Book XXI

Half the rout is driven into the river, and the river fights back: Lycaon's bared throat, Asteropaeus's two spears, Scamander rising against the man who has choked him with corpses — water against fire, gods against gods — until Troy's gates gape for the routed, and Apollo, wearing a man's face, runs Achilles out of the way.

Translator’s note on Book 21

Book 21 is the wildest book of the Iliad — the one where the fighting bursts every frame that holds it: ransom, river-banks, even the difference between the elements. It opens at the ford of Xanthus (the lines repeat 14.433-434, where the stunned Hector was laid at this same crossing: the river of Trojan refuge becomes the trap), where Achilles cuts the rout in two, drives half into the water, and wades in after them with a sword — locusts before a grass-fire, fish before a dolphin. He takes twelve boys alive for Patroclus's pyre, collecting the vow of 18.336-337, and then meets Lycaon.

The Lycaon scene (34-135) is the moral center of the second half of the poem. The poem gives him the fullest biography of any minor figure — caught at night cutting fig-shoots for chariot-rails, sold to Lemnos, ransomed, home eleven days, and on the twelfth delivered by "the god" back into the same hands — precisely so that his death will be the death of the old economy: Achilles had sold him once, because "sparing was dearer to my heart"; now "Fool — offer me no ransom." What follows the refusal is the most quoted consolation in Greek literature, spoken with the spear raised: "So, friend — you die too. Why lament it so? Patroclus died, and he was a far better man than you... over me too stand death and strong fate: there will be a dawn, or an evening, or a midday..." (note 6). The word is φίλος — friend — and it is not irony: it is the fellowship of the doomed, which is the only fellowship Achilles has left. Lycaon opens his arms and takes the sword; the body goes to the fish, with a taunt that cancels every funeral rite the poem holds dear — and the river begins to be angry.

Asteropaeus, who fights with a spear in each hand and draws the only blood Achilles loses in the Iliad, dies over the argument his corpse then illustrates: rivers against Zeus. Achilles' boast descends the ladder — Zeus beats rivers; not even Achelous, "not even the great strength of deep-flowing Ocean, from whom all rivers and all the sea and all springs and deep wells flow," can face the thunderbolt. Zenodotus's text omitted the Ocean line, crowning Achelous the first of waters — the oldest recorded Greek quarrel about cosmology, sitting in our apparatus (note 10). Then the river itself has had enough: "my lovely streams are full of corpses... and you kill and kill." The battle with Scamander (233-382) is the poem's one war between a man and an element, and it strips Achilles to something no enemy has seen: running, outrun, wailing to Zeus that his mother lied, dreading the "wretched death" of a boy swept down a gully — death by water, without glory, without a grave. The river's threat makes that explicit in the poem's bitterest mock-burial: sand and shingle heaped so deep "the Achaeans will not know where to gather his bones... he will need no heaped tomb" (note 16). Rescue comes as plot: Poseidon and Athena, hand in hand, dictate the rest of the epic — pen the Trojans, kill Hector, take the glory — and Hera throws Hephaestus at the water. Fire drinks the plain; the riverside trees burn by name; eels tumble; the god of water surrenders while boiling "like a cauldron melting the lard of a fatted hog."

Then the Theomachy the poem has owed us since Book 20 — and it is played as comedy under one laughing spectator ("Zeus heard, sitting on Olympus, and his own heart laughed for joy"). Athena fells Ares with a boundary-stone and Aphrodite with a fist; Hera boxes Artemis's ears with her own bow; Hermes politely forfeits to Leto; Artemis ends in Zeus's lap in tears. Only one exchange is in earnest: Poseidon reminds Apollo of Laomedon's cheat — the wall built for a wage never paid, the threatened ear-lopping — and Apollo refuses combat with the most devastating thing any god says about us in the poem: mortals are not worth a fight, "who like the leaves now flourish in their blaze... and now wither heartless away" — Glaucus's leaf-simile of 6.146 returned from above, as contempt (note 24). The gods go home; Achilles remains — smoke of a burning city — and the book ends with Priam opening the gates, Agenor's lonely stand (the soliloquy where a frightened man discovers that Achilles too "has one life"), and Apollo in Agenor's shape running the fastest man alive across the plain, "always just a little ahead," while everything that is left of Troy's army pours inside the walls — everything except the man who will be standing outside them when the next book begins.

Register notes: 21.1-2 = 14.433-434; 21.374-376 repeat Hera's oath verbatim (= 20.315-317) — the river swears her own clause back at her; 21.69-70 keep 20.279-280's planted-spear wording; the twelve youths pay the vow of 18.336-337; "worker-from-afar," "bane of mortals," "blood-stained," "who showers arrows," and the death-formulas hold their registered forms.

1But when they came to the ford of the fair-flowing river,¹

eddying Xanthus, whom immortal Zeus begot,

there he cut them in two: one half he chased over the plain

toward the city, where the Achaeans had fled in terror

5the day before, when glorious Hector raged —

there they streamed in rout, and Hera spread deep mist

in front of them, to hold them; and the other half

were rolled into the deep-flowing, silver-eddying river.

In they fell with a great crash, and the sheer current roared,

10and the banks rang loud around them; and shouting they

swam this way and that, spun about in the eddies.

As when locusts rise on the air before the rush of fire

and flee toward a river: the unwearying flame burns on,

leaping up suddenly, and they cower down in the water:

15so before Achilles the sounding stream of Xanthus,

the deep-eddying, was choked with horses and men together.

And the Zeus-born one left his spear there on the bank,²

leaned on the tamarisks, and leapt in like more than man,

holding only his sword, with dark work in his heart,

20and struck on every side; and an ugly groaning rose

from the men the blade hit, and the water reddened with blood.

As before a huge-mawed dolphin the other fish

flee and fill the inlets of a fair-anchoring harbor,

terrified — for he devours whatever he catches:

25so the Trojans down the channels of the terrible river

cowered under the overhangs. And when his hands were weary of killing,

he picked twelve young men alive out of the river —

blood-price for the death of Patroclus, Menoetius's son.

He led them out dazed, like fawns,

30and tied their hands behind them with the well-cut straps

they wore on their own supple tunics,

and gave them to his companions to lead down to the hollow ships.

Then back he sprang, wild to be killing.

There he met a son of Priam, Dardanus's descendant,³

35running out of the river: Lycaon — whom he himself

had taken once by night, and led away unwilling

from his father's orchard: with the sharp bronze he was cutting

young shoots from a wild fig, to be chariot-rails,

when — evil unlooked-for — brilliant Achilles came on him.

