18 Achilles

Full transcript

Good evening and welcome back. The hour has grown still, and the room around you has begun the slow practice of letting go of the day. The lamps are low, the corners have softened. Whatever the morning brought, whatever the afternoon asked, whatever the evening still holds in its small busy hands, you may begin now, little by little, to set it down. There is no urgency here. The story we are about to enter is older than urgency. It has waited a long time already. It will wait, patient as bronze armour laid down beside a sleeping fire, for as much of your attention as you can give before sleep takes you.

Let your shoulders settle, let your jaw rest, let your hands lie wherever they have come to rest, open or folded, whichever feels more natural to the body that has carried you this far. There is no pose to maintain tonight, there is no question to answer before the the morning. The day, with all its rough edges, may now begin its slow folding away into memory, and the night, kind and old, may begin to gather you up. Tonight we enter the story of Achilles, the swift-footed son of a mortal king and a goddess of the sea, the greatest warrior of the age of heroes. The man whose anger opens the oldest poem in the Greek world, and whose grief closes it in something very near to tenderness.

He is a figure of bronze and salt water, of music played in a cave on a mountain of a a long shawl lined with ships, of a wrath that turned the tide of a great war, and a sorrow that turned the warrior back into a man. His story holds the wedding of his parents, the long care of a centaur, a choice between two fates, a quarrel over honour, the loss of the friend he loved most, and a single night of shared weeping that the old singers thought was the truest thing in all the tale. We will move through these images slowly. We will not press them. We will let them rise and fade like figures painted faintly on the wall of an old temple, and the listener may drift into sleep at any point along the way without missing what matters.

Get cosy, settle in, and let us begin. You may close your eyes if your eyes wish to close. The story will keep its shape without you watching it. The Greeks who first sang of Achilles would have understood. They sang of him in the great halls and at the small fires, in the courts of kings and in the doorways of farmers for many centuries before anyone wrote the songs down. The singer continued, the listener slept or did not sleep as the listener wished. The song carried on regardless. Because a song about a hero does not need its hero to be awake, and it does not need its listener to be awake either. It needs only to be sung and to be carried from one night into the next across the long inheritance of nights.

In the beginning of this telling we must step back, before Achilles was born, into a matter that troubled the gods themselves. There was a sea goddess named Thetis, a daughter of old sea elder Nereus, one of the grey and gentle powers of the deep water. She was beautiful in the way that the sea is beautiful, changeful, silver, difficult to hold. Both Zeus, the king of the gods, and Poseidon, the lord of the sea, had looked upon her with desire. had thought for a time to take her for himself. But there was an oracle, an old word carried by Earth or spoken by Prometheus, who knew the shapes of things to come. The oracle said that Thetis would bear a son greater than his father, the son would surpass the one who fathered him, exactly as Zeus had surpassed his own father, Cronos, and Cronos had surpassed the sky before him. When the gods heard this, their desire called into caution. Neither Zeus nor Poseidon wished to father a child who would one day rise above him and unseat him from his place. The throne of heaven had changed hands twice already through exactly this kind of succession. Zeus had no wish to make it change a third time.

So the gods made a decision that was, in its way, both wise and a little cruel. They would give Thetis, a goddess of the deep sea, to a mortal man. A son born to a mortal father could be great, even the greatest of his kind, but he would still be mortal, he would still die. The danger in the oracle would be contained inside the boundary of a single human lifetime. The son might surpass his father in glory, but the father would be a man, and the surpassing of a man is a small thing beside the surpassing of a god. The man they chose was Pelias, a king of the Mermanns in Thethea, a region of Thessaly in the north of Greece. Pelias was a good man, brave and pious, a former companion of heroes, a hunter who had sailed on great voyages and stood beside famous names. But he was mortal, and Thetis, who was a goddess, did not at first wish to be given to him. The old story says she resisted, she changed her shape, as the powers of the sea can change their shape.

Peleus, advised by the wise cental Sharon, caught hold of her on a lonely shore and held on while she became fire, became water, became a lion, became a serpent, became every wild and slipping form the sea could offer. He did not let go. At last she returned to her own shape and consented and agreed to be his wife. There is sorrow even in this consent. She had been handed from the company of the gods to the bed of a man, not entirely by her choosing, and she never quite forgot that she had once belonged to the deep water and to the deathless company of her own kind.

The wedding of Peleus and Thetis was one of the great celebrations of the Old World. It was held, the signers say, in the cave of Sharon on Mount Pelion, and the gods themselves came down from Olympus to attend. They brought gifts. Poseidon gave two immortal horses, swift as the wind. The gods gave a suit of divine armour. The Muses sang. For one bright evening the mortal and immortal world sat together at a single feast, and the high air of the mountain was full of music and the smell of the long tables. It was at this wedding that the seed of a far greater sorrow was quietly planted, though no one at the feast yet understood it. The goddess of discord Eris had not been invited, for Who invites discord to a wedding?

She came anyway, unseen, and she rolled among the guests a single golden apple inscribed with three words, for the fairest. Three goddesses reached for it, Hera, the Queen of Heaven, Athena, the grey-eyed daughter of Wisdom, and Aphrodite, the goddess of Love and Beauty. Their quarrel over that apple would in time lead to the judgment of a Trojan prince, the carrying away of a Spartan queen, and the gathering of a thousand ships against the city of Troy. But all of that lay far in the future.

