it can be jumped, and the gods are deployed here as its police. The Book 8 ban is formally dissolved; the last movement of the poem runs with all gods on the field. ↩

3 lines 31–40 — The order of battle: five gods to the ships (Hera, Athena, Poseidon, Hermes, Hephaestus), five to the Trojans (Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Leto, Xanthus the river, with Aphrodite). Ares arrives as "Ares of the flashing helmet" — Hector's fixed epithet, lent to the war-god this once, as if the poem were already transferring Hector's identity to the god he follows. Xanthus fights for the city through whose plain he flows — the enlistment Book 21 will take terribly seriously. ↩

4 lines 41–53 — Before the gods engage: pure Achilles-effect — Achaeans exultant, "terrible trembling" in every Trojan limb. When they do engage, the poem gives us war-noise as divine antiphony: Athena shouting from the ditch and the headlands, Ares "like a black stormwind" screaming from the citadel and Callicolone — the battlefield turned into a theater with two crying gods for a chorus. ↩

5 lines 54–66 — The cosmic quake. Zeus thunders above, Poseidon shakes "the boundless earth and the steep heads of the mountains," Ida trembles root to peak — and below, the poem's single glimpse into the underworld from the inside: Aïdoneus leaping from his throne with a scream, terrified the crust will split "and his houses stand exposed to mortals and immortals — terrible, mouldering houses, which the very gods abhor." Death's kingdom described only by the horror of its possible exposure: the gods themselves cannot bear to look at what they consign men to. Longinus quoted these lines as the summit of the sublime. ↩

6 lines 67–74 — The pairings — Poseidon/Apollo, Athena/Enyalius, Hera/Artemis, Hermes/Leto, Hephaestus/Xanthus — a formal duel-card that Book 21 will actually play out. The river is introduced with the poem's fullest instance of divine double-naming: "whom the gods call Xanthus, and men Scamander" — the world has two vocabularies, and the poem knows both. ↩

7 lines 75–85 — Apollo picks Aeneas as the delaying weapon and wears the voice of Lycaon, Priam's son — a savage irony held in reserve: the real Lycaon will meet Achilles in Book 21 and become the poem's great emblem of unsparable life. The taunt is perfectly aimed: dinner-table threats "over your wine" against the sober fact of Achilles. ↩

8 lines 86–102 — Aeneas's answer is a veteran's risk-assessment: he has run from Achilles before, off Ida, in the raid that sacked Lyrnessus and Pedasus (the raid that took Briseis — the poem's pre-history everywhere this afternoon), and he names the real problem: "always one of the gods is beside him, beating ruin away." His conditional — with a level field, "he would not beat me so easily" — is exactly the proposition the duel will test and the gods will refuse to let conclude. ↩

9 lines 103–111 — Apollo's counter is genealogical arithmetic: Aphrodite outranks Thetis ("yours is a child of Zeus; his, of the old man of the sea") — therefore fight. The syllogism is divine snobbery, and false as tactics: rank of mother decides nothing on the plain, as the shield of Hephaestus is about to demonstrate. But it works — on "the shepherd of the people," the poem's title for the responsible man goaded into an irresponsible duel. ↩

10 lines 112–131 — Hera's alarm council. Her speech swings characteristically from tactics (turn Aeneas back) to prestige (let Achilles "know that they love him — the best of the immortals — and that windy nothings" defend Troy); lines 125-128, with their weaving Fate ("whatever Fate spun for him with her thread at his birth"), were athetized by Aristarchus. Her closing maxim earns its place in the book of divine epiphanies: "Gods seen in their true shapes are hard to bear" (χαλεποὶ δὲ θεοὶ φαίνεσθαι ἐναργεῖς). ↩

11 lines 132–143 — Poseidon's restraint doctrine — "we are far the stronger" is his reason not to fight: overwhelming force can afford to sit down. "Leave the war to men" is the book's quiet thesis: the gods' battle is theater; the men's is real. His trigger-conditions (if Ares or Apollo start, or if they hold Achilles back) keep the Theomachy loaded for Book 21. ↩

12 lines 144–155 — The gods take their seats — on the wall of Heracles, the rampart Trojans and Athena built a generation ago so Heracles could escape the sea-monster sent against Laomedon's Troy (the Hesione story, surfacing only here). The Greek gods watch this Trojan war from the fortification of the last one: Troy's past salvation reused as the grandstand for its destruction. Both parties sit "deliberating" — and Zeus, alone, "seated on high, commanded" the war on: the only spectator who wants the show to start. ↩

13 lines 156–175 — The champions meet, and Achilles gets the book's great lion simile — not a hunting lion but a hunted one: "a raider, whom men are wild to kill — a whole district, gathered," heedless until wounded, then foaming, groaning, lashing his own ribs with his tail, "whipping himself on to fight," driving in "to see whether he will kill some man, or die himself in the front of the crowd." The simile makes self-destruction part of the charge: kill or die are equal outcomes inside it — which is, since Book 18, precisely Achilles' own arithmetic. ↩