40That time he shipped him to well-built Lemnos and sold him,

and the son of Jason paid the price;

from there a guest-friend ransomed him — he paid a fortune —

Eëtion of Imbros, and sent him to shining Arisbe;

and slipping away from there, he reached his father's house.

45Eleven days he delighted his heart among his dear ones,

home from Lemnos; and on the twelfth the god threw him

once more into the hands of Achilles, who was to send him

down to the house of Hades — not willing to go.

Now when swift-footed brilliant Achilles saw him —⁴

50naked, without helmet or shield, and no spear either:

he had thrown it all to the ground, for the sweat wore him down

as he ran from the river, and weariness broke his knees under him —

troubled, Achilles spoke to his own great-hearted spirit:

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

55so the great-hearted Trojans I have killed

will rise again out of the murky dark below,

the way this man has come back, escaping the pitiless day —

sold into holy Lemnos! And the deep of the grey sea

did not hold him, which holds so many against their will.

60Well then: now he shall taste the point of our spear

as well — so I may see in my mind, and learn for certain,

whether he will come back equally from down there, or be held

by the life-giving earth, which holds down even the strong."

So he weighed it, and waited. And the man came near him, dazed,⁵

65desperate to touch his knees: for his heart's whole wish

was to escape from evil death and the black spirit of destruction.

Brilliant Achilles lifted the long spear

meaning to stab; but he ducked under and grasped his knees,

crouching; and the spear passed over his back and stood in the earth,

70planted, still hungry for the flesh of a man.

With one hand Lycaon held his knees and begged,

and with the other gripped the sharp spear, and would not let go,

and speaking winged words he addressed him:

"By your knees, Achilles: respect me, and pity me.

75I stand to you, Zeus-nurtured, as a suppliant with a claim:

it was at your table first that I ate the grain of Demeter,

on the day you took me in the well-built orchard,

and led me away, far from father and friends, and sold me

into holy Lemnos: I brought you the price of a hundred oxen.

80I was freed for three times that; and this dawn

is my twelfth since I came back to Ilion

after much suffering. And now murderous fate has put me

in your hands again. I must be hateful to father Zeus,

who gave me to you twice. To a short life my mother

85bore me — Laothoe, daughter of the old man Altes:

Altes, who is lord of the war-loving Lelegians,

holding steep Pedasus on the Satnioeis.

Priam had his daughter — among his many wives;

and of her we two were born, and you will butcher both.

90One you have broken already among the front-rank foot-fighters —

godlike Polydorus, when you hit him with your sharp spear;

and now, here, it will be evil for me: for I do not hope

to escape your hands, since the god has driven me into them.

But I will say one thing more — take it into your heart:

95do not kill me. I am not from the same womb as Hector,

who killed your companion, the gentle and the strong."

So the shining son of Priam spoke to him,⁶

a speech of begging; but the voice he heard was without honey:

"Fool — offer me no ransom. Make me no speeches.

100Before Patroclus met his day of destiny,

sparing Trojans was dearer to my heart:

many I took alive, and sold abroad.

Now there is not one who escapes death — not one the god

delivers into my hands in front of Ilion —

105not one of all the Trojans, and of Priam's sons beyond all.

So, friend — you die too. Why lament it so?

Patroclus died, and he was a far better man than you.

And do you not see what I am — how beautiful, how big?

My father is a noble man, a goddess was the mother who bore me:

110yet over me too stand death, and strong fate.

There will be a dawn, or an evening, or a midday,

when someone takes my life too out of me in the fighting,

whether he hits me with a spear or an arrow from the string."

So he spoke; and there the man's knees went slack, and his own heart.⁷

115He let go of the spear, and sat back, spreading both hands

wide. And Achilles drew his sharp sword

and struck at the collarbone, beside the neck, and the whole

two-edged blade went in; and face-down on the earth

he lay stretched out, and the black blood ran, and soaked the ground.

120Achilles seized him by the foot and slung him into the river,

and cried in triumph over him with winged words:

"Lie there now among the fish: they will lick the blood

from your wound, uncaring. No mother will lay you out

on a bed and mourn you: eddying Scamander

125will carry you into the broad gulf of the sea,

and many a fish, leaping along the wave, will dart up

under the black ripple to eat the white fat of Lycaon.

Perish, all of you — till we reach the city of holy Ilion,

you running, and I cutting you down from behind!

130Not even the river will save you — the fair-flowing,

silver-eddying river you have honored so long with slaughtered bulls,

drowning single-hoofed horses alive in his eddies.

Even so you shall die evil deaths — every one — till all of you

pay for the killing of Patroclus and the ruin of the Achaeans

135whom you cut down beside the swift ships when I was away."

So he spoke; and the river's anger rose the higher in his heart,

and he turned over in his mind how to stop brilliant Achilles

in his work, and beat destruction away from the Trojans.

Meanwhile the son of Peleus, with his long-shadowed spear,⁸

140sprang on Asteropaeus, wild to kill him —

the son of Pelegon, whom wide-flowing Axius

begot on Periboea, eldest of the daughters

of Acessamenus: the deep-eddying river lay with her.

On him Achilles rushed; and he stood up out of the river

145to face him, holding two spears; and Xanthus put fury

in his chest, in anger for the young men cut down in the fighting,

the ones Achilles was butchering down the stream without pity.

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

the first to speak was swift-footed brilliant Achilles:

150"Who are you — of what men — that you dare come against me?

Unhappy are the fathers whose sons face my fury!"

And the shining son of Pelegon answered him:

"Great-hearted son of Peleus, why ask my lineage?

I am from Paeonia of the deep soil — a far country —

155leading the Paeonian men of the long lances; and this dawn

is my eleventh now, since I came to Ilion.

My line is from Axius, the wide-flowing —

Axius, who sends the most beautiful water over the earth;

he fathered Pelegon, famed with the spear; and of Pelegon

160they say I was born. Now let us fight, brilliant Achilles."

So he spoke, threatening; and brilliant Achilles raised⁹

the Pelian ash. But the hero Asteropaeus threw

both spears at once — for he was a two-handed fighter.

With the one spear he hit the shield, but did not

165break the shield: the gold held it, the god's gift;

with the other he grazed the elbow of the right arm,

and the dark blood shot out; and the spear, passing over him,

stuck fast in the earth, still craving its fill of flesh.

Second in turn Achilles let fly his straight-flying ash

170at Asteropaeus, wild to kill him —

and missed the man, and hit the high bank,

and drove the ash spear half its length into the bank.

