The Iliad · wrath, sing, goddess
One man is left outside the wall. His father begs from the tower, his mother bares her breast; he debates, runs, is run down past the washing-places of the old peace; the scales dip, Athena lies, the ash spear finds the throat above the stolen armor's collar — and a woman heating bath-water learns why the tower is wailing.
Everything in the poem has narrowed to this: one man outside the wall, "penned by deadly fate" at the Scaean Gates, and the whole apparatus of the epic — parents, gods, landscape, army, similes — arranged around the last hour of Hector. The book is built as three concentric scenes: the pleading (Priam and Hecuba from the tower); the running (three circuits of Troy); the killing and its consequences — and at each stage the poem does the thing only it would dare: it makes the terror specific. Priam does not simply fear death; he sees his own house-dogs — "the dogs I fed at my table, to keep my doors" — drinking his blood in the doorway, and states the poem's cruelest law of decorum: a young man dead in battle is seemly, "all things are beautiful on a dead young man"; it is the mauled grey head of an old one that is "the most pitiful thing there is for wretched mortals" (note 3). Hecuba answers with the bared breast that once quieted him — the body's own argument (note 4). Neither works, because Hector's real audience is neither parent: it is Polydamas ("who will be the first to lay reproach on me"), and behind him the nameless "worse man" of the streets. Shame, not courage, holds him at the gate — his soliloquy admits it in so many words — until Achilles is close, and then shame does what shame does under enough pressure: it collapses, and the best man of Troy runs (notes [6], [8]).
The chase (136-213) is the greatest sustained passage of the poem, and its power is in what the runners pass: the lookout, the wind- blown fig, and the two springs of Scamander — one steaming, one ice-cold — "and there beside them are the wide washing-troughs, beautiful, of stone, where the Trojans' wives and their beautiful daughters used to wash their glistening clothes — in the old days, in peace, before the sons of the Achaeans came." Domestic memory set flush against the fact: "they ran for the life of Hector the horse-tamer" (note 9). Zeus proposes rescue; Athena answers him with the same rebuke Hera used over Sarpedon (179-181 = 16.441-443, kept verbatim): the gods themselves have a form-line for this argument, and it always ends the same way. The dream-simile — pursuer who cannot catch, quarry who cannot pull away — was athetized by Aristarchus and kept here (note 11); the golden scales dip; Apollo leaves; and Athena, wearing the face and "unwearying voice" of the brother Hector loves, commits the coldest act any god performs in the poem (note 13).
The duel is short because it was never a duel: it is the supplication theme played to its end. Hector offers a compact about corpses; Achilles answers with wolves and lambs — "there are no faithful oaths between lions and men" — and, when the throat is pierced and the dying man begs again, with the wish he could "hack your flesh away and eat it raw" (notes [15], [20]). Hector dies prophesying — Paris and Phoebus Apollo at the Scaean Gates — exactly as Patroclus died prophesying Hector's own death, and the soul-flight couplet repeats 16.856-857 verbatim, as the Greek does: the poem's two great deaths are one death, twice (note 21). What follows — the ankle-thongs, the dragging, the head "that was once so beautiful" in its own country's dust — the narrator marks with the plainest sentence available: "Zeus gave him to his enemies to defile in his own fatherland."
And then the poem does what only the Iliad does: it leaves the victor, and goes inside. Priam rolling in dung, already planning the journey of Book 24 ("He too has a father like me — Peleus"); Hecuba's lament; and Andromache — who has heard nothing — at the loom, weaving flowers into a purple cloak, ordering the cauldron heated "for Hector, for his return out of the fighting. Poor innocent." She reaches the wall in time to see the dragging, and her fainting fling scatters the headdress Aphrodite gave her on her wedding day — the marriage undone garment by garment — before the great widow's lament, with the athetized orphan-passage (the child at the feast, lips wetted, palate dry) defended in note 31, and the last quiet horror: the fire she will feed with his unused clothes, "no use to you: you will not lie in them." The book ends on the women's answering wail — the sound Book 24 will finally be allowed to finish.
Register notes: 22.179-181 = 16.441-443; 22.361-363 = 16.855-857 (the soul-flight couplet, both kept verbatim); 22.365-366 reuse 18.115-116; "But why does my own heart argue these things with me?" (122, 385) = 21.562; "gluts with his blood Ares, the fighter under the ox-hide shield" (267) keeps 5.289 = 20.78; "portion of fire" (343) keeps 15.350's wording; Hector's Polydamas-shame (99-107) answers 18.249-313 as registered; the fixed formulas (glaring darkly, flashing helmet, swift-footed, the scales) hold.
1So, driven like fawns into the city, the Trojans1
dried their sweat, and drank, and slaked their thirst,
leaning on the beautiful battlements; and the Achaeans
came up close under the wall, shields tilted on shoulders.
5But Hector — deadly fate shackled him where he stood,
in front of Ilion and the Scaean Gates.
And Phoebus Apollo called to the son of Peleus:
"Why, son of Peleus, do you chase me on your quick feet —
you a mortal, and I a deathless god? Not even yet
10have you known me for a god: how unrelenting your fury is!
And the Trojans you routed — no thought for that labor now?
They are penned in the town, while you swerve away out here.
You cannot kill me: I am not a man marked out for death."
Then, deeply troubled, swift-footed Achilles answered him:
15"You have robbed me, worker-from-afar — deadliest of all gods —
turning me away from the wall. Many more of them
would have bitten the earth before they got to Ilion!
Now you have stolen great glory from me, and saved them
cheaply: you had no vengeance to fear afterward.
20I would pay you back — I! — if only I had the power."
So speaking, he set off for the city, high-hearted,2
stretched out like a prize-winning horse with his chariot,
one that runs at full reach, easily, over the plain:
so Achilles worked his feet and knees, and they were quick.