On the night of the wedding there was only music, and the long tables, and the bride who had been a goddess of the sea sitting beside the mortal man who would be the father of her only child. In time, Thetis bore Pelias, a son. This was Achilles. From the moment of his birth, his mother was caught in a grief that most mothers are spared. She was deathless and her child was not. She had given herself, however unwillingly, to a mortal husband, and the fruit of that union was a mortal son. She knew, with the cold, clear knowledge of the gods, that her boy would one day die. The waters of her own nature ran in him, but so did the blood of a man, and the blood of a man always runs out in the end. A mortal mother does not know the hour of her child's death, and is mercifully spared the certainty of it. Thetis knew the certainty without the hour, and the certainty pressed on her from the first day. So she tried, in the way of the old myths, to make her son something other than mortal. There There are two tellings of what she did, and the singers preserved them both.

In the older telling she took the infant Achilles by night to the hearth fire. She anointed him with ambrosia, the food of the gods by day, and by night she laid him in the embers of the fire, burning away the mortal part of him a little at a time, intending to make him deathless. Pelius, waking one night, saw his infant son in the flames and cried out in terror. Thetis, interrupted in her secret work, set the child down and left him, angry and grieving, returning to the sea and to her father's halls beneath the water. The work was unfinished. The boy remained mortal.

In the telling that later ages remembered best, Fettis carried the infant down to the River Styx, the cold, dark river that runs through the underworld and by which even the gods swear their most binding oaths. She held him by one heel and dipped him into the black water, which had the power to make flesh-proof against all wounds. The water touched every part of him except the heel where her fingers held him, and so Achilles grew to be a man whose body no spear could pierce and no arrow could wound. Except in that one small place, The heel his mother's hand had covered, The one part of him the dark water had never touched.

We will return to that heel at the very end, gently, The way one returns at the end of a long evening To a small thing noticed at the start. Whichever telling we follow, The meaning underneath them is the same, And it is a tender one. A goddess mother, knowing her son was mortal, tried with all the power she had to spare him the death that waited for him. She failed. There was a small place she could not reach, a heel, a gap, a floor, and through that small place mortality kept its hold.

The Greeks understood this. They understood that no love, however great, however divine, can wholly armour a child against the world. The mother does what she can. She dips the child in the protecting water. And still there is a heel. There is always a heel. When the The time came for the boy to be raised and taught. Chilius and Thetis did what the best families of the heroic age did. They sent Achilles to the cave of Charon on Mount Pelion. Charon was the wisest of the centaurs, a being half man and half horse, but unlike the wild and quarrelsome centaurs of the lowlands, he was gentle, learned, and old beyond measure.

He had taught many heroes. He had taught Jason, who would sail for the fleece. He had taught Asclepius, who would become the God of Healing. He had taught the boy's own father, Peleus. Now he took Achilles into his high mountain home and raised him as he had raised the others, with patience and clear knowledge and the slow authority of one who has seen many seasons turn. The childhood of Achilles on Mount Pelian is one of the quiet, bright passages of his story, and the singers loved to dwell on it before the long shadow of the wall fell across everything. The mountain air was clean, the meadows were full of herbs that Sharon knew by name and by use. The boy was fed, the old story says, not on ordinary food, but on the inner parts of lions, and the marrow of bears and wild boars, so that the courage of those creatures might enter him. Whether this is to be taken plainly or as a way of saying that he was raised hard and raised for strength, the meaning holds. He grew swift, he grew strong. He learned to run so fast that he could catch the wild deer of the mountain on foot, without bow, without snare, simply by running them down across the high slopes until they tired.

Aeron taught him more than running and the use of weapons. He taught him the lyre, and Achilles learned to play and to sing, and in later years, even in the camp before Troy, he would take up the lyre in the evenings and sing of the famous deeds of earlier men. The greatest warrior of the age was also a musician, and the old singers thought this fitting. The same hands that would one day be terrible in battle could also draw quiet sweetness from the strings. Shurung taught him the healing of wounds, the binding of injuries, the knowledge of which herbs draw out poison and which clothes are cut and which brings sleep to a man in pain.

He taught him the old courtesies, the proper honouring of guests, the proper respect for the gods, the proper care of a king for the men who follow him. He taught him, in short, to be not only a fighter, but a man worthy of the songs that would be sung about him. It was in these years, in some of the tellings, that Achilles first came to know Patroclus, companion who would matter to him more than any other person in his life. Petroclus was older than Achilles, a boy of good family who had come to live in the household of Pelias after a misfortune in his own home. The two were raised together, in the way that Fostridge worked in the Old World, and a bond grew between them that the Greeks honoured as the deepest kind of friendship a man could have.

Petroclus was the gentler of the two, the more even tempered, the one who soothed where Achilles burned. Achilles was the swifter, the fiercer, the one who's feeling ran hot and quick. They balanced one another. Where one was fire, the other was the steady hand that knew how to hold the fire. We will follow that bond all the way to its end, because the end of that bond is in a sense the turning point of the whole story. But before the war, there was the matter of the two fates. This is one of the oldest and most beautiful things the Greeks said about Achilles, and it sits at the centre of who he was. Thetis, his goddess mother, knew the future, as the powers of the sea sometimes know it. She knew that two destinies lay before her son and that he would in the course of his life choose between them, even if he did not always know he was choosing. The first fate was this. If Achilles stayed home, in Phythia, far from the great war that was gathering in the East, he would live a long life. He would grow old, he would marry and have children and watch them grow. He would rule his father's kingdom in peace. He would die at last in his own bed, full of years, surrounded by his family. But his name would fade. No songs would be sung of him. The generations would forget that he had ever lived. He would have length of days and obscurity at the end of them. The second fate was the opposite. If Achilles went to the war at Troy, he would win undying glory. His name would be sung forever, in every land where the Greek tongue was spoken, for as long as there were singers to sing and listeners to listen. He would be remembered as the greatest of all the heroes. But he would die young.