14 lines 178–198 — Achilles' taunt runs through every motive a rational Aeneas could have — the succession ("Priam would not lay that prize in your hand: he has sons; and he is steady"), the land-grant (the temenos of orchard and plowland) — Aristarchus athetized 180-186, but the political satire is sharp and early: the poem knows about princes who fight for estates. Then the memory: the cattle-raid chase down Ida, Lyrnessus wrecked, "the women captive, their day of freedom gone." It ends with the registered proverb, reused verbatim from Menelaus at 17.30-32: "When the thing is done, even the fool learns." ↩

15 lines 199–258 — Aeneas's genealogy — the longest pedigree in the poem, and the poem's most self-aware speech about speech. The frame (200-202: "do not hope to frighten me with words, as if I were a silly child") will be repeated verbatim by Hector at 431-433 — the Trojan princes share a script against Achilles. Then the lineage: Dardanus, son of Zeus; Erichthonius, richest of men, whose three thousand mares bore to Boreas twelve foals that ran over wheat-ears without breaking them and along the crests of the breakers — the poem's most weightless image, horses of wind bred from the hill-pastures of Troy; Tros; Ganymede, "most beautiful of mortal men," taken up to pour Zeus's wine; then the split into the two houses — Ilus to Laomedon to Priam and Hector; Assaracus to Capys to Anchises to Aeneas. Two first-cousin lines, and the survival of one is being decided this hour. The coda is the poem's finest statement on language: "The tongue of mortals is a twisty thing... whatever sort of word you speak, that is the sort you will hear" — and the simile of the wrangling women in the street ("and much is true, and much is not: the anger orders that too"), athetized by Aristarchus (251-255), too humanly observed to lose. Then, superbly: "let us taste one another with our bronze-fitted spears." ↩

16 lines 259–272 — The shield test. Aeneas's spear beats two folds and stops in the gold — and the narrator scolds Achilles for flinching ("the fool: he did not consider... that the glorious gifts of the gods do not lie down easily under mortal men"): even its owner does not yet trust divine craft. The five layers (two bronze, two tin, one gold) troubled the ancients — if the gold is decorative surface, how does it stop a spear at the third layer? — and Aristarchus athetized 269-272; some ancient texts omitted them entirely. Kept here: the physics of a miraculous object need not audit. ↩

17 lines 273–283 — Achilles' cast: through both circles of the rim where bronze and hide run thinnest — the Pelian ash "shrieked" through and stood planted in the earth "still hungry" (ἱεμένη — straining onward). Aeneas crouched under his own shield with the spear quivering over his back: "grief past measure flooded down over his eyes, in terror at how close the point was planted." Zenodotus's text had a different pair of lines here; the vulgate's sequence — cast, crouch, the standing spear — is the most cinematic near-miss in the poem. ↩

18 lines 285–291 — The stone "which no two men could carry, such as mortals are now" (the register's fixed diminished- present formula, its fourth occurrence) — and the double counterfactual: rock against sword, both blows about to land, when Poseidon "saw it sharply." The duel is frozen at its decisive instant and never resumed: the poem refuses to know who was better. ↩

19 lines 292–308 — Poseidon's rescue speech — a Greek god saving Troy's prince — is the poem's window onto a future beyond itself: Aeneas is "guiltless," pious, and destined: "It is destined for him to escape, so that the race of Dardanus not perish seedless... and now the might of Aeneas shall be king over the Trojans — and his children's children." The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite makes the same promise; Strabo knew a variant — "his race shall rule over all" (γένος πάντεσσιν ἀνάξει) — which Rome, tracing the Julii through Iulus to Aeneas, had every reason to prefer; the apparatus records it. Whatever its politics, the moment is structurally superb: in the middle of the Iliad's terminal battle, the poem certifies that something Trojan survives everything. ↩

20 lines 309–317 — Hera's consent is glacial: do as you like about Aeneas — "we two have sworn oaths, many of them... never to ward the evil day away from the Trojans, not even when all Troy is burning in ravening fire." The burning-city clause, spoken as calmly as a contract term, is the coldest sentence any god utters in the poem. ↩

21 lines 318–339 — The rescue itself: mist over Achilles' eyes, the spear laid back at his feet (a courtesy with an edge: nothing of yours is lost — except the kill), and Aeneas thrown over "many ranks of heroes, many ranks of horses" to the Caucones at the battle's rim. Poseidon's parting instructions are precise prophecy: avoid Achilles while he lives; after his death, "fight among the front-fighters: no other of the Achaeans will ever strip your armor." Aeneas exits the poem's war carrying its only personal guarantee of survival. ↩

22 lines 340–352 — Achilles' soliloquy over the vanished opponent gets his tone exactly: wonder for one breath ("a great marvel is this I see with my eyes"), then the shrug — "Let him go, and good riddance (ἐρρέτω). He will find no heart to test me again" — and back to work. The aristeia's engine does not idle. ↩

23 lines 353–363 — The order of the day: "man against man." His self-estimate is the rarest thing in his mouth — a limit: not even Ares or Athena "could work the mouth of a battle-line so wide" (the battle imagined as a thing with jaws; cf. 19.313 "the mouth of bloody war"). What follows is the promise kept literally: "straight through the line I will go." ↩