25And it was old Priam whose eyes first made him out,
streaking across the plain, blazing like the star
that rises at harvest-time, and its rays shine clear
among many stars in the milking-dark of night —
the star men call by name the Dog of Orion.
30Brightest of all it is; and it is made an evil sign,
and brings great fever down on wretched mortals:
so shone the bronze on his chest as he ran.
And the old man cried out, and beat his head with his hands,
raising them high, and shouted down, crying aloud,
35begging his dear son. But he, before the gates,
stood fast, hot beyond turning to fight Achilles;
and the old man called to him piteously, hands outstretched:
"Hector — do not wait for that man, dear child!3
Not alone, with no one by you — or you will meet your doom quickly,
40broken by the son of Peleus: for he is far the stronger.
Merciless! I wish the gods loved him just as much
as I do: quickly enough the dogs and vultures would eat him
where he lay — and this terrible grief would leave my heart.
He has emptied me of many sons, and good ones,
45killing them, or selling them off to far-lying islands.
Even now there are two — Lycaon and Polydorus —
whom I cannot see among the Trojans penned in the town,
the sons Laothoe bore me, a queen among women.
If they are alive somewhere in the camp, then we will
50ransom them with bronze and gold: it is there, inside —
old Altes, the famous name, gave plenty with his daughter.
But if they are dead already, and in the house of Hades,
that is grief to my heart and their mother's — we who bore them.
To the rest of the people the grief will be briefer —
55so long as you do not die too, broken by Achilles.
Come inside the wall, my child — so you may save
the men and women of Troy; do not hand the great glory
to the son of Peleus, and be stripped of your own dear life.
And pity me — the wretch, the ill-fated, who can still feel —
60whom the father, Cronos's son, on the threshold of old age
will wither out in hard fate, with my eyes full of evils:
sons destroyed, daughters dragged away captive,
store-chambers ransacked, and little children
dashed against the ground in the terrible slaughter,
65and my sons' wives dragged off under the deadly hands of Achaeans.
And me last of all — at my own front door the dogs
will tear me raw, when someone with the sharp bronze
has stabbed or speared the life out of my limbs —
the dogs I fed at my table, to keep my doors,
70who will drink my blood, and sprawl, their hearts run mad,
in my own doorway. For a young man it is all seemly:
killed in war, torn by the sharp bronze,
to lie there — everything is beautiful on him, dead, whatever shows.
But when the dogs defile the grey head and the grey beard
75and the naked shame of an old man slain,
that is the most pitiful thing there is for wretched mortals."
So the old man spoke, and pulled at his grey hair with his hands,
tearing it from his head; but he could not move the heart of Hector.
And his mother in her turn wailed, letting her tears fall,4
80loosening the fold of her gown; with the other hand she held out her breast,
and letting her tears fall she spoke winged words:
"Hector, my child — respect this. And pity me —
me — if ever I gave you this breast, and it stilled your crying.
Remember that, dear child. Fight that man of death
85from inside the wall — do not stand out there to meet him,
merciless one! For if he kills you, I shall never
mourn you laid on a bed, dear green shoot I bore —
nor will your wife of the rich dowry — but far away from us both,
by the ships of the Argives, the quick dogs will eat you."
90So the two of them, weeping, called to their dear son,
begging over and over; but they could not move the heart of Hector.
He stood fast, as gigantic Achilles came on nearer.
And as a mountain snake at his hole waits for a man,5
fed full of evil poisons, and the terrible anger has entered him,
95and he glares dreadfully, coiling around his hole:
so Hector, holding his fury unquenchable, would not give way,
his shining shield propped on the jut of the tower;
and troubled, he spoke to his own great-hearted spirit:
"Ah me! If I go inside the gates and the wall,6
100Polydamas will be the first to lay reproach on me —
he who commanded me to lead the Trojans back to the city
on that ruinous night, when brilliant Achilles rose.
I would not listen. It would have been far better if I had.
Now — since I have destroyed the army by my own recklessness —
105I am ashamed before the Trojan men and the trailing-robed
Trojan women: that some worse man than I may say:
'Hector trusted his own strength, and destroyed the army.'
So they will talk. And then it would be far better for me
to meet Achilles man to man, and kill him, and come home —
110or die at his hands myself, with honor, in front of the city.
Or what if — if I set down the bossed shield
and the heavy helmet, and lean the spear on the wall,
and go out, just myself, to meet blameless Achilles,
and promise him Helen, and all her treasure with her —
115everything, all that Alexandros in his hollow ships
brought home to Troy, the beginning of the quarrel —
to give to the sons of Atreus to lead away; and for the Achaeans,
to divide with them everything else this city holds;
and after, I would take the elders' oath for the Trojans
120to hide nothing, but to split it all in two —
all the wealth the lovely town keeps locked within it —
but why does my own heart argue these things with me?
I might come to him, suppliant — and he would show no pity,
no respect at all: he would kill me naked as I stood,
125just like a woman, once I had put off my armor.
There is no way now, from an oak or from a rock,
to murmur with him softly — the way a girl and a young man,
a girl and a young man, murmur softly with each other.
Better to drive together in strife — and quickly.
130Let us see to which of us the Olympian hands the triumph."
So he weighed it, waiting. And Achilles came near him,7
the equal of Enyalius, the war-god of the flashing helm,
shaking the Pelian ash over his right shoulder,
terrible; and the bronze around him flashed with a light
135like blazing fire, or the sun as it rises.
And trembling took Hector when he saw him. He could bear it8
no longer there: he left the gates behind, and ran in terror;
and the son of Peleus sprang after, trusting his quick feet.
As a falcon in the mountains, lightest of winged things,
140swoops easily after a trembling dove:
she flees away under him, and he close upon her, shrieking
sharp, lunges again and again, and his heart drives him to take her:
so Achilles flew straight for him, hot; and Hector fled
under the wall of the Trojans, working his knees fast.
145Past the lookout-place, past the wind-blown wild fig,9
always out from under the wall, along the wagon-road
they sped; and they came to the two fair-flowing springs,
where the twin sources of eddying Scamander leap up.