He would never grow old. He would never see his son become a man. He would fall on the plane before Troy far from home, and his bright short life would end in the dust of a foreign country. A long life forgotten, or a short life remembered forever. This was the choice. The Greeks turned it over and over, because it seemed to them to hold something true about every human life, not only the life of a hero. We cannot have everything. The thing we reach for is bought with the thing we let go. And Achilles, when the moment came, would reach for glory, knowing the price, and the knowing is what made him more than simply a strong man with a spear. He chose, with open eyes, the bright brief burning over the long, slow fading. The old singers did not entirely approve of the choice, and they did not entirely condemn it. They held it up to the light, and let the listener feel its weight. When the great war began to gather, Thetis, who knew the second fate and dreaded it, tried one last time to save her son from the death she could see coming.

The story of how she tried is one of the strangest and most touching in his whole tale. She took the young Achilles, who was by now a youth on the edge of manhood, and she hid him far away on the island of Skyros in the court of a king named Lycomedes. And she hid him in disguise. She dressed him as a girl and placed him among the many daughters of Lycomedes, so that he might live unnoticed in the women's quarters, far from any thought of war, and so escape the fate that waited for him a-troy. For a time the disguise held.

Achilles lived among the daughters of the king. He was given a girl's name. He learned or pretended to learn the work of the women's rooms. And in those quiet rooms he came to love one of the king's daughters, Dodamia, and she bore him a son who would be called Neoptolemus, and who would, in the fullness of time and in a manner his father never lived to see play his own part in the fall of Troy. But all of that lay ahead. For now there was only a young man hidden in a disguise, living a borrowed quiet life on a small island, while across the sea the kings of Greece were beginning to count their ships. For the war could not begin without him. There had been a prophecy, as there so often was, that Troy would never fall unless Achilles fought in the host that besieged it. The Greek commanders knew this.

And so they sent for the cleverest among them Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, to find the hidden youth and bring him out of his disguise. Odysseus, whose mind was the sharpest in all the gathering army, came to Skyros disguised himself as a travelling merchant. He spread out his wares before the daughters of Lycimedes, cloth and jewellery and the small bright things that delight the eye. But among the soft and lovely goods he laid a sword and a shield. The daughters of the king reached for the cloth and the ornaments, as Odysseus had known they would. But one of them, at the sight of the sword and shield, forgot herself entirely.

The hand that reached for the weapon was not a girl's idle hand. It closed on the hilt with the old familiar certainty of one who had been trained from childhood to fight. And in that moment, in some tellings, Odysseus had a horn sounded, a call to arms, and the disguised Achilles. Hearing the walk-all, stripped away the woman's clothing and stood revealed, a young man with a sword in his hand, ready for the battle his nature could not refuse. The disguise was over. His mother's last attempt to save him had failed, as her dipping of him in the river had failed, because there was something in him that reached for the sword the way water reaches downhill, by its own nature, without deciding.

So Achilles went to the war. He came with his own people, the myrmidons of Phaethia, the ant people, a hard and faithful body of fighting men, fifty ships of them, the old count says. He came with Petroclus at his side. He came with the divine armour and the immortal horses that had been given at his parents' wedding. He came with his old tutor Phoenix, who had helped to raise him and who loved him almost as a father. And he came knowing, because his mother had told him, that this road led to glory and to an early death, and he came anyway, because the alternative was to fade, and he had chosen not to fade.

Before the fighting could begin, the whole host of the Greeks had to be gathered, and the gathering was itself a great labour. The kings of all the scattered Greek lands brought their men and their ships to a single harbour at Aulis, on the strait between the mainland and the long island of Euboea. The old singers loved to count the ships, kingdom by kingdom, a long slow-roll call that named every captain and every island and every town that sent its sons to the war. There were ships from Rocky Ithaca and from Sandy Pylos, from Mycenae Richingold and from Sparta and from Crete of the Hundred Cities, from Argos and from Tyrrins of the Great Walls, until the Count reached more than a thousand vessels drawn up along the shore. It was the largest gathering of fighting men the Old World remembered, and it took a long time to assemble and longer still to cross. The fleet waited at all this for fair winds. When at last the winds came, the thousand ships put out together onto the open water, and the sea between Greece and the far coast was covered. For a few days, with sails. And the whole strength of a people was carried eastward toward a single city on a distant plain, toward the ten long years that waited there, and toward the bright brief life that Achilles had chosen when he stepped aboard.

The war at Troy was long. The old poems do not tell it as a single swift campaign, but as a grinding siege that lasted, in the count of the tradition, ten full years. For nine of those years the fighting went back and forth across the plain between the Greek ships and the walls of the city, and neither side could win. The Greeks raided the towns around Troy, the smaller cities allied to her, taking their goods and their cattle and their people. His was foremost in this work. He sacked many towns in those nine years, and from one of them he took, as his portion of the spoils, a woman named Brissice, who became dear to him. Remember her name. The whole great turning of the story will hinge, before long, on the question of, who has the right to keep her? We will not dwell on the violence of those years. The sleep-story does not press the edge of the sword. We will only say that the war was hard and long, that good men on both sides fell, and that the plane before Troy became, over those nine years, a place soaked in the memory of fighting.