Then the son of Peleus, drawing the sharp sword from his thigh,

leapt on him, furious; and the man could not wrench

175Achilles' ash out of the bluff with his thick hand.

Three times he shook it, straining to pull it free,

and three times his strength gave out; the fourth time his heart wished

to bend and snap the ash spear of Aeacus' grandson —

but before that Achilles closed, and took his life with the sword.

180He struck him in the belly beside the navel, and all

his bowels gushed out on the ground; and darkness covered his eyes

as he gasped. And Achilles, springing on his chest,

stripped his armor, and spoke his word of triumph:

"Lie there. It is a hard thing to strive with the children¹⁰

185of Cronos's mighty son — even for one born of a river.

You said your birth was from a wide-flowing river;

I claim the lineage of great Zeus.

The man who fathered me is lord of many Myrmidons —

Peleus, Aeacus' son; and Aeacus was from Zeus.

190As Zeus is stronger than the rivers that run murmuring to the sea,

so the line of Zeus is made stronger than a river's.

Why — here is a great river at your side, if he can help

at all. But there is no fighting Zeus, Cronos's son:

not even Achelous the king is his equal,

195not even the great strength of deep-flowing Ocean,

from whom all rivers flow and every sea,

and all the springs, and the deep wells:

even he fears the thunderbolt of great Zeus

and the terrible thunder, when it crashes out of heaven."

200He spoke, and pulled the bronze spear out of the bluff,¹¹

and left the man there, where he had taken his dear life,

lying in the sands; and the dark water lapped him.

Around him the eels and the fish were busy,

tearing at the fat of his kidneys, plucking it away.

205And Achilles went on after the chariot-fighting Paeonians,

who were still running in terror along the eddying river,

since they had seen their best man in the strong encounter

broken by force under the hands and sword of the son of Peleus.

There he took Thersilochus and Mydon and Astypylus

210and Mnesus and Thrasius and Aenius and Ophelestes —

and now swift Achilles would have killed still more Paeonians,

had not the deep-eddying river called to him in anger,¹²

likened to a man, and sent his voice out of a deep eddy:

"O Achilles — beyond men you are strong, and beyond men you do

215outrage — and always the gods themselves are your defenders.

If the son of Cronos has granted you to destroy all the Trojans,

at least drive them out of me and do your grim work on the plain:

my lovely streams are crammed full of corpses,

and I can no longer pour my current through to the bright sea,

220choked with the dead — and you kill, and kill.

Come, let it be. Horror takes me, leader of the people."

Then in answer spoke to him swift-footed Achilles:

"It shall be so, Scamander, nurtured of Zeus, as you command.

But the arrogant Trojans — I will not stop cutting them down

225before I pen them in their city, and stand against Hector

face to face, whether he breaks me or I break him."

So speaking he swept on the Trojans like more than man.

And then the deep-eddying river called to Apollo:

"Shame, lord of the silver bow, child of Zeus — you have not

230kept the counsels of Cronos's son, who charged you strictly

to stand by the Trojans and defend them, until the late

evening-light comes down and shadows the deep-soiled plowland."

He spoke; and spear-famed Achilles leapt from the bluff¹³

and sprang into mid-current. And the river rushed on him, surging

235and swelling, and stirred all his streams into turmoil, and shoved

the many corpses that crowded him — Achilles' killing —

out onto dry land, bellowing like a bull

as he threw them; and the living he saved down his beautiful streams,

hiding them in his eddies, deep and wide.

240And terrible around Achilles the churning water towered,

and the current beat down on his shield and shoved him; nor could

his feet find purchase. He grasped an elm with both hands —

full-grown, majestic — and it tore out by the roots,

brought the whole overhang down with it, dammed the beautiful

245streams with its dense branches, and bridged the river itself,

falling in whole. And he sprang up out of the eddy

and set off flying across the plain on his quick feet —

terrified. And the great god did not let up, but rose behind him,

cresting black, to stop the labor of brilliant

250Achilles, and beat destruction away from the Trojans.

And the son of Peleus bounded away a spear-cast's length,

with the swoop of the black eagle, the hunter,

strongest of winged things at once, and swiftest:

like him he darted, and the bronze on his chest

255clashed terribly; and swerving out from under it

he fled, and the river poured after him, roaring hugely.

As when a ditch-tending man leads a stream of water¹⁴

from a dark spring down through his plantings and gardens,

mattock in hand, knocking the clogs from the channel,

260and as it flows all the pebbles are rolled and tumbled

under it, and it runs murmuring quickly down

the sloping ground, and outruns the very man who guides it:

so the wave of the current forever caught Achilles,

fast as he was: gods are stronger than men.

265And as often as swift-footed brilliant Achilles turned

to make a stand against it, and to learn whether all

the immortals who hold the wide heaven were hunting him,

so often the great wave of the sky-fed river

battered down on his shoulders; and he sprang high with his feet,

270heartsick; and the river was breaking his knees from under him,

raging slantwise beneath, eating the dust from under his feet.

And the son of Peleus cried aloud, looking into the wide heaven:¹⁵

"Father Zeus! — that no god undertakes to save me,

pitiful as I am, from the river! Afterward let anything happen.

275No other of the sons of Heaven is so much to blame

as my own mother, who beguiled me with lies:

she said I would die under the wall of the armored Trojans

by the swift arrows of Apollo.

I wish Hector had killed me — the best man reared here:

280then a good man would have done the killing, and stripped a good man.

Now it is my portion to be caught by a wretched death,

hemmed in a great river, like a swineherd's boy

swept away by a gully he was crossing in a storm."

So he spoke; and very quickly Poseidon and Athena

285came and stood beside him, likened to men in body,

and taking his hand in their hands they pledged him with words.

And Poseidon the earth-shaker began speaking among them:

"Son of Peleus — do not tremble so hard, do not be afraid.

Such are we two of the gods who stand your helpers —

290Zeus approving — I and Pallas Athena.

It is not your portion to be broken by a river:

this one will soon give over — you will see it yourself.

And we will give you close counsel, if you will heed it:

do not rest your hands from the leveling war

295before you pen the Trojan army inside the famed walls

of Ilion — whoever escapes. And when you have taken Hector's life,

come back to the ships. We give you the glory to carry off."

The two of them, so speaking, went away to the immortals;¹⁶

and he went on — for the gods' command stirred him greatly —

300into the plain. And the whole of it was filled with flood-water,

and much beautiful armor of young men killed in battle

floated there, and their bodies. His knees sprang high

as he rushed straight on against the current, nor could the river

hold him now, wide as it flowed: Athena put great strength in him.