One flows with warm water, and steam all around it
150rises off it, as if from a burning fire;
the other runs out even in summer as cold as hail
or freezing snow, or ice that forms from water.
And there beside them are the wide washing-troughs,
beautiful, of stone, where their glistening clothes
155were washed by the Trojans' wives and their beautiful daughters —
in the old days, in peace: before the sons of the Achaeans came.
There the two of them ran past, one fleeing, one behind pursuing:
a brave man fled in front — but a far better one pursued him —
fast: since it was no beast of sacrifice, no ox-hide,
160they strove for — the prizes given for men's running:
they ran for the life of Hector, the tamer of horses.
As when prize-winning single-hoofed horses wheel round the turn-posts
at full gallop, and a great prize is set out —
a tripod, or a woman — in the games for a man who has died:
165so the two of them whirled three times around Priam's city
on their quick feet. And all the gods looked on.
And the father of men and gods began speaking among them:10
"Shame — a man that I love, chased around the wall
before my own eyes! My heart is grieving for Hector,
170who has burned the thigh-cuts of many oxen for me
on the peaks of folded Ida, and other times again
on the city's height; and now brilliant Achilles
hunts him on quick feet around the city of Priam.
Come, gods — consider it, take counsel:
175shall we save him from death? Or now, at last,
break him — brave though he is — under Achilles, Peleus's son?"
Then answered him the goddess grey-eyed Athena:
"Father of the bright bolt, of the black cloud — what a word!
A man — a mortal, long since doomed to his fate —
180and you mean to release him back out of harsh-sounding death?
Do it. But we other gods will not all approve you."
Then in answer spoke to her cloud-gatherer Zeus:
"Take heart, Tritogeneia, dear child. I do not speak
in full earnest, and to you I mean to be kind.
185Do as your purpose is. Hold back no longer."
So speaking, he urged on Athena, eager already,
and she went darting down from the peaks of Olympus.
And swift Achilles pressed Hector without pause, driving him.11
As when a hound in the mountains starts the fawn of a deer
190out of its bed, and courses it through glens and gorges;
and even if it goes to ground, cowering under a thicket,
the hound tracks it out, running steadily, till he finds it:
so Hector could not shake the swift-footed son of Peleus.
As often as he set himself to dash for the Dardanian gates,
195to get in under the strong-built towers,
hoping the men above might defend him with their missiles,
so often Achilles headed him off and turned him back
toward the plain, keeping himself always on the city side.
And as in a dream a man cannot catch one who runs —
200the one cannot escape him, nor the other catch —
so he could not run him down, nor the other get away.
And how could Hector have slipped the death-spirits of death,
had not Apollo — for the last and latest time — come near him,
to rouse his strength in him, and his quick knees?
205And brilliant Achilles shook his head to the army: no —
he would not let them throw their bitter missiles at Hector,
lest some thrower win the glory, and he come second.
But when they came the fourth time round to the springs,12
then it was that the father stretched out his golden scales,
210and set in them two death-spirits of death that lays men low —
one for Achilles, one for Hector, tamer of horses —
and grasping the middle he raised it. And Hector's day of doom
sank down, and went to Hades; and Phoebus Apollo left him.
And the goddess grey-eyed Athena came to the son of Peleus,13
215and standing close she spoke winged words:
"Now at last, shining Achilles, dear to Zeus, I hope
the two of us bring the Achaeans great glory at the ships,
breaking Hector, however insatiable for battle.
Now there is no escaping us any longer — not for him,
220not though Apollo the worker-from-afar should suffer agonies for it,
rolling and rolling at the feet of father Zeus of the aegis.
Now stop, and catch your breath. I will go
and win this man over to fight you face to face."
So spoke Athena; and he obeyed, and rejoiced at heart,
225and stood there, leaning on his bronze-bladed ash.
And she left him, and came up with brilliant Hector,
likened to Deiphobus in body and unwearying voice;
and standing close she spoke winged words:
"Old friend — how hard swift Achilles is pressing you,
230hunting you on quick feet around the city of Priam!
Come — let us make our stand, and hold him off together."
Then answered her great Hector of the flashing helmet:
"Deiphobus — you were always dearest to me before this
of all the brothers Hecuba and Priam bore;
235and now I mean to honor you in my heart still more,
who dared for my sake, when your eyes saw me,
to come outside the wall — while the others stay within."
Then answered him the goddess grey-eyed Athena:
"Old friend — yes: father and lady mother begged me hard,
240each in turn, clasping my knees, and my companions around them,
to stay inside — so hard they are all trembling.
But the heart in me was worn away with grieving.
Now — straight at him, and let us two fight; and no
sparing of spears: so we may learn whether Achilles
245kills us both and carries our bloody armor
to the hollow ships — or is broken by your spear."
So spoke Athena, and led him on by her cunning.
And when they had come close, advancing on each other,14
the first to speak was great Hector of the flashing helmet:
250"No more running from you, son of Peleus — not now, as before,
when I fled three times round the great city of Priam, and dared not
stand to your coming. Now my heart has risen and set me
to stand against you face to face. I will kill, or be killed.
But come — let us swear here by the gods: for they
255will be the best witnesses, and the guardians of covenants.
I will not defile you — not monstrously — if Zeus grants me
the endurance, and I take your life:
no, when I have stripped your famed armor, Achilles,
I will give your body back to the Achaeans. And you do the same."
260Then, glaring darkly, swift-footed Achilles answered him:15
"Hector — you past forgiving — talk to me of no covenants.
As between lions and men there are no faithful oaths,
and wolves and lambs do not carry hearts in concord,
but think evil against each other all the way through:
265so there is no way for me and you to be friends, and between us
there will be no oaths — not before one or the other falls
and gluts with his blood Ares, the fighter under the ox-hide shield.