The Greeks lived in a great camp along the shore, behind a wall and a ditch, with their ships drawn up on the sand behind them. The Trojans lived inside their high walls, with their wide streets and their temples and their families defending their home. Both sides grew weary. Both sides longed for an ending that would not come. It is at this point in the tenth year that the oldest poem of the Greek world begins. The poem we call the Iliad does not tell the whole war. It does not begin at the beginning or end at the fall of the city. It tells a single episode from the tenth year, a quarrel and its consequences, and the first word of the poem, in the old Greek, is the word for wrath. Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles. The whole great poem is the story of one man's anger, where it came from, what it cost, and how, at the very end, it was finally laid down. The quarrel began with a question of honour, and to understand it we must understand how the old warriors thought. To these men honour was not a private feeling. It was a visible, countable thing. It was shown in the prizes a man received, in the share of the spoils that were set aside for him, in the public acknowledgement of his worth before the assembled army. To be honoured was to be given your due portion in the sight of all. To be dis-honoured was to have that portion taken away in the sight of all. It was a wound that could not be hidden, because everyone had seen it. The trouble started with a priest. A priest of the god Apollo came to the Greek camp to ransom his daughter, a girl named Chrysai, who had been taken in one of the raids and given to Agamemnon, the high king, the commander of the whole Greek host. The priest brought a rich ransom and begged for his daughter back. The army wished to accept the ransom and honour the priest. But Agamemnon refused, harshly, and sent the old man away with insults. The priest, grieving, prayed to Apollo, and Apollo heard him, and the god came down from Olympus with his bow, And for nine days he shot his arrows of plague into the Greek camp, and men and animals sickened and died, and the smoke of the funeral fires never ceased.

On the tenth day Achilles called the army together to ask why the god was angry. A seer rose and said the truth. The plague would not end until Chrysice was returned to her father without ransom. Agamemnon was forced to give up the girl to save his army, but he did so in a rage, and he declared that since his own prize was being taken from him, he would take another man's prize to replace it. the prize he chose to take was Briesais, the woman who belonged to Achilles. This was the insult that opened the wound. It was not at the deepest level about the woman herself, though Achilles had come to care for her. It was about honour, about the public stripping of a man's due portion before the whole army. Agamemnon, the High King, was using his rank to take from Achilles, the best fighter in the host, the very thing that marked Achilles as honoured. He was saying, in front of everyone, that the greatest warrior could be robbed at the will of the king and could do nothing about it.

For a man whose entire choice in life had been to trade length of days for honour and and glory, this was a blow aimed at the very heart of why he had come to Troy at all. He had given up a long life for honour, and now the king was taking the honour and leaving him with nothing. Achilles' hand went to his sword. For a moment, the old poem says, he stood on the edge of cutting Agamemnon down where he sat. But the goddess Athena came to him, unseen by the others, and caught him by his fair hair, and counseled him to hold his hand, to fight with words rather than with the blade, and promised that one day he would be paid back three times over for this insult if he could only endure it now.

Achilles obeyed. He let the sword slide back. But he swore a great oath. He swore that the day would come when the Greeks would long for him, when they would be driven back to their ships and cut down in heaps and would cry out for Achilles, and he would not come. withdrew from the war. He went back to his ships with his myrmidons, and he sat there, and he would not fight. Then Achilles went down to the shore, alone, and he wept, and he called out across the grey water to his mother. And Thetis heard him from the depths of the sea, as a mother hears a child, and she rose up out of the waves like a mist, and sat beside him on the sand and asked him why he wept. He told her everything. The insult, the stolen prize, the dishonour before the army. And he asked her to do a terrible thing.

He asked her to go to Zeus and to beg the king of the gods to turn the tide of the war against the Greeks, to let them be beaten and driven back, so that they would learn how badly they needed the man they had dishonored. He asked, in his anger, for his own people to suffer, so that his worth would be proven by their suffering. Fettis grieved to hear it, because she knew where this anger would lead. And she knew the second fate, and she felt the early death of her son drawing nearer with every step of this quarrel. But she loved him, and she did as he asked. She went up to Olympus, to the high halls, and she clasped the knees of Zeus in the old gesture of supplication. And she begged him to honour her son by giving victory to the Trojans until the Greeks should make amends. And Zeus, after some hesitation, for he knew it would anger his wife Hera, who favoured the Greeks, bowed his great head in ascent. And when Zeus bows his head, the old poem says, All Olympus trembles, the thing was settled, the tide of the war would turn. And it turned.

With Achilles sitting idle by his ships, the Trojans, led by their great prince Hector, the eldest son of King Priam, the noblest man on either side of the war, began to push the Greeks back. Day by day the fighting went worse for the Greeks. Their best men were wounded, their lines were broken. The Trojans drove them back across the plain, back toward the ditch, back toward the wall, back toward the very ships that had carried them across the sea. The Greeks, who had begun the war so confident, now faced the real possibility that they would be destroyed on the shore, their ships burned, escape cut off, their long siege ending not in the fall of Troy, but in their own annihilation.

In their desperation the Greek commanders did what Achilles had sworn they would do. They came to long for him. Agamemnon, humbled at last by the disaster, agreed to give back brissise untouched, and to add to her a vast treasure of gold and bronze and horses and women, and even the promise of one of his own daughters in marriage, if only Achilles would set aside his anger and return to the fighting. And he sent an embassy of three men to Achilles' tent by night, to carry the offer Phoenix, old tutor who loved him, the great Ajax, a plain honest fighter whom Achilles respected, and Odysseus, whose clever tongue could persuade almost anyone of almost anything.

