The Trojan War (19 page)

The death of Hector might have been a turning point but it did not mean that the war was lost. On the contrary, it might have worked to Troy's advantage. The Trojans still had a lot of fight in them and, what is more, they had a real chance of putting that spirit to good use. They could still inflict casualties on the enemy; they still defended an impregnable fortress; and they still enjoyed the comparative advantage of an urban base. The Greeks were stuck in their wretched camp. The Trojans could wait them out, especially if they replenished their ranks with new allies.

But Hector's family did not see things that way. King Priam and Queen Hecuba watched their son's death from the battlements, where they had earlier called down and pleaded with him not to risk battle with Achilles. Now they were inconsolable in their grief.

Hector's wife, Andromache, was at home, preparing the house for her husband's return when she heard the cries of lamentation. Fearing the worst, Andromache took two servants as escorts and ran to the city walls. From a high tower, she scanned the battlefield for Hector. Achilles had attached Hector's naked body to a chariot by leather thongs cinched through holes in Hector's tendons. Hector's long hair streamed in the dust as Achilles whipped his horses across the plain, dragging the cadaver behind him in triumph.

S
weet as it was to drive his spearhead through Hector's neck, to spit out taunts—no fewer than three times—about the dogs and birds that would soon eat the dying man's corpse, to strip off his stolen armor from the Trojan's body, to see his comrades poke the still-warm flesh with their spears, and to raise the victory paean among the Greeks, it was not enough for Achilles. Achilles brought the corpse back to his camp and dumped it before Patroclus's bier. It lay there until after his friend's funeral, when Achilles hitched up his chariot and dragged the cadaver around Patroclus's tomb three times. Like Hittite and Egyptian generals, the Greek leader mistreated his enemy's corpse.

At first the gods displayed no objection; presumably they communicated through their priests. In fact, Zeus allowed Hector to be dishonored in his native land. But after nine days, enough was enough, and Zeus insisted that Achilles return the corpse to Troy for burial or suffer divine retribution. Hector's corpse had not begun to rot and the dogs had kept their distance—miracles both, unless “nine days” merely means a long time.

Achilles' behavior shocks us, but perhaps not as much as his cold-blooded slaughter of twelve noble Trojan youths before Patroclus's pyre. The great hero himself had captured them in battle expressly for this purpose.

Meanwhile, a revisionist version of Hector's story began circulating. The real Hector was a self-absorbed, often sharp-tongued martinet whose honor was more important to him than his country's safety; a man who imagined his wife's suffering in captivity but hastened it by his actions; a man who rejected the prudence that would have saved his own life and that of many of his comrades. Now he became a selfless martyr for his homeland.

The
Iliad
tells how Priam journeyed courageously at night across the plain to the Greek camp and, at the risk of his own life, begged Achilles for Hector's corpse. The old man fell to his knees before Achilles and kissed the Greek's murderous hands. It was humiliating, but Priam was engaging in a classic gesture of prostration and self-abasement. And just as an enemy of the Hittite king might signal his surrender by offering valuable gifts (in one example, a throne and scepter, both made of iron), so Priam came laden with treasures. In all of these cases a tit-for-tat exchange was understood on the part of the winner.

The Greeks granted a truce of eleven days so that Hector's funeral could take place; afterward, the war continued. Only a few details of what followed are found in Homer and mainly in the
Odyssey
rather than the
Iliad.
For more the reader has to turn to what is left of the other poems of the Epic Cycle. Only sketchy summaries and a few quotations survive from the
Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Sack of Ilium,
and
The Returns.
These accounts were embroidered by such later writers of antiquity as Pindar, the Attic tragedians, Vergil, Statius, Dictys of Crete, Quintus Smyrnaeus, and Apollodorus—not to mention Herodotus and Thucydides. Where Homer is severe and restrained, some of these other authors revel in gossipy details.

The Greek and Trojan generals took the path of least resistance. Each side having failed thus far in its objectives, the generals' recipe, on both sides, was more pitched battle.