305But Scamander did not slacken his fury either — worse,

his rage at Peleus's son grew; and he crested the wave of his current,

lifting himself high, and shouted a call to Simoïs:

"Dear brother — the strength of this man — let the two of us

hold it together, since very soon he will sack the great city

310of lord Priam; and the Trojans will not stand in the chaos.

Help me, and quickly: fill your streams with water

from the springs, and rouse up every gully;

raise a great wave, and stir a huge clamor

of timbers and stones — so we stop the wild man

315who is winning now, and straining like the gods themselves.

For I say his strength will help him nothing, nor his beauty,

nor those beautiful arms, which deep beneath the mere

shall lie wrapped in slime — and the man himself

I will roll in sand, and pour around him shingle

320past counting; and the Achaeans will not know where to gather

his bones, so deep in silt shall I bury him.

There his burial-mound will stand ready-made: he will need

no heaping of a tomb when the Achaeans bury him."

He spoke, and surged at Achilles, churning, rearing high,

325seething with foam and blood and dead men.

And the darkening wave of the sky-fed river

towered above him, and began to drag the son of Peleus down.

And Hera shrieked aloud, in terror for Achilles,¹⁷

lest the great deep-eddying river sweep him away,

330and at once she called to Hephaestus, her dear son:

"Up, Crook-foot! Up, my child! — for it was against you

we always reckoned eddying Xanthus matched in battle.

Help him, and quickly: bring your flames out in force.

And I will go rouse a hard storm out of the sea —

335the West Wind and the white South Wind — to carry

the evil burning and set the Trojans' heads and armor alight.

You, along the banks of Xanthus, burn the trees,

and throw the fire into the river himself. And do not let him

turn you back at all with soft words or with threats;

340do not slacken your fury — not until the moment

I shout and call to you: then hold the unwearying fire."

So she spoke; and Hephaestus made ready unearthly fire.¹⁸

First the fire blazed on the plain, and burned

the many corpses that crowded it — Achilles' killing;

345and the whole plain was dried, and the shining water stopped.

As when in late summer the North Wind quickly dries

a new-watered orchard, and the man who tends it is glad:

so the whole plain was dried, and the fire consumed

the corpses. Then he turned his all-shining flame on the river.

350The elms burned, and the willows, and the tamarisks;

the lotus burned, and the rushes, and the galingale,

which grew in abundance around the river's beautiful streams;

and the eels and the fish were in torment down the eddies,

tumbling this way and that through the beautiful streams,

355worn down by the blast of resourceful Hephaestus.

And the strong river burned, and spoke a word, and named him:¹⁹

"Hephaestus! — no one of the gods can stand against you,

and I will not fight you, flaming with fire as you are.

Leave off the strife. As for the Trojans — let brilliant Achilles

360drive them out of their city this instant. What are strife and rescue to me?"

He spoke, burning in the fire, and his beautiful streams were seething.

As a cauldron boils within, hurried by a great fire,

melting down the lard of a fatted hog,

bubbling up on every side, with dry split wood beneath it:

365so his beautiful streams blazed with the fire, and the water boiled,

and would not flow onward, but stood checked: the breath

of mighty, wise Hephaestus wore him down. And to Hera,

begging hard, he spoke winged words:

"Hera, why has your son fallen on my current, to torment it

370out of all others? Surely I am not so much to blame

as all the rest of them — all the helpers of Troy.

I will stop — I promise it — if you command it;

but let him stop as well. And I will swear this oath besides:

never to ward the evil day away from the Trojans,

375not even when all Troy is burning in ravening fire —

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

Now when the goddess white-armed Hera heard that,

at once she called to Hephaestus, her dear son:

"Hephaestus — hold, my glorious child. It is not seemly

380to batter an immortal god this way for the sake of mortals."

So she spoke; and Hephaestus quenched the unearthly fire,

and the wave ran back down the beautiful streams.

And when the fury of Xanthus was beaten, those two²⁰

rested — for Hera held them back, angry as she was.

385But on the other gods fell strife, heavy and grinding,

and the hearts in their chests blew two ways at once;

and they fell together with a great crash, and the wide earth rang,

and the great heaven trumpeted around them. And Zeus heard it,

sitting on Olympus; and his own heart laughed

390for joy, when he saw the gods coming together in strife.

Then they stood apart no longer. Ares began it —²¹

the shield-piercer: first he sprang at Athena,

bronze spear in hand, and flung the word of insult:

"Why, dog-fly — why do you drive the gods together in strife

395with your gale of daring, your great heart egging you on?

Do you not remember when you set Diomedes, Tydeus's son,

on me to wound me — and took the spear yourself, in plain sight,

and drove it straight at me, and tore my beautiful flesh?

Now, I think, you will pay me for all you have done."

400So speaking, he stabbed at the tasseled aegis —

the terrible aegis that not even Zeus's thunderbolt breaks:

there blood-stained Ares stabbed her with his long spear.

But she, giving ground, caught up a stone in her thick hand —

a stone that lay on the plain, black, jagged, and huge,

405which men of former times had set to be a field's boundary-marker.

With it she hit rushing Ares in the neck, and unstrung his limbs.

Seven acres he covered, falling; and his hair was fouled with dust,

and his armor clattered around him. And Pallas Athena laughed,

and triumphing over him she spoke winged words:

410"Baby fool — you have never yet reckoned how much stronger

I claim to be, that you match your fury against mine.

So pay in full your mother's curses — the Erinyes

she wishes on you in her anger, because you deserted

the Achaeans and defend the arrogant Trojans."

415So speaking, she turned her shining eyes away.

And Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus, took Ares by the hand²²

and led him off, groaning thick and fast, barely gathering his spirit.

But when the goddess white-armed Hera noticed her,

at once she spoke winged words to Athena:

420"Shame! Unwearied one, child of aegis-bearing Zeus —

there goes the dog-fly again, leading Ares, bane of mortals,

out of the deadly war through the chaos. After her!"

So she spoke; and Athena sped after, glad at heart,

and rushing on Aphrodite she struck her on the breast

425with her thick hand; and there her knees went slack, and her own heart.

So the two of them lay on the earth that feeds many,

and Athena, triumphing, spoke winged words:

"Such may they all be now — all the helpers of the Trojans

when they fight the armored Argives:

430just so bold, and just so hardy, as Aphrodite

coming to second Ares, and facing my fury.

Then long ago we should have rested from the war,

with the well-built citadel of Ilion sacked."

So she spoke; and the goddess white-armed Hera smiled.