The Embassy to Achilles is one of the great scenes of the old poem, and it is, for our purposes tonight, a quiet one. A scene of men talking in a tent by the sea while the The fires burn low. They found Achilles playing the lyre, singing of the famous deeds of earlier heroes with Patroclus sitting beside him listening. He welcomed them as guests with all the old courtesy Sharon had taught him. He set out food and wine. And then he listened to their the treasure, the apology, the return of Bresais, the daughter in marriage. And he refused it. He refused it for a reason that the Greeks found both troubling and profound. He said that no amount of treasure could buy back the thing that had been taken from him because the thing that had been taken was not measurable in treasure. He said that all the wealth of Troy, all the wealth of the world, was not worth his life, and that he had now seen the truth of the choice his mother had laid before him. He said he would sail home in the morning, back to fifth year, and live the long quiet life, and grow old, and let his glory go. He had glimpsed in his anger the value of the thing he had been about to throw away, and for one long night in his tent he chose, or thought he chose, the first fate, the length of days, the obscurity, the old age in his own bed. The Embassy went back empty-handed, and the men who heard their report were filled with despair. But the war did not let him keep that choice. The fighting grew worse. The Trojans broke through the Greek wall. They reached the ships. Hector laid his hands on the stern of one of the beached vessels and called for fire to burn the Greek fleet. The Greeks were on the very edge of destruction, and Patroclus, the gentle friend, the one who soothed where Achilles burned, could bear it no longer.

Patroclus came to Achilles weeping, the old poem says, weeping like a spring of dark water running down a rock, and Achilles, seeing him weep, asked him gently why he cried like a little girl running beside her mother and tugging at her gown and begging to be picked up. There is great tenderness in the question, even as it teases. And Patroclus told him, The best of the Greeks were wounded, and out of the fighting, the ships were about to burn. And how could Achilles sit here nursing his anger while his own people died?

And then Patroclus asked for a thing that would prove fatal. He asked to be allowed to put on Achilles' own armour, the divine armour, and to lead the Mermanns into battle himself, so that the Trojans, seeing that armour, would think that Achilles had returned and would be thrown into fear, and the ships might be saved. Achilles agreed. This is the hinge of the whole story, the small yes that turns everything. He would not go himself for his anger still held him. But he loved Patroclus, and he could not refuse him, and the ships truly were burning. So he gave his friend his own armour. He gathered the myrmidons, who had been idle as long as their lord was idle, and he sent them out under Patroclus' command. And he warned Patroclus with a strange foreboding to drive the Trojans back from the ships, and then to come straight back to win him honour but not to press on toward the city, not to seek glory on his own, because there were gods on the Trojan side, and Apollo above all loved the Trojans.

"'Come back,' he said. "'Save the ships and come back.' "'Do not go too far.' Petroclus led the Mermanns out, and at the sight of the famous armour the Trojans truly were thrown into fear, thinking Achilles had returned. The tide turned again. The Greeks rallied. The fire was driven back from the ships. Patroclus, in that bright terrible hour, fought better than he had ever fought, cutting through the Trojan ranks, driving them back across the plain. He had, the old singers say, his hour of glory, his Aristaea, the brief blaze in which a fighter rises above himself and does great deeds. And in the heat of it, in the joy and the fury of it, he forgot the warning. He did not turn back at the ships. He pressed on across the plain all the way to the walls of Troy itself, hunting for greater glory, doing exactly the thing Achilles had begged him not to do. We will pass the death of Patroclus gently, because the sleep story does not press the sharpest grief. We will only mark what happened, and we will mark it quietly." Beneath the walls of Troy, the god Apollo, who loved the city, came against Patroclus unseen, and struck him from behind, and dazed him, and loosened the divine armour from his body. A Trojan spearmen wounded him, and then Hector, the great prince of Troy, came and finished what the god had begun, and Petropolis fell, and as he died he spoke a prophecy, as the dying sometimes do in the old poems, telling Hector that his own death was not far off, that Achilles would come for him soon. Then the darkness closed over him, and the gentle friend was gone, and his body and the divine armour became the prize over which the two armies fought through the long red afternoon. There is a small image from that afternoon that the old singers could not bear to leave out, and it is one of the strangest and most moving in the whole poem.

The two immortal horses of Achilles, Xanthas and Baelias, the deathless horses that the the gods had given at his parents' wedding, stood apart from the fighting and wept. They had carried Petrotless into the battle, and now they stood with their heads bowed to the ground and their long manes trailing in the dust, and they would not move, and they wept as men weep, the tears running down from their immortal eyes, grieving for the gentle driver who would not come back to take the reins, even the deathless creatures who would never themselves know death were not spared the grief of it, the grief of those who were left behind.

Zeus himself looked down and pitied them, the old poem says, and wondered aloud why the gods had ever given deathless horses to a mortal man, only to let them share in the sorrows that mortals cannot escape. When the news reached Achilles, the old poem says that a black cloud of grief covered him. He poured dust over his own head and his fair face. He lay in the dust and tore his hair. He cried out so terribly that his mother heard him from the depths of the sea and all her sister-sea nymphs heard. And they rose up wailing from the grey water. Thetis came to her son and found him in the dust, and she knew, with the cold, clear knowledge of the gods, what this grief would mean. For there was one more thing she had not told him plainly until now, or that he had not let himself hear. It was fated that very soon after Hector died Achilles himself would die. The two jig deaths were bound together. To kill Hector was to seal his own death, and Achilles, hearing this, did not hesitate. The anger that had kept him from the war was gone, burned away in an instant, replaced by a far greater anger, the anger of grief. He said that he did not care about his own death anymore. He said he would go now and kill the man who had killed the friend he loved, and that he would accept his own death whenever the gods chose to send it. Because his friend was dead, and he had sat idle by the ships while it happened, and the long life he had glimpsed in his tent that night meant nothing to him now. He chose the second fate, finally and completely, not for glory this time, but for grief, and for the unbearable need to do something with the love that had nowhere left to go, but he had no armour, for the divine armour had been stripped from Patroclus' body and taken by Hector. So Thetis went up to Olympus once more, this time to the Forge of Hephaestus, the Smith God, the Maker of all the finest things the gods possess, and she begged him to make new armour for her son, knowing it would be the armour he wore to his death, making it anyway, because that is what a mother does, even a goddess mother even at the end. And Hephaestus, who owed Thetis an old kindness, set to work, and through the night he made a suit of armour more beautiful than any the world had seen.