Remember every kind of valor you own: now above all hours
you must be a spearman, and a daring fighter.
270There is no way out for you any longer: this instant Pallas Athena
breaks you under my spear. Now, in one payment, you settle
all my grief for my companions — the men you killed, raging with your spear."
He spoke, and poised and hurled his long-shadowed spear.16
But shining Hector was watching it, and dodged:
275he saw it coming and crouched, and the bronze spear flew over
and stuck in the earth. And Pallas Athena snatched it up
and gave it back to Achilles — hidden from Hector, shepherd of the people.
And Hector called across to the blameless son of Peleus:
"You missed! So after all, godlike Achilles, you never
280learned my doom from Zeus — though you claimed to know it.
You are a glib one, a very thief with your words —
hoping I would forget my fury and valor for fear of you.
You will plant no spear in my back as I run:
as I charge you straight on, drive it through my chest —
285if the god has given you that. Now dodge my bronze
in your turn — and may you carry all of it away in your flesh!
The war would be lighter for the Trojans
with you destroyed. You are their greatest bane."
He spoke, and poised and hurled his long-shadowed spear,
290and hit the shield of the son of Peleus, mid-center — no miss —
but the spear glanced far off the shield. And Hector was angry
that the swift cast had left his hand for nothing,
and stood there hanging his head: he had no second ash spear.
He shouted then, calling to white-shielded Deiphobus —
295a long spear was what he asked — but Deiphobus was nowhere near him.
And Hector understood inside himself, and said:17
"So. The gods have called me deathward after all.
I thought the hero Deiphobus stood beside me;
but he is inside the wall, and Athena has tricked me.
300Now evil death is close to me — not far off now,
and no way out. So this, long since, was the true pleasure
of Zeus, and of Zeus's son who strikes from afar, who before
defended me gladly. And now fate overtakes me.
Then let me not die without a fight, without glory —
305no: having done some great thing first, for men to come to hear of."
So speaking, he drew the sharp sword18
that hung along his flank, heavy and huge,
gathered himself, and swooped — like the high-flying eagle
that drops to the plain through the lowering clouds
310to snatch a soft lamb or a cowering hare:
so Hector swooped, shaking his sharp sword.
And Achilles charged to meet him, his heart crammed full
of savage fury; over his chest he held the cover of his shield,
beautiful, intricate; and he nodded with the shining helmet,
315four-horned; and around it tossed the beautiful plumes
of gold that Hephaestus had set thick along the crest.
And as a star moves among stars in the milking-dark of night —
Hesperus, the most beautiful star that stands in heaven —
so the light went from the keen point that Achilles
320balanced in his right hand, purposing evil for brilliant Hector,
searching the beautiful flesh for where it would yield the most.
Now all the rest of his flesh the bronze armor held —19
the beautiful armor he stripped from the might of Patroclus, killed —
but there showed, where the collarbones part neck from shoulders,
325the gullet — where the destruction of a life is quickest.
There, as he charged, brilliant Achilles drove with the spear,
and the point went through and out the soft neck —
yet the ash, heavy with bronze, did not sever the windpipe,
so that he could still speak, and trade words with him.
330He crashed down in the dust; and brilliant Achilles cried in triumph:
"Hector — no doubt you thought, while you stripped Patroclus,
that you were safe; and I, far off — you gave me no thought.
Fool: far from him, a helper — and a far greater one —
was left behind at the hollow ships: I,
335who have unstrung your knees. You the dogs and the birds
will drag and defile. Him the Achaeans will bury."
Then, his strength nearly gone, Hector of the flashing helmet:20
"I beg you — by your life, by your knees, by your parents:
do not let the dogs devour me by the ships of the Achaeans.
340Take the bronze — take gold in plenty —
the gifts my father and my lady mother will give you;
and give my body back to go home, so that the Trojans
and the Trojans' wives may grant me, dead, my portion of fire."
Then, glaring darkly, swift-footed Achilles answered him:
345"Dog. Do not beg me by knees, or by parents.
I only wish the fury and the heart in me would drive me
to hack away your flesh and eat it raw myself — for what you have done —
as surely as there is no man alive who will keep the dogs
from your head: not if they bring here and weigh out
350ransom ten times over — twenty times — and promise more;
not if Priam, Dardanus's descendant, bids them buy you
for your own weight in gold — not even so shall your lady mother
lay on a bed and mourn the son she bore.
No: the dogs and the birds will share you out — all of you."
355Then, dying, Hector of the flashing helmet said to him:21
"I know you now — looking at you. There was never a chance
I would persuade you: the heart in your chest is iron.
Only take care, now, that I not become the gods' curse
upon you — on that day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo
360destroy you, brave as you are, at the Scaean Gates."
Even as he spoke, the end that is death covered him;
and his soul, flying from his limbs, went down to the house of Hades,
wailing its fate, leaving its manhood and its youth.
And brilliant Achilles spoke to him — dead already:
365"Die. My own death-spirit I will accept whenever
Zeus wills to accomplish it, and the other immortal gods."
He spoke, and pulled the bronze spear out of the corpse22
and set it aside, and stripped the bloody armor
from the shoulders. And the other sons of the Achaeans ran up around him,
370and gazed at the stature and the marvelous beauty
of Hector; and not one man stood by him without a stab.
And thus would one of them say, with a glance at his neighbor:
"Well now — softer to the touch, this Hector, easier handling
than when he burned the ships with blazing fire!"
375So a man would say — and step in close, and wound him.
Now when swift-footed brilliant Achilles had stripped him,23
he stood among the Achaeans and spoke winged words:
"Friends — leaders and counselors of the Argives —
since the gods have granted us the breaking of this man,
380who did more harm than all the rest together,
come: let us circle the city under arms and probe it,
and learn what mind the Trojans have in them now —
whether they will abandon the high town, with this man fallen,
or are set on holding it, though Hector is no more.
385But why does my own heart argue these things with me?