24 lines 364–372 — Hector's rally answers it with the poem's most honest command ever given to troops: "I too could fight the very immortals — with words; with the spear it is harder, since they are far stronger." Then the great epanalepsis, the line that turns on its own hinge: "I will go against him, though his hands are like fire — though his hands are like fire, and his fury like burning iron." The repetition is courage audibly talking itself past its own information. ↩

25 lines 373–380 — Apollo's counter-order — wait in the mass, "or he will hit you with a cast — or close, and cut you down with the sword" — names exactly the two deaths Hector risks; and Hector, who told the Trojans not to fear Achilles, obeys the god and sinks back "shaken." The gap between his speech and his obedience is the whole tragedy of Hector, one book early. ↩

26 lines 381–395 — The aristeia's first kill: Iphition, a nymph's son from under snowy Tmolus, his skull split clean in two — and Achilles' epitaph-taunt returns the man to his geography: "Here is your death. Your birth was by the Gygaean lake" — death here, birth there, the whole biography reduced to two map-points (the register's "most terrifying of all men" — Iris's address to Achilles at 18.170 — flung at a corpse). Then the poem lets the chariots shred him: no burial-notice, only wheel-rims. ↩

27 lines 395–406 — Demoleon (temple, through the bronze-cheeked helmet, "the brain was all spattered inside it") and Hippodamas, whose soul leaves him "bellowing — as a bull bellows when he is dragged for the Heliconian lord": the sacrifice of bulls to Poseidon Heliconius at the Panionian festival, where a bellowing victim was a good omen — "and the earth-shaker delights in them." A man's death-cry heard by the poem as a pleasing sacrifice: the grimmest cult-note in the Iliad, and Poseidon is standing right there on the field. ↩

28 lines 407–418 — Polydorus — Priam's youngest, forbidden the war "because among his children he was youngest-born and dearest," fastest of them all, killed "in his boy's folly, showing off the speed of his feet" as he darted through the front-fighters: struck where the war-belt's golden clasps meet, the point out beside the navel, kneeling with a scream, "and he clutched his bowels to him with his hands as he sank." The poem will reveal in Books 21-22 that he and Lycaon were Laothoe's sons — Priam mourns the pair at 22.46-48 — making Polydorus the first payment of a double debt this aristeia collects from one mother. ↩

29 lines 419–454 — The premature Hector-duel. The sight of his brother's bowels brings Hector out against orders — the mist that "poured down over his eyes" is grief doing to him what gods do to the doomed — and the exchange is a dress rehearsal of Book 22: taunt ("Come closer — so you come the sooner to the borders of destruction"), Hector's reply reusing Aeneas's frame verbatim (431-433 = 200-202) but adding what Aeneas never said: "I know that you are brave, and that I am far weaker than you. But these things lie on the knees of the gods." Then Athena turns his spear back "with a breath — the gentlest breathing" (the war decided by the smallest quantity of divine effort in the poem), Apollo snatches him into mist, and Achilles' three charges and fourth "like more than man" (δαίμονι ἶσος) end in the shout that repeats 11.362-367 word for word — Diomedes' very speech to the same rescued man: "Dog! Again you have run out from under death." Two heroes, nine years apart in the poem's afternoon, are given identical words against Hector's charmed life — a repetition that makes Apollo's protection feel like policy, and its expiry date (Book 22) feel like doom. ↩

30 lines 455–483 — The spree, each kill a different door out of life: Dryops (neck), Demuchus (knee, then sword), the sons of Bias tumbled from their chariot, Mulius (spear in one ear, point out the other), Echeclus (the whole sword-blade "grew hot with the blood" — the register's "purple death" takes his eyes), Deucalion (arm pinned through the elbow-tendons; he "stood and waited, his arm hanging heavy, looking at death before him" — the poem's stillest instant of doomed consciousness — then head and helmet flying, "and the marrow spurted up out of the spine"). At the center, Tros son of Alastor, who tries the war's other exit: supplication, knees clasped, mercy of an age-mate — "the fool: he did not know there would be no persuading. This was not a sweet-tempered man, not mild of mind." The litotes is the aristeia's moral thermometer: the man who once spared and ransomed captives (as Lycaon will remind him, 21.74-96) is not there to be reached. The liver slides out; the tunic fills with blood; the theme is set for Lycaon. ↩

31 lines 484–503 — Rhigmus of Thrace and his driver Areithous close the count (a dozen named kills), and the book ends in two similes that refuse pathos: the fire-storm in the parched glens ("the wind, driving it everywhere, whirls the flame around"), and — harder — the threshing-floor: oxen treading barley, "and quickly the grain is husked under the feet of the bellowing oxen: so under great-hearted Achilles the single-hoofed horses trampled corpses and shields together." Slaughter as agriculture, the dead as processed grain; the axle and chariot-rails "spattered" with the spray from hooves and wheel-rims. The last line hangs the whole book on its hero's hands: "spattering his invincible hands with gore" — the hands Thetis called man-slaughtering (18.317), still reaching for glory, not yet for Hector. There is no closural cadence: Book 21 continues the same hour at the river. ↩