435And the lord earth-shaker addressed Apollo:²³

"Phoebus — why do we two stand apart? It is not fitting,

when the others have begun. The greater shame if we go back

fightless to Olympus, to the bronze-floored house of Zeus.

Begin: you are the younger born. It would not be right

440for me, since I was born first and know more things.

Baby fool — how mindless a heart you have! Do you not even

remember all we two suffered around Ilion,

alone of the gods, when we came from Zeus and drudged

a whole year for haughty Laomedon at a stated wage,

445and he gave the orders, and we served?

I built the Trojans their wall around the city —

wide, and very beautiful, so the city might be unbreakable —

while you, Phoebus, herded the shambling twist-horned cattle

in the spurs of wooded, many-folded Ida.

450But when the glad seasons brought around the term

of our hire, then he robbed us of all our wage by force —

terrifying Laomedon — and sent us off with threats.

He threatened to bind our feet, and our hands above them,

and ship us for sale to far-off islands;

455and he vowed to lop the ears from both of us with bronze.

So back we went, the two of us, with rancor in our hearts,

in anger for the wage he promised and did not pay.

And it is his people you now favor — instead of trying,

with us, to make the arrogant Trojans perish

460root and branch, evilly, with their children and honored wives!"

Then in turn the lord Apollo, the worker-from-afar, answered him:²⁴

"Earth-shaker — you would say I was unsound of mind

if I fought against you for the sake of mortals —

pitiful things, who like the leaves at one time

465flourish in their blaze, eating the fruit of the plowland,

and at another wither heartless away. No — quickly,

let us rest from battle. Let them do their own fighting."

So speaking he turned away: for he shrank in awe

from trading blows with his father's brother.

470But his sister rebuked him bitterly — the lady of wild beasts,²⁵

Artemis of the wilds — and flung the word of insult:

"So you run, worker-from-afar! — and hand Poseidon the whole

victory, and give him glory for nothing!

Baby fool — why do you carry that bow, useless as wind?

475Never again let me hear you in our father's halls

boasting, as before among the immortal gods,

that you would fight Poseidon face to face."

So she spoke; and Apollo the worker-from-afar answered nothing;

but the honored wife of Zeus, in anger,

480reviled the shooter of arrows with words of insult:

"And how is it you are eager, shameless bitch, to stand

against me? I am a hard match for your fury,

bow-carrier though you are — you whom Zeus made a lion

to women, and gave you leave to kill whichever you choose.

485Better, surely, to slaughter beasts on the mountains,

and wild deer, than to fight by force with your betters.

But if you want a lesson in war — so you may know well

how much stronger I am, when you match your fury against mine —"

She spoke, and with her left hand caught both the other's hands

490at the wrist, and with her right stripped the bow from her shoulders,

and with the bow itself, smiling, she boxed her about the ears

as she twisted this way and that; and the swift arrows spilled out.

And the goddess fled from under her, weeping, like a dove

that flies from a hawk into a hollow rock,

495a cleft — for it was not her portion to be caught:

so she fled weeping, and left her bow and arrows where they lay.

And to Leto spoke the courier, the slayer of Argus:²⁶

"Leto, I will not fight you — no: it is a hard thing

to trade blows with the wives of cloud-gatherer Zeus.

500With all my heart's goodwill: boast among the immortal gods

that you overcame me with your strong force."

So he spoke; and Leto gathered up the curved bow

and the arrows, fallen this way and that in the swirl of dust,

and taking her daughter's bow and arrows she went back.

505And the girl came to Olympus, to the bronze-floored house of Zeus,²⁷

and sat down weeping on her father's knees,

the ambrosial robe trembling around her; and her father

the son of Cronos drew her to him, and asked, laughing sweetly:

"Who of the sons of Heaven, dear child, has treated you so —

510for nothing — as if you had been caught doing wrong in the open?"

And the fair-crowned goddess of the clamorous hunt answered him:

"Your wife battered me, father — white-armed Hera,

from whom strife and quarrel cling to the immortals."

So the two of them spoke such things to one another.²⁸

515And Phoebus Apollo went down into holy Ilion:

for the wall of the well-built city was on his mind —

lest the Danaans sack it that day, beyond its fate.

The other everlasting gods went to Olympus,

some in anger, and some in high triumph,

520and sat down beside the father of the black cloud. But Achilles

went on killing the Trojans — the men and their single-hoofed horses.

As when smoke rises and reaches the wide heaven

from a burning city — the wrath of the gods has sent it up,

and it lays labor on all, and grief on many:

525so Achilles laid labor and grief on the Trojans.

And old Priam stood on the god-built tower,

and made out gigantic Achilles: and there before him

the Trojans were being driven pell-mell in rout, and no defense

was left. He cried out, and came down from the tower,

530to rouse the famed gate-keepers along the wall:

"Hold the gates spread open in your hands, until the army

comes into the city in its rout: for here is Achilles

close by, driving them. Now, I think, comes disaster.

But the moment they are gathered inside the wall and breathing,

535close the tight-fitted double doors again:

I dread that ruinous man — that he may leap inside the wall."

So he spoke; and they loosed the gates and thrust back the bars,

and the gates, spread wide, made a light of safety. And Apollo

sprang out to meet the rout, to beat destruction from the Trojans.

540And they, straight for the city and the high wall,

parched with thirst and caked with dust, came fleeing

out of the plain; and he pressed hard behind them with the spear:

raging madness held his heart, and he strained for glory.

Then the sons of the Achaeans would have taken high-gated Troy,²⁹

545had not Phoebus Apollo stirred up brilliant Agenor —

Antenor's son, a man blameless and strong.

Into his heart he threw courage, and himself stood

beside him, to beat away the heavy hands of death,

leaning on the oak tree, wrapped in thick mist.

550Now when Agenor caught sight of Achilles, sacker of cities,

he stood fast; but the heart in him churned dark as he waited,

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

"Ah me! If I run from strong Achilles

the way the rest are driven, panicked, in rout —

555he will catch me all the same, and butcher me for the coward I am.

But if I leave these men to be driven before him —

before Achilles, Peleus's son — and run on my own feet

another way, off from the wall, toward the Ileian plain,

until I reach the spurs of Ida and get into the brush —

560then at evening, when I have bathed in the river

and cooled the sweat from me, I could come back to Ilion...

But why does my own heart argue these things with me?

What if he sees me swinging wide of the city toward the plain,

and comes after at a sprint, and runs me down on his quick feet?

565Then there will be no more escaping death and the death-spirits:

he is too strong — strong beyond all mankind.

