Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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СКАЧАТЬ he presides at a splendid funeral games for Patroclus. As instigator of the games and giver of the prizes, he does not compete: were he to do so, he would, of course, be unbeatable. He consoles the losers, arbitrates wherever there is a dispute and sends all home happy with the generosity of his awards. His rage has left him. When Agamemnon wishes to compete as spear-thrower, risking an embarrassing situation if he loses, Achilles intervenes to prevent him by tactful flattery, acknowledging, as he once so passionately refused to do, his commander’s superiority: ‘You are the best by far.’ Even his deference is princely. He is courteous, judicious, munificent, a lord among men.

      Disputes about the composition of the Iliad are legion, probably insoluble, and certainly outside the scope of this book. There is a case for considering the funeral games episode to be a later interpolation; but whether or not it always formed part of the Iliad, it certainly did so by the time Homer had come to be ‘the educator of the Greeks’. To the Athenians of the classical era Homer was not only ‘the Poet’, the supreme practitioner of the noblest art; he was also a sage whose works were imagined to contain all wisdom. The Iliad and the Odyssey were recited in their entirety to huge crowds at the great Panathenaic festivals. The citizens of Periclean Athens heard the story of Achilles the frenzied killer who, once the fighting was over, was also a gracious, fine-mannered aristocrat, and saw no inconsistency worth their puzzling over. Patroclus, the man over whom Achilles mourns so frantically, was a fighter almost as savage as his friend, and yet Homer repeatedly describes him as being ‘gentle’. In a warrior culture nobility, even gentleness, coexist comfortably with a capacity for mass-murder.

      For twelve days Hector’s body lies unburied. For twelve days Achilles mourns for Patroclus, wandering distraught along the beach, or time and again lashing his enemy’s corpse to his chariot and dragging it three times around his beloved’s tomb. At last the gods intervene. Thetis comes to tell her son that it is Zeus’ will he return the body. That night, helped by Hermes, who has led him unseen past the Greek sentries, old King Priam appears in Achilles’ tent and begs to be allowed to ransom Hector’s body. He offers in exchange magnificent gifts: twelve of the brocaded robes for which the weavers of Troy are celebrated all over the known world, tripods and cauldrons, ten bars of gold, a priceless Thracian cup. Achilles, who has repeatedly spurned Agamemnon’s attempts to conciliate him with rich gifts, accepts.

      On the wonderful shield Hephaestus forged for Achilles two cities are depicted, two visions juxtaposed. One is that of a world of war, where even allies quarrel over tactics, where animals and men alike are promiscuously and wastefully killed, where the only way of resolving differences is by the slaughter of opponents. The other is a microcosm of civilized life, typified first by weddings and dancing, emblems of union and cooperative creation, and, most pointedly, by the detailed representation of a dispute resolved, not by violence, but by argument culminating in financial payment. A man has been murdered. The killer and the victim’s kinsman have come into the marketplace so that the case may be publicly debated. The killer offers to pay the blood price. The other refuses to accept it. Both ask for a judge to ‘cut the knot’ of their antagonism, to save them from the horrors of vendetta. The elders of the city, in turn, propose solutions. Money, not blood, will end this quarrel.

      Mercenary exchange has frequently been held to be antithetical to the heroic ideal. One who allows himself to be bought off forfeits his claim to glory. Plato censured Homer for showing the great Achilles trading a corpse for gifts. A hero should not be represented as suffering from the ‘disease of mean-spirited avarice’. Sallust, the Roman historian, praised the great men of Rome’s early days for their disdain for gold, their preference for fame: ‘To be seen of all while doing a splendid deed, this they considered riches.’ Virgil, whose hero was the Trojan prince Aeneas, cast Achilles as the archenemy, not only of Troy but of civilization in general, and took every opportunity of discrediting him: in the Aeneid the events of the Iliad are conflated so as to suggest that Achilles was driven by financial greed, that he killed Hector with the ignoble intention of selling him. The distaste for deal-making has proved persistent. At the beginning of the twentieth century members of the European nobility still thought twice before marrying their children to nouveaux riches who had made their fortunes in trade.

      The heroes of the Iliad have no such scruples. In the terrifyingly belligerent world Homer describes, the making of a financial deal seems like a blessed release from the otherwise inevitable cycle of killing and counter-killing. As Ajax argues: ‘Any man will accept the blood-price paid/For a brother murdered, a child done to death.’ Once the price has been paid the murderer can be reincorporated into society and the injured man must ‘curb his pride, his smouldering, vengeful spirit’. Such transactions may run counter to the individual’s craving for vengeance but they are necessary to the preservation of the community. Far from being dishonourable, they are manifestations of praiseworthy forbearance. Achilles’ refusal to accept Agamemnon’s gifts along with his apology is a sign that he is still death-bent, an enemy of his own kind, a ‘hard, ruthless man’.

      He accepts the exchange Priam proposes because the old King asks it not only for his own sake but also for that of Achilles’ father, who will some day grieve as he does now for the loss of a glorious son. Touched at last, Achilles weeps with him. The rage that had made him emotionally inviolable has passed. He feels pity, for Priam, for his own father, for Patroclus, for himself. He is no longer isolated, no longer either superhuman or subhuman, but part of a family, part of a race. He urges Priam to eat, as Odysseus and Thetis have each on earlier occasions urged him to do: the need for food being something that humbles people, reminds them of their vulnerability and of the imperative need for cooperation. He seems almost ready to countenance the compromises and sacrifices a social existence requires, to accept the limitations physicality sets to a human’s behaviour. Ever since Briseis was taken from him, he has been set on a suicidal course. ‘Only death submits to no man,’ says Agamemnon, infuriated by his obduracy; but Achilles has been as implacable as death, and implacably set on dying. Perhaps, if it were open to him to choose again, he might this time choose survival. But he is given no second chance. Priam returns to Troy with Hector’s body. For twelve days both sides observe a truce while the Trojans celebrate the funeral rites. Shortly after the fighting resumes, Achilles falls.

      The Romans had a legend that in earliest times a chasm opened up in the centre of the Forum, threatening to yawn wide enough to swallow the city. The terrified citizens consulted the oracles, which told them that the horrid mouth would close only if Rome’s greatest treasure were cast into it. A splendid young man named Curtius, handsome, brave and nobly born, at once sprang upon his horse and, fully armed as though for battle, put his spurs to its sides and leapt into the abyss. The earth closed over him. The city was saved. Similarly, the death of Achilles, ‘the best of the Achaeans’, opens the way for a Hellenic victory. Once their supreme warrior, their greatest treasure, has been sacrificed, the Greeks take Troy.

      When the war is over, when the fabled towers of Troy are shattered, its riches plundered and its people slaughtered or enslaved, when the Greeks at last have sailed away, Poseidon and Apollo throw down the massive rampart that protected the Greek ships. The proper sacrifices were not made before building began. The prodigious wall is an impious defacement of the landscape. The gods call upon the waters of the earth to wash it away. Rivers in flood, torrential rain, the sea’s breakers, all batter against it until there is nothing left of that desperate labour. Poseidon ‘made all smooth along the rip of the Hellespont/And piled the endless beaches deep in sand again’. This war, the most celebrated in human history, is to leave no trace upon the face of the earth.

      ‘You’d think me hardly sane,’ says Apollo to a fellow god, ‘if I fought СКАЧАТЬ