By the ships lies a dead man — unwept, unburied —
Patroclus. I will not forget him, not while I
am among the living, and my own knees have their spring.
And if in the house of Hades men forget their dead,
390even there I will remember my dear companion.
Now, singing the paean, young men of the Achaeans,
let us go back to the hollow ships, and take this man.
We have won great glory: we have killed brilliant Hector —
the man the Trojans prayed to through their city, as to a god."
395He spoke; and he devised foul work against brilliant Hector.24
Behind both feet he pierced the tendons through,
from heel to ankle, and threaded straps of oxhide,
and bound them to his chariot, and left the head to drag;
and lifting the famed armor into the car, he mounted
400and lashed the horses on; and they flew, nothing loath.
And the dust rose off the dragged man; and his dark hair
spread wide around him; and in the dust lay all that head
that was so beautiful before; but now Zeus gave him
to his enemies, to be defiled in his own fatherland.
405So all his head was fouled with dust. And now his mother25
tore her hair, and flung the shining veil
far from her, and screamed aloud at the sight of her child;
and his dear father groaned piteously, and around them the people
were seized with screaming and with wailing through the city.
410It was most like this — as if the whole of
beetling Ilion, top to bottom, were smouldering in fire.
The people could barely hold the old man, frantic
in his grief to go out by the Dardanian gates.
He begged them all, groveling in the dung,
415calling on each man by his name:
"Let be, friends — for all your care of me, let me alone
go out of the city and come to the ships of the Achaeans.
I will beg this man — this reckless doer of violence —
if somehow he may respect my years, and pity
420old age. For he too has a father — such a one as I am:
Peleus, who begot him and reared him to be a bane
for the Trojans — and beyond all men he has laid grief on me:
so many of my sons he has killed in their green prime.
Yet for all of them I do not mourn so much — grieved as I am —
425as for one, whose sharp loss will carry me down into Hades:
Hector. I wish he had died in my arms!
Then the two of us could have glutted ourselves with weeping and wailing —
the mother who bore him — born to sorrow — and I myself."
So he spoke, weeping; and the citizens groaned in answer.
430And among the women of Troy, Hecuba led the thick lament:26
"My child — I am destroyed. Why should I live now, in this horror,
with you dead? — you who were, night and day,
my boast through the city, and a blessing to all,
to the men and women of Troy through the town, who greeted you
435like a god: for you were their great glory too,
while you lived. Now death and fate have overtaken you."
So she spoke, weeping. But the wife of Hector had not yet27
heard anything: no true messenger had come to her
to tell her that her husband stood alone outside the gates.
440She was weaving at her loom, deep in the high house,
a double cloak, purple, sprinkling in flowers of many colors;
and she had called through the house to her lovely-braided handmaids
to set a great tripod over the fire, so there would be
a warm bath for Hector, for his return out of the fighting.
445Poor innocent: she did not know that far from all baths
grey-eyed Athena had broken him under the hands of Achilles.
Then she heard the shrieking and the wailing from the tower;
and her limbs whirled where she stood, and the shuttle fell out of her hand,
and she called again to her lovely-braided slave-women:
450"Here — two of you, come with me. I must see what has happened.
I heard the voice of my honored mother-in-law, and in me
my own heart leaps to my mouth, and beneath me my knees
are frozen: something evil is close to the children of Priam.
May the word stay far from my ear! — but I am terribly
455afraid that brilliant Achilles has cut off my bold Hector,
alone, from the city, and driven him toward the plain,
and has ended it — that grievous pride of his
that always held him: he would never stay back in the crowd of men,
but ran far out in front, yielding first place to no one."
460So speaking she rushed through the hall like a madwoman,28
her heart slamming; and her maids went with her.
But when she reached the tower and the crowd of men,
she stopped on the wall, staring — and saw him:
dragged in front of the city, and the quick horses
465dragging him, uncaring, toward the hollow ships of the Achaeans.
Then black night came down and covered her eyes,
and she toppled backward, and gasped her spirit out.
And off her head she flung the shining head-dress —
the frontlet, and the cap, and the woven band,
470and the veil that golden Aphrodite gave her
on the day Hector of the flashing helmet led her
out of Eëtion's house, when he had brought bride-gifts past counting.
Around her, thick, stood her husband's sisters and his brothers' wives,
and held her up among them, dazed to the point of death.
475But when she caught her breath, and the spirit gathered again in her chest,29
with bursting sobs she spoke among the women of Troy:
"Hector — I am wretched. To one fate, then, we were born,
the two of us: you in Troy, in the house of Priam,
and I in Thebe, under wooded Placus,
480in the house of Eëtion — who reared me when I was little,
the doomed man, the ill-doomed girl. I wish he had never begotten me.
Now you go down to the house of Hades under the hidden places
of the earth, and you leave me in hateful mourning,
a widow in your halls. And the boy is just a baby still,
485whom we bore, you and I — the two ill-fated. No help
will you be to him, Hector — you are dead — nor he to you.
For even if he escapes the Achaeans' war of many tears,30
still there will be nothing for him ever after but labor
and sorrows: other men will strip away his fields.
490The day of orphaning makes a child companionless:
his head is bowed to everyone; his cheeks are wet with tears;
and in his need the boy goes up to his father's friends,
tugging at one man's cloak, another's tunic;
and of those who pity him, one holds out his cup — a moment:
495he wets his lips; his palate he does not wet.
And a boy with both parents living beats him from the feast,
striking him with his fists, jeering at him with insults:
'Get out — just as you are! No father of yours dines with us.'
And in tears the boy goes up to his widowed mother —
500Astyanax: who before, on his own father's knees,
would eat only marrow and the rich fat of sheep;
and when sleep came over him, and he left off his child's play,
he would slumber in a bed, in the arms of his nurse,
in soft bedding, his heart brimful of good things.
505But now he will suffer and suffer, missing his dear father —
Astyanax, 'the lord of the city,' as the Trojans call him
by name: for you alone guarded their gates and their long walls.