But what if, in front of the city, I stand and face him?

His flesh too, surely, can be cut by the sharp bronze;

in him is one life, no more; and mortal, men say

570he is — though Zeus, Cronos's son, keeps handing him the glory."

So speaking, braced and gathered, he waited for Achilles,³⁰

and the brave heart in him strained toward war and battle.

As a leopard comes out of deep brush

to face the huntsman, and her heart neither

575fears nor thinks of flight when she hears the baying —

for even if he is quicker, and stabs or hits her with a cast,

still, run through on the very spear, she does not leave off

her valor, until she closes with him or goes down:

so the son of proud Antenor, brilliant Agenor,

580refused to run before he had put Achilles to the test.

He held the balanced round shield out before him,

aimed at him with his spear, and shouted loud:

"No doubt you hoped in your heart, shining Achilles,

to sack the city of the proud Trojans this very day.

585Baby fool — there is grief yet to be suffered over her:

inside her we are many, and men of valor,

who will guard Ilion, standing in front of our dear parents

and wives and sons. It is you who will meet your doom here —

terrifying as you are, and so daring a fighter."

590He spoke, and let the sharp javelin fly from his heavy hand,

and hit him on the shin below the knee — no miss:

and around it the greave of new-forged tin

screamed terribly; and the bronze sprang back

from where it struck, and did not pass: the god's gifts held it.

595And the son of Peleus went for godlike Agenor

in his turn — but Apollo would not let him win the glory:

he snatched Agenor away, and hid him in thick mist,

and sent him quietly out of the war, to go his way.

Then by a trick he kept the son of Peleus from the army:³¹

600likened in every point to Agenor himself, the worker-from-afar

stood before his feet — and Achilles ran hot after him.

And while he chased him across the wheat-bearing plain,

turning him along the deep-eddying river Scamander

as he ran just a little ahead — for by that cunning Apollo

605kept him beguiled, always hoping to catch him on his quick feet —

meanwhile the rest of the routed Trojans, in a mass,

came glad to the city, and the town was filled with their crowding.

Nor did they dare wait for one another any longer

outside the city and the wall, to learn who had escaped

610and who had died in the fighting: in they poured, headlong,

every man whose feet and knees could save him.

Notes

1 lines 1–16 — The opening repeats 14.433-434 exactly (our English kept): "the ford of the fair-flowing river, eddying Xanthus, whom immortal Zeus begot" — the crossing where the stunned Hector was laid and revived in Book 14. The river of Trojan refuge becomes the killing-pen: Achilles splits the rout, Hera walls one half behind mist, and the other half goes into the water. The locust simile knows what is coming three hundred lines early: men driven into a river by fire is precisely how the book will end for the river himself. ↩

2 lines 17–33 — The spear left leaning on the tamarisks: sword work — butcher's work — is what the moment wants. The dolphin simile makes the water itself predatory ground. Then the poem's coldest logistics: twelve young men taken alive "blood-price for the death of Patroclus" — the vow of 18.336-337 collected on schedule, the victims led out "dazed, like fawns," bound with the belts of their own tunics. They will be paid out at 23.175-176. Between vow and payment the poem never lets them speak. ↩

3 lines 34–48 — Lycaon's dossier — the fullest biography any minor victim receives, given precisely so we know the whole weight of what is about to be refused: the night raid, the fig-shoots cut for chariot-rails (a boy doing farm-work in an orchard war), the sale on Lemnos to Euneus son of Jason (the fleet's wine-merchant, 7.467-469), the ransom by Eëtion of Imbros, Arisbe, the escape home. "Eleven days he delighted his heart among his dear ones; and on the twelfth the god threw him once more into the hands of Achilles." The symmetry is exact and awful: eleven days of resurrection, and then the machinery resumes. ↩

4 lines 49–63 — Achilles' soliloquy over the unarmed man plays the return as ghost-story: "the great-hearted Trojans I have killed will rise again out of the murky dark." The joke — spear as experiment: "so I may see... whether he will come back equally from down there" — is the aristeia's humor: death-dealing grown so routine it wants variety. Under it, the poem's physics: the sea did not hold him; "the life-giving earth... holds down even the strong" will. ↩

5 lines 64–96 — The supplication tableau: one hand on the knees, one gripping the spear itself — clinging to the weapon to keep it out of his own body. Lycaon's claims are, in order: the suppliant-bond; table-fellowship ("at your table first I ate the grain of Demeter" — the captive fed by his captor becomes his guest); the ransom record (a hundred oxen paid, three hundred to free him); the fate-arithmetic of the twelfth dawn; and last, the desperate genealogical wedge — born of Laothoe, not Hecuba: "I am not from the same womb as Hector." He offers every category the heroic world honors. The answer voids the categories. ↩

6 lines 97–113 — The refusal and the consolation, the poem's ethical summit. "Fool — offer me no ransom": the economy that ran Books 1-9 (and Lycaon's own first capture — "before Patroclus met his day of destiny, sparing Trojans was dearer to my heart") is formally closed. Then the turn from wrath to metaphysics — "So, friend, you die too" (ἀλλὰ φίλος θάνε καὶ σύ) — and the terms of the consolation: Patroclus was better, and died; "do you not see what I am — how beautiful, how big?" — and I die too: "a dawn, or an evening, or a midday." The killer comforts his victim with their equality before death, and means it; φίλος is not sarcasm but the only fellowship left to a man who has accepted his own sentence. No passage of the poem was more quoted in antiquity as the summary of the human condition. ↩

7 lines 114–135 — Lycaon's assent: knees slack, spear released, both hands spread — a posture between surrender and embrace — and the sword at the collarbone. Then the anti-funeral: slung into the river with a taunt that negates each rite in turn — no mother's laying-out, no lament; instead fish licking the wound "uncaring" and darting up "under the black ripple to eat the white fat of Lycaon" (the body already imagined as carcass-meat). The closing insult is cultic: the river you honored "so long with slaughtered bulls, drowning single-hoofed horses alive in his eddies" (live-horse sacrifice to rivers is real archaic practice) will not save you. Aristophanes athetized 130-135 — and Didymus suspected Aristarchus agreed — but the lines are the hinge: this speech is what the river cannot forgive, and the next six hundred lines grow out of it. ↩

8 lines 136–160 — Asteropaeus: grandson of the river Axius, eleven days at Troy (to Lycaon's twelve — the book counts its doomed newcomers), with Xanthus himself putting fury in his chest: the river's first counter-move is a champion of river-blood. The challenge-exchange is a diptych with Book 20's: where Aeneas gave sixteen generations, the Paeonian gives a river and a spear — "Axius, who sends the most beautiful water over the earth." ↩