The
Aethiopis
tells the story of a woman warrior named Penthesilea. She was an Amazon, a Thracian, and a so-called daughter of Ares, who came to help the Trojans fight. Penthesilea enjoyed a day of glory on the battlefield until she confronted Achilles, who killed her. Homer does not mention Penthesilea but he offers a few other details about the Amazons. He refers to them as “women who are equivalent to men” and he names two heroes who fought them in battle: King Priam in his younger days and a certain Bellerophontes, who was the grandfather of the Lycian warrior Glaucus, comrade of Sarpedon. These clashes took place years before the Trojan War. Although “Penthesilea” is a Greek name, “Amazon” itself is probably not a Greek word. Priam is said to have fought the Amazons on the Sangarius River in Phrygia, about 350 miles east of Troy. This is far from modern Thrace, which is in southeastern Europe, but the ancients sometimes imagined Thrace as including northwest Anatolia.

It was left to later writers of antiquity to elaborate other details about Amazons: making them man-haters who killed their own husbands, placing them geographically in Anatolia's Black Sea region, having them attack Athens, and pitting them against such Greek heroes as Heracles and Theseus. Penthesilea is said to have come to Troy with twelve other Amazon warriors and to have distinguished herself in action. She is also supposed to have been so beautiful that, after Achilles took off the dead woman's helmet and saw her face, he fell in love.

Women warriors may have seemed outlandish in much of history but not so today when, for example, several hundred thousand women serve in the U.S. military. Nor are women soldiers unknown historically. The best-documented case may be that of the corps of women archers and spear-fighters in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dahomey. Good soldiers, they also were trusted as royal bodyguards, and they had a propaganda value to boot, because alpha males felt insulted to be matched in battle with women.

No other all-female units are known in the ancient world, but there were several Joans of Arc, from Artemisia of Halicarnassus, in 480
B.C.
the first recorded female admiral, to Boudicca, the British queen who commanded troops against a Roman army in
A.D.
61. At sites in southern Russia and Ukraine, archaeologists have found dozens of graves of women buried with weapons. Swords, daggers, bows, quivers, arrowheads, spearheads, horse trappings, and jewelry as well as household objects are among the objects discovered. In some cases, the women's bones demonstrate that they were accustomed to horse riding, heavy use of the bow, and possibly even that they died in battle.

The earliest of such graves dates to around 600
B.C.
, the latest to about four hundred years afterward. The skeletons represent three Iron Age cultures: Scythian, Sauromatian, and Sarmatian. No archaeological evidence of women warriors has been found for the Bronze Age, but the Iron Age discoveries raise at least the possibility that they did exist.

Thersites resurfaces in the
Aethiopis
to rebuke Achilles for allegedly having fallen in love with Penthesilea. Achilles did not respond well to criticism, and Thersites paid with his life. Later writers claim that Thersites was Diomedes' cousin; but no army could tolerate a warrior who killed one of its own men for so flimsy an offense. Achilles is supposed to have had to make a short trip to the nearby island of Lesbos to be purified before he could fight again. When he did, he found a new enemy.

Memnon, king of the Aethiopians, came to Troy's aid late in the war, perhaps, as Roman-era sources have it, bringing a large contingent of soldiers with him. If so, they surely were not cheap, to judge from one Anatolian ruler under siege who paid up to seven times the normal wage to hire mercenaries. Although Memnon does not appear in the
Iliad,
he is remembered in the
Odyssey
as a great hero. Among other feats, Memnon killed Nestor's son Antilochus before being killed by Achilles in turn. In Homer, Memnon is son of the legendary Tithonus and the goddess Dawn. Other sources claim a marriage tie between Memnon's family and Priam's.

Memnon is too obscure a character for us to be sure that he existed, but it is worth speculating that he might have been black. Memnon came from Aethiopia, a place thought of by the Greeks in various and sometimes vague ways. The term could refer to modern Ethiopia, to any land south of Egypt—especially Sudan—to any land with dark-skinned inhabitants, or to the East, that is, the land of the morning. But one thing is clear: to the Greeks, Aethiopians had skin burned by the sun. So, to a Greek, an Aethiopian might have been black.

In the late Bronze Age, Nubia, which is roughly today's northern Sudan, was conquered and annexed by Egypt. Nubian mercenaries fought in the pharaoh's army, and sons of Nubian princes were brought northward to be Egyptianized, alongside the sons of Canaanite princes. Some Nubians rose to high positions in Egypt. Nubian nobles began depicting themselves as Egyptians in their tombs and sometimes assumed Egyptian names.