Now, by the beaked ships, far away from your parents,31
the writhing worms will eat you, when the dogs have had
510their fill of you — naked: though here in your halls lies clothing,
fine-woven and lovely, made by the hands of women.
All of it — all — I will burn now in blazing fire:
no use to you: you will not lie in it.
Let it be your glory in the eyes of the men and women of Troy."
515So she spoke, weeping; and the women wailed in answer.
1 lines 1–20 — The frame: Troy drinking and drying its sweat on the battlements — safety made physical — while one man stands outside, "shackled" by fate (πέδησεν: the poem's verb for the trap already sprung). Apollo's revelation ends the decoy-chase of 21.599-611, and his taunt — "you cannot kill me: I am not a man marked out for death" — states the book's whole geometry: gods are unkillable, so all the afternoon's fury must land on the one man who is not. Achilles' reply — "I would pay you back, if only I had the power" — is the closest any mortal in the poem comes to declaring war on heaven. ↩
2 lines 21–32 — The Dog Star simile. Priam sees Achilles as Sirius — "brightest of all... and it is made an evil sign, and brings great fever down on wretched mortals": the most beautiful light in the sky, read as pestilence. It is the book's signature: brilliance and disaster in a single body, seen by an old man from a wall. (Achilles' own armor makes the same double sign at 134-135 — fire, or sunrise.) ↩
3 lines 38–76 — Priam's plea moves from policy to the body. The center is Lycaon and Polydorus — "whom I cannot see among the Trojans penned in the town" — the audience knowing what the father does not: Book 20 and 21 have already answered him. The close is the most terrible passage spoken by any parent in the poem: the vision of his own scavenging — the table-dogs, "my door-keepers," drinking his blood at his own threshold — governed by the law he states with dreadful calm: on a young man killed in war "everything is beautiful, dead, whatever shows" (πάντα καλά); but dogs at the grey head and beard and "the naked shame of an old man slain — that is the most pitiful thing there is for wretched mortals." Tyrtaeus rebuilt the lines for Spartan war-song; here they are not exhortation but a father's terror. ↩
4 lines 79–89 — Hecuba's argument is the breast itself — λαθικηδέα μαζόν, "the breast that stills care" — motherhood presented as evidence: "if ever I gave you this breast... remember that." Both parents end at the same image (the dogs, the unmourned bed) because both know what corpse- treatment this war has come to; the poem has spent four books teaching it. ↩
5 lines 93–98 — The snake simile: coiled at his hole, "fed full of evil poisons," glaring — the only simile in the poem that makes a hero venomous. It renders exactly what shame has done to Hector: courage held not as flame (his usual fire-similes) but as toxin — swallowed anger waiting at a threshold it cannot abandon. ↩
6 lines 99–130 — The soliloquy. Its logic deserves tracing: (1) Polydamas was right on the ruinous night (18.249-313 — "whose counsels were ruinous" said the narrator; Hector now says it of himself: "I have destroyed the army by my own recklessness"); (2) therefore the city's eyes — down to "some worse man than I" — are unbearable: shame (αἰδέομαι) holds him outside; (3) the fantasy of total surrender — Helen, her treasure, half the city's wealth under oath — rehearsed in loving legal detail and cut off by the fixed register line ("but why does my own heart argue these things with me?" = 21.562): he would be killed "naked... just like a woman"; (4) the strangest and most human turn in the poem — "There is no way now, from an oak or from a rock, to murmur with him softly — the way a girl and a young man, a girl and a young man, murmur softly with each other." The doubled phrase (the Greek repeats it too) is courtship remembered at the door of death: no more beginning-talk; only the ending. So: "Let us see to which of us the Olympian hands the triumph." ↩
7 lines 131–135 — Achilles arrives as the war-god ("the equal of Enyalius"), the Pelian ash over his shoulder, bronze like "blazing fire, or the sun as it rises" — the Dog Star of 26-31 come to ground-level. The poem has spent two similes making him light; the third thing light does, after shining and warming, is blind. ↩
8 lines 136–144 — "And trembling took Hector... he left the gates behind, and ran." The poem does not soften it: the snake bolts from its hole; the best man of Troy, having chosen to stand through ninety lines of deliberation, is undone in one look. The falcon-and-dove simile gives the chase its physics (the shriek, the repeated lunges) and its verdict: from here to the springs Hector is prey. ↩
9 lines 145–166 — The run past the landmarks — lookout, wild fig, wagon-road — to the double springs of Scamander (one steaming, one ice-cold) and the stone washing-troughs "where the Trojans' wives and their beautiful daughters used to wash their glistening clothes — in the old days, in peace, before the sons of the Achaeans came." No passage in Homer does more with less: the whole lost civilian world folded into laundry, set at the exact spot where its defender is being run down. Then the narrator's cold accounting — "a brave man fled in front, but a far better one pursued" — and the great inversion of the games: they run as at funeral games, "a tripod, or a woman" for prize — "but they ran for the life of Hector, the tamer of horses." (Some ancient copies added a plus- line at 158; the apparatus records it.) Book 23 will run real races, for real tripods, around this dead man's pyre. ↩
10 lines 167–187 — The divine council in miniature: Zeus's grief for a pious man ("who has burned the thigh-cuts of many oxen for me") and the proposal to save him — answered by Athena with the same three lines Hera used over Sarpedon (179-181 = 16.441-443, kept verbatim): a mortal "long since doomed" cannot be un-doomed without cosmic scandal; "Do it. But we other gods will not all approve you." The rescue-debate has become a form-letter, and both times the father yields — adding here, with terrible mildness, that he "does not speak in full earnest." Zeus's love is real; it is simply not the kind that saves. ↩