The making of the shield of Achilles is one of the most beautiful passages in all the old poetry, and it is for tonight a gentle thing to rest the mind upon. For Hephaestus did not make a shield covered in scenes of war alone. He made upon its bronze the whole of the world. He made the earth, the sky, the sea, the tireless sun, the full moon and all the stars that crowned the heavens. He made two cities of mortal men. In one city there were weddings and feasts, brides led through the streets by torchlight and music and dancing, and an old dispute being settled peacefully by wise elders in the market-place.

In the other city there was a war, a siege, an ambush by a river. He made a field being ploughed, the dark earth turning behind the oxen. He made a king's estate at harvest, the reapers cutting the grain, the binders following, a feast being prepared under an oak. He made a vineyard heavy with dark grapes, and young men and girls carrying the sweet fruit in baskets while a boy played the lyre and sang. He made a herd of cattle and a pasture and a dancing floor where young men and women danced holding one another's wrists.

Turning, the old poem says, like a potter's wheel spinning true. And around the whole rim of the shield he made the great river of ocean, the stream that the old Greeks believed encircled the entire world. Think of that for a moment, as you lie there in the quiet. The armour the greatest warrior would wear to the bloodiest fighting of the war was decorated not with battle, but with the whole round of ordinary life, weddings and harvests and dances and the turning seasons and the great river flowing around the edge of everything.

The old singer who made that shield in his song was saying something he could not say any other way. All the small ordinary things, the ploughing and the dancing and the bringing in of the grapes, all the things that war interrupts and threatens and destroys, these are what the fighting is set against. The shield carries the world the warrior has left behind, will never return to, around the body of the man who has chosen glory over that world. It is the most peaceful object in the most violent story, and it rests at the very centre of the poem like a held breath.

In the morning Achilles put on the new armour. He and Agamemnon were reconciled. The old quarrel set aside, small now against the size of his grief. Briseyes was returned to him. The treasure was offered and hardly noticed, and Achilles went out to the war at last, after sitting idle for so long, and the fighting that followed was unlike anything that had come before, because now the greatest warrior of the age was on the field, and he was not fighting for honour or for spoils or for the cause of the Greeks. He was fighting because his friend was dead, and there is no fury in the world quite like that one. We will pass quickly and gently over the great rampage that followed, for it was terrible, and the sleep story turns its eyes away from the worst of it. We will say only that Achilles drove the Trojans before him across the whole plain, that he fought even the River Scamander when its waters rose against him choked with the slain, that the gods themselves came down and took sides and clashed above the battlefield. The Trojans fled before him toward their gates. And one by one the lesser fighters fell or fled, until at last only one man remained outside the walls of Troy to face him. That man was Hector.

The jewel of Achilles and Hector is the climax toward which the whole poem has been moving, But it is a strange and sorrowful thing, because the poem has made us no Hector, and love him almost more than it has made us love Achilles. For we have seen Hector inside the city, we have seen him with his wife Andromache and his infant son, in one of the tenderest scenes the old world ever made. We have seen the baby frightened by the great horsehair crest on his father's helmet, and Hector laughing and taking off the helmet and setting it shining on the ground and lifting his son in his arms, and praying that the boy might grow up to be a better man than his father.

We have seen him as a son, a husband, a father, the defender of his people, the one man holding the doomed city together, and now he stands alone outside the walls, and the greatest killer of the age is coming for him across the plain, bright and terrible in his god-made armour, swift as the dog-star rising in the late summer, a thing of beauty and of doom. Then Hector's courage failed him at the last sight of that approach. And he ran. Three times the two of them ran around the walls of Troy, the hunter and the hunted, while the gods watched from above and the people of Troy watched from the walls in horror.

And then the goddess Athena, who favoured the Greeks, worked a deception upon Hector. the shape of one of his brothers to make him believe he had support at his side, and so Hector turned and stood and faced Achilles and found himself alone. The help and illusion abandoned by the gods at the end as mortals so often are. They fought. We will not linger over the blows. Achilles found the gap, the place at the throat where the stolen armour, his own old armour, did not quite cover Hector's body, for Hector was wearing the very armour he had stripped from Patroclus, and Achilles knew its every joint and weakness because it had once been his own.