Egypt was no stranger to the politics of western Anatolia. Pharaoh Amenhotep III (1382–1344) had sought an alliance with the kingdom of Arzawa in western Anatolia by marrying an Arzawan royal princess. More recently, Rameses II (1279–1213) corresponded with the king of Mira, a successor state of Arzawa.

But in spite of Memnon's support for Troy, the Greek army led by Achilles routed the Trojans, who streamed back to the city. And Achilles was on the verge of forcing his way into Troy when he was struck down by Paris.

The surviving bits of the Epic Cycle do not specify how Paris killed Achilles but the presence of Apollo (who was lending divine support) points to archery. The heel was supposed to be the only place where Achilles was vulnerable. Another tradition has him shot in the ankle. If either of these stories were true, and since Achilles died right away, it would point to a poison-tipped arrow. An ordinary arrow that penetrated the ankle or heel should not have been instantly fatal; it might have led to a mortal infection, but then Achilles should have lingered for several days before succumbing.

According to the
Aethiopis,
Achilles was shot at Troy's Scaean Gate. The gate was a potentially weak point in the walls, so the attack was usually pressed hard there. Troy's architects compensated by channeling the enemy into a narrow space at the gate where they could be attacked from above by defenders on the battlements or in a tower. All of the surviving gates of Troy have designs of deadly sophistication, so the challenge facing Achilles is clear (even if the identification of the Scaean Gate is not).

The Trojan gatekeepers had opened the double doors to let the men back in, which was dangerous with Achilles and his men hot on their heels. Priam had coached Troy's gatekeepers, on the day of Hector's last battle, to close the doors in the nick of time, so that Achilles could not follow the fleeing Trojans back into town. On this latest occasion Achilles managed to break in, just as the king had feared. Flung open to let the men stream back to safety, the gates were not closed until it was too late. Achilles had penetrated the city's defenses. But not for long. Paris was waiting and with the help of the god Apollo or Iyarri, he killed Achilles, just as Hector had foretold with his dying breath.

Paris must have taken up a position on the walls. At an elevation of twenty-five feet or more, there were few reference points to judge the distance accurately, which was critical because arrows shot from a compound bow follow an arched trajectory in flight. The ground was also packed with soldiers, so Paris pulled off an extraordinarily lucky shot.

A battle now raged over Achilles' corpse, as the
Aethiopis
reports. Ajax eventually saved the body and brought it back to the Greek camp, while Odysseus played the leading role in holding back the enemy. According to the
Odyssey,
the mourning for Achilles lasted seventeen days. The
Aethiopis
brings in divine mourners and funeral games. And the
Little Iliad
mentions a deadly contest over Achilles' arms, which had been saved along with his body.

As with Hector, the revisionists were not slow to emerge. If Achilles had been so glorious, then why did the gods give him such an ugly, almost random death? Two years after the end of the war, the ghost of Achilles confessed to Odysseus that he, Achilles, had made the wrong choice by opting for an early but glorious death instead of a long, dull life. But, Odysseus protested, isn't Achilles honored as a king in Hades? The ghost replied:

Reality was rapidly rejecting the heroic ideal. Nothing was sacred, not even Achilles' arms, at least if the epic tradition is to be trusted. These arms were supposed to go to the Greeks' best remaining warrior, but it would take a contest to choose him. Ajax and Odysseus were the two main contenders; Ajax was all muscle, Odysseus fought with his wits.

The poets agreed that the decision was entrusted to the Trojans, surely a way of avoiding civil war among the Greeks. Homer claims that the “children of the Trojans” made the choice, while the
Little Iliad
offers a delicious if perhaps incredible scheme. Nestor proposed that the Greeks choose the winner by sending eavesdroppers to the walls of Troy. There, they could overhear the enemy discussing the courage and manliness of the Greek heroes. The spies were dispatched and they did indeed hear a conversation but not by Trojan warriors: the speakers were unmarried girls. The first girl sang the praises of Ajax because he had saved Achilles' body, which was more than could be said of Odysseus. The second girl overruled her, arguing that even a woman could drag a corpse to safety, but only a man would have the courage to stand and guard the rear, as Odysseus had. This response was so clever that the poets saw it as the work of Athena.