11 lines 188–207 — Three similes of unclosable distance: the hound and the fawn (tracking "steadily, till he finds it"); Achilles heading Hector off from the Dardanian gates "keeping himself always on the city side" — the pursuit as sheep-dogging, the runner herded away from rescue; and the dream — "as in a dream a man cannot catch one who runs — the one cannot escape him, nor the other catch." Aristarchus athetized the dream-lines as undignified; they are the passage's genius — the one simile in Homer taken not from the world but from the experience of nightmare, where both runners labor and neither moves. Achilles' head-shake to the army (no missiles — "lest some thrower win the glory, and he come second") keeps the kill private: this death has an owner. ↩
12 lines 208–213 — The scales. "Then the father stretched out his golden scales" — as at 8.69-74 for the armies, now for two men — "and Hector's day of doom sank down, and went to Hades; and Phoebus Apollo left him." Two clauses, no comment: the god who saved him at 20.443, who roused his knees at 22.204, departs like an advocate leaving a courtroom at verdict. Fate in the Iliad is exactly this scene: not a decree from above the gods, but the moment the gods stop arguing. ↩
13 lines 214–247 — Athena's masterpiece of cruelty. To Achilles she is plain ("Now stop, and catch your breath. I will go and win this man over"); to Hector she is Deiphobus — the dearest brother, "in body and unwearying voice" — with a fabricated biography of devotion (the parents' clasped knees, "the heart in me was worn away with grieving") engineered to convert the fugitive's shame into hope. Hector's answer — "I mean to honor you in my heart still more" — is the sound of a man being loved back into a trap. The narrator closes the scene with the plainest possible verdict: "So spoke Athena, and led him on by her cunning" (κερδοσύνῃ). Nothing else any god does in the poem is this personal. ↩
14 lines 248–259 — Hector's compact: he has stopped running — "I will kill, or be killed" — and offers the war's last treaty, with the gods as "witnesses and guardians of covenants": the winner strips the armor and returns the body. It is the decent minimum of heroic war, the norm the whole Patroclus-sequence has been shredding; and he offers it to the one man in the poem for whom it is now unthinkable. ↩
15 lines 260–272 — The refusal, in natural law: "As between lions and men there are no faithful oaths, and wolves and lambs do not carry hearts in concord... there will be no oaths — not before one or the other falls and gluts with his blood Ares, the fighter under the ox-hide shield" (the register's phrase, 5.289 = 20.78 — now at its terminus). Achilles has left the covenant-species; he says so in genus terms. The taunt's ledger — "in one payment, you settle all my grief" — makes Hector the invoice for every companion dead since Book 16. ↩
16 lines 273–295 — The exchange of casts, rigged: Achilles misses — and Athena returns the spear "hidden from Hector, shepherd of the people" (the title never crueler than here, applied to the deceived). Hector's speech at the false parity — "You missed!... You will plant no spear in my back as I run: drive it through my chest as I charge" — is magnificent precisely because it is obsolete: he thinks he is in a duel; he is in an execution with an intermission. His own cast hits mid-shield, true — against the shield of Hephaestus. Then: "he had no second ash spear," and Deiphobus "was nowhere near him." ↩
17 lines 296–305 — The recognition. "So. The gods have called me deathward... Athena has tricked me. Now evil death is close to me — not far off now, and no way out." Four lines from deception to acceptance, and then the sentence on which Hector's whole meaning rests: "Then let me not die without a fight, without glory — no: having done some great thing first, for men to come to hear of" (ἐσσομένοισι πυθέσθαι — for those-to-be to learn). Cheated by heaven, out of weapons, out of brothers, he reorganizes in four heartbeats around the only future left: the story. It is the clearest statement in Greek of what heroism is for. ↩
18 lines 306–321 — The last charge: Hector's eagle-stoop with the sword (the predator-simile returned to him for his final act — he dies attacking); Achilles' counter-charge behind the shield, the four-horned helmet, and Hesperus — "the most beautiful star that stands in heaven" — as the light of the spear-point "purposing evil." The evening star: the day-clause of Zeus's plan, the sunset Hector was granted through, now rising as the gleam on the weapon that ends him. ↩
19 lines 322–330 — The gap in the armor: Hector dies through Achilles' own stolen gear — "the beautiful armor he stripped from the might of Patroclus" — pierced at the one place it leaves open, the collarbones' notch, "the gullet — where the destruction of a life is quickest." The borrowed-armor chain (16.793-804; Zeus's comment at 17.198-208) closes with precise irony: Patroclus's disguise becomes Hector's coffin, and its known gap the door. The spear spares the windpipe "so that he could still speak" — the poem granting itself the dying dialogue it needs, and saying so. ↩
20 lines 331–354 — Triumph and plea. Achilles' first speech is the ledger (you thought you were safe; "I... have unstrung your knees"), with the sentence-pair the whole corpse-war rests on: "You the dogs and the birds will drag and defile. Him the Achaeans will bury." Hector, "his strength nearly gone," begs by life, knees, parents — the full suppliant formula — for burial at any price; and the answer passes beyond the human: "I only wish the fury and the heart in me would drive me to hack away your flesh and eat it raw myself." Not even Zeus's scale of ransom — Hector's weight in gold — would move him. The wish to eat the enemy is the aristeia's terminal reading: Achilles has argued himself, by grief, to the edge of what the poem's world can call a man. Book 24 exists because the poem cannot leave him there. ↩
21 lines 355–366 — The dying prophecy and the double death. "I know you now... the heart in your chest is iron" — then the curse-warning: "that I not become the gods' wrath (μήνιμα) upon you — on that day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo destroy you, brave as you are, at the Scaean Gates" — naming the god, the man, and the place (Xanthus's "a god and a man," 19.416-417, now specified; the gates are the very ones behind him). Then 361-363 repeat 16.855-857 verbatim, as the Greek repeats them — the soul-flight couplet, "wailing its fate, leaving its manhood and its youth": Patroclus and Hector go down through the same three lines, killer echoing killed. And Achilles answers the corpse with 18.115-116, kept verbatim: "Die. My own death-spirit I will accept whenever Zeus wills to accomplish it" — the acceptance he spoke to his mother, restated over the man whose death guarantees his own. ↩