9 lines 161–183 — The double cast — "for he was a two-handed fighter" (περιδέξιος): one spear into the shield's gold, the other grazing Achilles' right elbow — the only blood Achilles sheds in the entire poem, and a river's grandson draws it. The duel then turns on the ash spear stuck in the bluff: three heaves, and on the fourth attempt — trying to snap the spear of Aeacus' grandson — the sword takes him. He dies at the belly like Polydorus, bowels on the ground, "gasping"; the register's darkness-formula closes his eyes. ↩

10 lines 184–199 — The victory-boast is a theology lesson: "It is a hard thing to strive with the children of Cronos's mighty son — even for the son of a river." Zeus's line beats water's line; and the ladder runs up: "not even Achelous the king is his equal, not even the great strength of deep-flowing Ocean, from whom all rivers flow and every sea, and all the springs, and the deep wells." Zenodotus and Megaclides omitted line 195 (Pausanias saw such texts), which makes Achelous — not Ocean — the greatest of waters: the two readings preserve the oldest Greek dispute about the primal water. The vulgate keeps Ocean as source of all things and Achelous as king of rivers; this translation keeps the vulgate. ↩

11 lines 200–210 — The corpse in the shallows: "around him the eels and the fish were busy, tearing at the fat of his kidneys" — Lycaon's threatened fate enacted on the next body within eighty lines. Then seven Paeonians in a line — the plain catalogue-deaths that mark an aristeia running at full mechanical speed — until the river speaks. ↩

12 lines 211–232 — The river's protest is the book's ecological center: "my lovely streams are crammed full of corpses, and I can no longer pour my current through to the bright sea... and you kill, and kill." The god of the landscape pleads not for Troy but for his own nature — a river's function is to flow, and slaughter has clogged it. Achilles' answer grants the venue-change and nothing else, and states the poem's remaining program in one line: "stand against Hector face to face, whether he breaks me or I break him." The river then rebukes Apollo with Zeus's sunset commission — the day-clause that has governed the poem since 11.194 — as if to say: someone must hold the line till dark, and the archer is idle. ↩

13 lines 233–271 — The attack. The river fights as water fights: not blows but volume — the surge that shoves corpses ashore ("bellowing like a bull") while hiding the living in his eddies (the river as shepherd of his people, doing with water what Apollo does with mist); the wave on the shield; the uprooted elm that takes the whole bank with it and bridges the stream. Achilles — for the first time since Book 1 — runs. The eagle simile keeps his dignity ("strongest of winged things at once, and swiftest"); the irrigation simile takes it away magnificently: the cosmic terror measured by a gardener whose channel outruns him, mattock in hand — the most domestic image in the Iliad set against its most elemental combat, closed by the flattest of maxims: "gods are stronger than men." ↩

14 lines 272–283 — The despair-prayer. Achilles wails (ᾤμωξεν) — the verb of the wounded — that no god will save him, and that "my own mother beguiled me with lies": the promised death "under the wall... by the swift arrows of Apollo" (exactly the death he will in fact receive, 22.359-360 — the complaint certifies the prophecy). The horror is genre-specific: to drown is to die without a victor, without a grave-mound, without kleos — "like a swineherd's boy swept away by a gully he was crossing in a storm." The greatest of heroes measures his death against the smallest imaginable one; Odysseus, drowning, makes the same calculation (Od. 5.306-312). ↩

15 lines 284–297 — The rescue is pure dramaturgy: Poseidon and Athena "likened to men," taking his hand — the pledge- gesture — and dictating the remainder of the epic: not fated to die by water; pen the Trojans; kill Hector; return to the ships; "we give you the glory to carry off." (Seleucus athetized 290-292, and the Cretan edition omitted them.) The plot of Books 21-22 is handed over in a handclasp. ↩

16 lines 298–327 — Scamander summons Simoïs — "dear brother" — for the war of the waters: springs opened, gullies roused, "a huge clamor of timbers and stones." The threat-speech is the book's dark masterpiece: armor "deep beneath the mere... wrapped in slime," the man rolled in sand under "shingle past counting," and the perfect inversion of epic burial: "the Achaeans will not know where to gather his bones... There his burial-mound will stand ready-made: he will need no heaping of a tomb." Book 23 will build Patroclus (and eventually Achilles) the greatest funeral in poetry; the river offers its exact negation — burial as disappearance, the tomb no one can find. For a hero, that is not death but erasure. ↩

17 lines 328–341 — Hera's counter-stroke calls the match-card of 20.73-74 by name: "it was against you we always reckoned eddying Xanthus matched in battle." Her plan is a coordinated burn: Hephaestus on the trees and the river, herself rousing Zephyrus and the white South Wind from the sea to drive the flame onto the Trojans. Her warning — "do not let him turn you back at all with soft words or with threats" — repeats Apollo's coaching of Aeneas (20.108-109): even gods need to be told not to listen. ↩

18 lines 342–355 — Fire eats the book's own scenery. First the corpses — the dead of Achilles' killing get from Hephaestus the cremation the river denied them: the aristeia's litter burned off the plain. The drying simile answers the irrigation simile: there, water outran its gardener; here, the North Wind dries the new-watered orchard "and the man who tends it is glad." Then the riverside flora burns by name — elms, willows, tamarisks (where the spear leaned at line 18), lotus, rushes, galingale — and the eels and fish that ate Asteropaeus tumble in the boil. The book's justice is elemental and complete. ↩

19 lines 356–382 — The surrender: "no one of the gods can stand against you... What are strife and rescue to me?" — the god of the landscape resigning the war effort mid-sentence. The cauldron simile is the poem at its most audaciously domestic: a god's agony rendered as kitchen-work, "melting down the lard of a fatted hog... with dry split wood beneath." And the oath he offers Hera is her own: 374-376 repeat, word for word, the Troy-burning clause she recited at 20.315-317 (renderings kept identical) — the river buys his life by swearing the destruction of the city he rose to save. Hera's stand-down order states the Theomachy's official rule — "not seemly to batter an immortal god for the sake of mortals" — which every god then proceeds to break. ↩

20 lines 383–390 — The gods fall on each other, "the wide earth rang, and the great heaven trumpeted" — and the audience is named: "Zeus heard, sitting on Olympus; and his own heart laughed for joy, when he saw the gods coming together in strife." This is the show he commissioned at 20.23 ("where I can watch and delight my mind"), now delivered. The gods cannot die; therefore their war is comedy, and the poem plays it as such — the laughter of Zeus is the genre-marker for the next hundred lines, while beneath it the mortal war goes on being fatal. ↩