He drove his spear through that gap, and Hector fell. And as he died, Hector begged that his body be given back to his father and mother for proper burial, for the rights that the old world held sacred. And Achilles, still burning with the grief that had no bottom, refused him, and spoke cruelly to the dying man, and Hector, with his last breath, warned Achilles once more that his own death was near, that it would come at the Skyen Gate, by the hand of Paris and the god Apollo. Then the darkness closed over Hector II, and the noblest man of Troy was gone. What Achilles did next was the lowest point of his story, and the old poem does does not excuse it, though he understands it. In his grief and his rage he treated Hector's body without honour. He tied it behind his chariot and dragged it through the dust around the tomb of Patroclus day after day. This was not the act of the man Sharon had seized. It was the act of grief turned poisonous, of a man so broken by loss that he had lost his own nature, had forgotten the courtesies, had become cruel in the way that only the deeply wounded become cruel. The gods themselves looked down and were troubled. They had loved much about Achilles, but this they could not love. Even the body of an enemy deserved the rights of burial. Even in war there were things that must not be done. And Achilles was doing them, night after night, in the long darkness of his grief.

In the midst of this dark time, Achilles also did the thing the old world required for the friend he had lost. He built for Petropolis a great funeral pyre, and he gave him all the rights that Hector's body was being denied—the washing, the anointing, the long mourning, the burning, the careful gathering of the white bones. And when the burial was done he held funeral games in his friend's honour, as was the custom for a great man, and here for a little while something of the older Achilles returned. He set out rich prizes from his own store, tripods and cauldrons, horses and cattle, bars of iron and women skilled in fine work. And he called the best of the Greeks to compete. There was a chariot race across the plain, the teams thundering out to a far marker and back while the Kings called and wagered. There was a boxing match and a wrestling bout, a foot race, a contest with the spear, a throwing of a great weight of iron, and an archery contest at a dove tied to a distant mast. And in the giving of the prizes Achilles was generous and even wise, soothing the small quarrels that broke out among the competitors, honouring the old men, comforting those who lost, giving gifts even to some who had not won. It was as though in the ordered ceremony of the games he could find for one afternoon a way to be the courteous king that Charon had raised, the host who honours his guests, the man he had been before the grief came down. The games were a small island of order in the wide sea of his sorrow.

They did not heal him. But they showed that the healing was still possible, that the courtesy in him had not been destroyed, only buried, and that it could be called back up into the light when there was a fitting use for it. And so we come to the scene that the old singers thought was the truest and most beautiful thing in the whole long poem, the scene toward which everything has been moving, the scene that turns the warrior back into a man. It is a scene of two grieving people meeting in the dark, and it is, in its way, the gentlest ending a story of war could have.

One night the old King Prien, the father of Hector, the ruler of Troy, did an unimaginable thing. He left the safety of his city. He took a wagon loaded with treasure, a ransom for his son's body, and with only a single old driver he crossed the plain, in the dark, into the very camp of his enemies, into the tent of the man who had killed his son and was dragging his body in the dust. A god guided him safely through the Greek lines. And he came into the tent of Achilles, and he knelt before him, and he did the thing the old poem holds up as almost holy, he took the hands of Achilles, the terrible hands that had killed so many of his sons, and he kissed them. He kissed the hands that had killed his children, and he spoke to Achilles not as an enemy, but as one grieving man to another. He asked Achilles to think of his own father, Pelleus, far away in fear, an old man like Priam, who also waited for a son he would never see grow old. He asked Achilles to pity him, an old father come to beg for the body of his boy.

And something broke open in Achilles, the hard shell of grief and rage finally cracking, and he wept. He wept for his father, whom he would never see again. He wept for Petroclus, whom he had lost. And Priam wept for Hector. And the two of them, the old enemy king and the young warrior who had killed his son, sat together in the tent in the dark and wept, each for his own dead, and the weeping was the same weeping. And for that moment the the war was set aside. And there were only two human beings, sharing the oldest grief there is, the grief of those who go on living after the ones they love have died.

Then Achilles rose, and with his own hands he prepared Hector's body, and washed it and wrapped it, gently now the cruelty all spent, the grief turned at last into something that could recognize another's grief. He gave the body back to Priam for burial. He agreed to a truce, so that the Trojans could mourn their prince and build his funeral pyre and hold the rites the old world held sacred. And he fed the old king, and made him a bed in the tent, and let him sleep, the father resting in the tent of his son's killer, for that one night under the strange truce of shared sorrow. And in the morning Priam took his son's body home, and the old poem, the Iliad, ends not with the fall of Troy, not with the death of Achilles, but quietly, with the funeral of Hector. The breaker of horses mourned within the walls of the city he had died defending. The old singers ended it there on purpose, and it is worth pausing on why. They could have told of the city's fall. They could have told of Achilles' own death. Instead they chose to end with two grieving men weeping together in a tent, and with the burial of an enemy treated, at the last with honour. They were saying that the deepest truth of the whole long story of wrath was not in the killing, but in the moment the wrath was finally laid down. The anger of Achilles opened the poem, his grief deepened it, and his pity, his shared tears with the father of the man he had killed, closed it. The greatest warrior became greatest.

In the end, not when he killed Hector, but when he gave Hector back. The death of Achilles himself, which the Iliad does not tell, came soon after, exactly as the prophecies had said. The story was sung in other poems, the ones that told the parts of the war the great poem left out. After Hector's funeral the fighting resumed. Achilles performed still more great deeds. He faced an Amazon queen named Penthesilea who had come to fight for Troy, and he killed her. And the old story says that as she died he looked into her face and was struck with sorrow for her beauty and her courage. Grieving even as he conquered, The gentleness Charon had taught him surfacing again beneath the warrior.