22 lines 367–375 — The stabbing-circle: the Achaeans running up to admire "the stature and the marvelous beauty of Hector — and not one man stood by him without a stab." The anonymous soldier's joke — "softer to the touch, this Hector, than when he burned the ships" (line 375 was athetized in antiquity) — is the war's ugliest line, and true to armies: the terror of months paid out on a body that can no longer object. ↩
23 lines 376–394 — Achilles' speech breaks in half exactly where his mind does: strategy (probe the city — will it fall now?) collapsing mid-sentence into the register's self-interruption ("But why does my own heart argue these things with me?" = 122 = 21.562 — the third use binds victor to victim: Hector's phrase, in Achilles' mouth, within four hundred lines). What replaces strategy is Patroclus — "unwept, unburied... And if in the house of Hades men forget their dead, even there I will remember my dear companion" — memory outlasting death itself. Then the paean-couplet ("we have killed brilliant Hector — the man the Trojans prayed to... as to a god"), athetized by Aristarchus, kept here: the poem needs the army's song to set against what the next line does. ↩
24 lines 395–404 — The outrage, in procedural detail: tendons pierced heel to ankle, oxhide straps, the head left to drag; the dust; "his dark hair spread wide around him; and in the dust lay all that head that was so beautiful before." The narrator's judgment is one clause wide and bottomless: "Zeus gave him to his enemies, to be defiled in his own fatherland" (ἑῇ ἐν πατρίδι γαίῃ) — the last three words doing what no exclamation could. ἀεικέα ἔργα, "foul work": the poem names the deed and does not look away; its whole final book will be the undoing of these ten lines. ↩
25 lines 405–429 — Troy's grief begins with a simile of the end: the city's wailing "most like this — as if the whole of beetling Ilion, top to bottom, were smouldering in fire." Troy burns in the poem only here — in a comparison: with Hector dead, the fall is now a fact of grammar, needing no narration. Priam in the dung, begging to go out to the ships, announces Book 24 entire: "I will beg this man... He too has a father — such a one as I am: Peleus." The wish — "I wish he had died in my arms! Then the two of us could have glutted ourselves with weeping" — makes grief itself the feast (κορεσσάμεθα: the verb of eating one's fill): the only satiety left to the old. ↩
26 lines 430–436 — Hecuba's lament is civic: Hector as "boast" and "blessing," greeted "like a god" — the exact echo of the army's paean-line at 394, spoken now from the other wall: what the Achaeans sang as trophy, the mother sings as loss. Between the two uses, the poem holds its balance. ↩
27 lines 437–446 — The most devastating dramatic irony in epic: Andromache "had not yet heard anything," weaving flowers into a purple cloak — making beauty — and ordering the cauldron heated "for Hector, for his return out of the fighting. Poor innocent (νηπίη): she did not know that far from all baths grey-eyed Athena had broken him under the hands of Achilles." The bath for the living that becomes the bath for the dead (the washing of corpses) hovers unspoken; the narrator's νηπίη — the word for doomed unknowing children and soldiers all poem long — is spent here on its most undeserving bearer. ↩
28 lines 447–474 — The recognition sequence, staged in the body before the mind: the shuttle drops; the heart "to my mouth"; knees frozen; her exact guess about his "grievous pride... he would never stay back in the crowd of men" (she knew him better than his own soliloquy did); the run "like a madwoman"; the sight from the wall — the horses dragging him "uncaring" (ἀκηδέστως — the word for funeral-neglect); night on her eyes. Then the fall's one gesture: the head-dress flung off — frontlet, cap, woven band, "and the veil that golden Aphrodite gave her on the day Hector of the flashing helmet led her out of Eëtion's house." Widowhood performed as un-wedding: the marriage undone garment by garment in the sight of the city, at the news, before a word of lament is possible. ↩
29 lines 475–486 — The lament's opening: "To one fate, then, we were born, the two of us" — Troy and Thebe, Priam's house and Eëtion's, joined in a single doom (her whole Book 6 biography compressed: the father who reared her "when I was little," dead at Achilles' hands with all her brothers — this is the second household Achilles has emptied for her). Its center is the child: "No help will you be to him, Hector — you are dead — nor he to you": mutual uselessness as the measure of death, between father and infant son. ↩
30 lines 487–507 — The orphan-passage, athetized by Aristarchus (487-499) as beneath the moment — kept here, because its smallness is the point. Andromache's grief goes microscopically social: the seized fields; the bowed head and wet cheeks; the boy tugging at cloaks for charity; the friend's cup lent "a moment: he wets his lips; his palate he does not wet" — the most exactly observed line about charity in ancient poetry; the beating at the feast ("No father of yours dines with us"). Against it, the pampered past — the marrow, the sheep's fat, the nurse's arms — and the name that has become a taunt: Astyanax, "lord of the city... for you alone guarded their gates and their long walls." She is wrong about his future — the tradition kills him at the sack, thrown from these walls — and the poem lets her terrible modest fears stand as the mercy of not knowing worse. ↩
31 lines 508–515 — The close: worms and dogs at the naked body "far away from your parents" — while at home the clothes lie "fine-woven and lovely, made by the hands of women." Her one remaining act is the fire: to burn the unused garments — "no use to you: you will not lie in it — let it be your glory (κλέος) in the eyes of the men and women of Troy." Kleos, the poem's grand word — what Achilles traded his life for, what Hector died reorganizing himself around — is here a widow burning shirts: glory reduced to, and rescued as, a household rite performed in the absence of a body. "So she spoke, weeping; and the women wailed in answer" — the same close as Briseis's lament (19.301-302, wording kept): the poem ends its greatest book on the sound it trusts most, the antiphony of grieving women — which is also how, two books from now, the whole Iliad will end. ↩