21 lines 391–415 — Ares vs Athena, the grudge-match of Book 5: his "dog-fly" and the memory of Diomedes' guided spear; her weapon a boundary-stone "which men of former times had set to be a field's boundary-marker" — the goddess of civic order felling the war-god with the marker of agreed limits (what Ares tramples, in every sense). Seven acres of fallen god, dusty hair, a laugh, and the taunt: pay "your mother's curses — the Erinyes she wishes on you" for changing sides. The register's formulas — "blood-stained Ares," "unstrung his limbs" — do their fixed work. ↩

22 lines 416–434 — Aphrodite leading Ares off by the hand is Book 5 again (she led him wounded then too), and Hera's "there goes the dog-fly again" hands Athena her second knockdown: one blow to the breast, and the pair lie together "on the earth that feeds many." Athena's boast — had all Troy's helpers been so brave, "long ago we should have rested from the war, with the well-built citadel of Ilion sacked" — is the counterfactual that exposes the whole Theomachy: divine partisanship is what keeps the war long. Hera smiles; the smile is the scene's verdict. ↩

23 lines 435–460 — The one serious challenge: Poseidon to Apollo, elder to younger ("Begin: you are the younger born" — dueling etiquette among immortals), grounded in the poem's deepest Trojan backstory: the year of bonded labor under Laomedon, Poseidon building the wall "wide, and very beautiful, so the city might be unbreakable" (the very fortification this war beats against), Apollo herding cattle on Ida; the wage refused, the threats — binding, sale to far islands, ears lopped with bronze. Troy's royal house cheated two gods and threatened them with mutilation and slavery: the city's doom has a contract-law history, and Poseidon's indignation — "it is his people you now favor!" — is the poem's last rehearsal of it. ↩

24 lines 461–469 — Apollo's refusal is the great verdict on mankind from above: fighting a fellow-god "for the sake of mortals — pitiful things, who like the leaves at one time flourish in their blaze, eating the fruit of the plowland, and at another wither heartless away." This is Glaucus's leaf-simile (6.146-149) — there, a man's hard-won consolation ("as the generation of leaves, so the generations of men"); here, a god's reason for indifference. The same image carries humility from below and contempt from above: no two lines in the poem measure the distance between gods and men more exactly. He turns away out of respect — for his uncle, not for us. (471 and 475-477 were athetized by Aristarchus.) ↩

25 lines 470–496 — Artemis pays for her brother's prudence: her taunt ("why do you carry that bow, useless as wind?") draws Hera — and the queen of heaven disciplines the huntress like an unruly girl: wrists caught in one hand, the bow stripped and used to box her ears, "smiling" as she does it, the arrows spilling. Hera's speech first defines her — "Zeus made you a lion to women, and gave you leave to kill whichever you choose" (Artemis as the sender of women's sudden deaths) — then demotes her: "better to slaughter beasts on the mountains than to fight by force with your betters." The dove-into-the-rock-cleft simile turns the archeress into her own quarry; the bow lies where it fell. ↩

26 lines 497–504 — Hermes to Leto — the Theomachy's shortest match and its wittiest: an immediate, courteous forfeit ("it is a hard thing to trade blows with the wives of cloud-gatherer Zeus") with the winnings handed over in advance: "boast among the immortal gods that you overcame me with your strong force." Leto, unbloodied, gathers her daughter's scattered arrows — the one maternal gesture in a battle of gods. ↩

27 lines 505–513 — The end of the divine war: Artemis in Zeus's lap, the ambrosial robe trembling, and the father "laughing sweetly" as he asks who hurt her "as if you had been caught doing wrong in the open." Her answer indicts the household: "Your wife battered me... from whom strife and quarrel cling to the immortals." The Theomachy that began with a cosmic quake ends as a family scene in the living room — which is the poem's point: for the deathless, war can only ever be domestic comedy. Below, meanwhile, it is Books 22-24. ↩

28 lines 514–543 — Apollo alone stays at his post, entering Troy "lest the Danaans sack it that day, beyond its fate" — the god now guarding the same limit Zeus feared for at 20.30. The burning-city simile makes Achilles into the thing he is about to cause ("the wrath of the gods has sent it up" — he is that wrath); and Priam appears in his end-game role for the first time: the old man on the tower, ordering the gates held open in men's hands until the rout is in, then barred — "I dread that ruinous man — that he may leap inside the wall." The gates "spread wide, made a light of safety" (φάος — the register's word for rescue): the same doors that will stand between Hector and his life in Book 22. ↩

29 lines 544–570 — Agenor — one man, stiffened by Apollo, between Achilles and the open gates. His soliloquy in the registered frame ("troubled, he spoke to his own great-hearted spirit") is the infantryman's complete decision-tree: flight with the crowd (caught and butchered "for the coward I am"); solo flight to Ida's brush — with the poem's most humane detail, the fugitive's daydream of an evening bath in the river, "cooled the sweat from me" — rejected on pure footspeed-arithmetic; then the discovery on which the rest of the poem stands: "His flesh too, surely, can be cut by the sharp bronze; in him is one life, no more; and mortal, men say he is." Every man who chooses to stand against Achilles must first say this catechism; Hector will say it, and its refutations, at 22.99-130. ↩

30 lines 571–598 — The leopard simile — she comes out of deep brush at the huntsman and "run through on the very spear, she does not leave off her valor, until she closes with him or goes down": doomed courage as the poem's highest animal image, spent here on a secondary hero to set the standard Hector will be measured against. Agenor's cast hits the shin — "the greave of new-forged tin screamed terribly" — and Hephaestus's armor turns its first blow in combat exactly where Hephaestus promised marvel rather than protection (18.466-467): it gives both. Apollo snatches Agenor into mist before the counterstroke — the third man so saved from Achilles in two books. ↩

31 lines 599–611 — The decoy: Apollo "likened in every point to Agenor" runs, and the fastest man alive chases a god across the wheat-bearing plain, "always hoping to catch him on his quick feet" — Achilles' one weapon against Hector, his speed, played against him to bleed the pursuit of its object. The trade is a city's remnant for one man's glory: while he chases nothing, Troy pours inside, "glad" — and the book's last lines are the rout's arithmetic, without a single name: no one dared wait "to learn who had escaped and who had died in the fighting: in they poured, headlong, every man whose feet and knees could save him." One man is not inside. Book 22 opens with Hector standing in front of the gates. ↩