He faced Memden, a son of the Dawn, a great fighter from a distant land, and killed him too. And then, near the sky and gate of Troy, exactly where the dying Hector had foretold it, the end came. Paris, the Trojan prince, whose carrying away of Helen had begun the whole war, the least warlike of Priam's sons, drew his bow. And the god Apollo, who had never ceased to love Troy, and to hate the man who had killed so many Trojans, guided the arrow, and the arrow flew. And it struck Achilles in the one place where he could be wounded, the heel his mother's had covered when she dipped him in the dark river so long ago, the one small place the protecting water had never touched. And the greatest warrior of the age, who no spear had been able to pierce, who had fought rivers and faced gods, was brought down by an arrow in the heel, the small floor, the gap his mother could not close, the mortality that had always been waiting in that one untouched place.

The Greeks fought a long, bitter battle over his body as they had over the body of Patroclus, and at last they bore it back to the ships. His goddess mother Thetis came up out of the once more, with all her sister-nymphs, and they mourned him on the shore, and the muses themselves sang the lament, and for seventeen days and nights the old story says, gods and mortals wept for Achilles together. They burned his body on a great pyre, and they gathered his white bones, and they mixed them, as he had asked, with the bones of Petroclus, so that the two friends who had been parted in life by death would lie together in death in a single golden urn, never to be parted again. They raised a great mound over the urn on a headland by the sea, where it could be seen far off by sailors passing on the water so that the name of Achilles would not fade from the memory of those who came after.

He had chosen the second fate, the short bright life, and the undying name. And the name did not fade. It has not faded yet. We are speaking it tonight, three thousand years on, in a language he never knew, in a land he never imagined, and his name is still bright, and the bargain he made on the sure as a young man has in its strange way been kept. There was one last sorrow in the tale after his death, and it is a quiet one. His divine armour, the god-made armour that Hephaestus had forged, was to be given to the best of the Greeks who remained. Two men One claimed it, Odysseus the Cleverist and the Great Aax, the strongest and most steadfast, the man who had carried Achilles' body from the field. The army awarded the armour to Odysseus, for his cunning was judged more valuable to the war than the strength of Ajax.

And Ajax, the honest plane-fighter, was so wounded by the dishonour, so broken by the public stripping away of his due, that his mind gave way, and he took his own life. It is a small, terrible echo of the very thing that began the whole story. The quarrel over honour, the prize awarded to one and denied to another, the wound that is not in the body but in the standing of a man before his fellows. The war that began with Achilles' discommod ended, for Ajax with the same wound and the same darkness.

Good evening and welcome back if your mind has wandered through the long plain of the The figures have multiplied, the goddess of the sea, given unwilling to a mortal man, the wedding on the mountain, and the golden apple rolled among the guests. The infant dipped in the dark river, all but one small heel. The boy on Mount Pelion, fed for courage, the liar running down the deer. The choice between the two fates, the long life forgotten, and the short life remembered, the youth hidden in a disguise on Skyros, found out by a sword laid among the soft goods, the long siege, the stolen prize, the wrath, the withdrawal to the ships, the friend in the borrowed armour going too far, the shield with the whole world upon it, the jewel at the walls, the old king kissing the hands that killed his son, the arrow in the heel. Let those images settle, like stones settling to the bed of a clear River finding their places one by one in the long record of his story.

There is a meaning the Greeks drew from the life of Achilles, and it is worth holding for a moment before we let the whole story loosen towards sleep. He was the greatest of warriors, and yet the poem about him is not really a celebration of war. It is, if a long meditation on what war costs. Achilles got everything he chose. He got the glory, he got the undying name, he got the bright brief burning instead of the long slow fade. And the poem asks very quietly, never insisting whether it was worth it. It shows him in his tent in the Embassy scene, glimpsing the other life, the long, quiet life in Pathea, the old age, the children, and finding it suddenly precious, and it takes that life away from him by his own choice made twice over, once for honor and once for grief.

The Greeks did not give an easy answer. They held up the bargain and let each listen away it. It simply was, in the old Greek understanding, that a human life cannot hold every good thing at once. To reach for one is to release another. Achilles reached for the bright name, and let the long years go, and the singers neither praised nor blamed him for it, but only showed it clearly the way a thing is shown that is too large to judge. Most of us are not asked to make the choice so starkly. Most of us live somewhere in the middle, with some glory and some quiet, some years and some forgetting. But the choice is in every life, scaled down, made daily, the reaching and the releasing, and that is why the story of Achilles has lasted. It is not only about a hero, it is about the price of wanting things, and the way that every yes is also a no to something else.

And there is the other meaning, the gentler one. The one held in the tent at the end, for all his fury, for all the killing, the truest moment of the hero's life was not a moment of strength. It was a moment of shared weeping with an old man who had every reason to be his enemy. It was the moment the warrior remembered that the man across from him was also a son, also a father, also a creature who grieved. The Greeks thought this was the highest thing a person could reach, higher than any victory. The moment of seeing the enemy as a fellow sufferer, and laying the anger down, and weeping together for all that the living must lose. Achilles reached it once, in the dark, in a tent by the sea, and the old singers thought that one moment redeemed a great deal.

The night is older now, and the story has carried us far. Let us gather the figures and let them settle. Thetis rising silver from the grey sea to sit beside her grieving sun on the sand, Pelius on the lonely shore, holding fast to the shape-changing goddess until she consented. The cave of Sharon high on Mount Pelian, full of herbs and music and the patient teaching of the old centaur, the infant held by the heel above the dark water of the sticks. The two fates laid out like two roads from a single doorway, the long dim one and the short bright one, the island of Skyros, the disguise, the sword that gave him away.

The fifty ships of the Mermanns drawn up on the long shore, Patroclus the gentle friend, Listening to the lyre in the tent, Brissai's the prize who's taking opened the wound. Agamemnon in his pride and the priest of Apollo turned away, and the nine days of plague arrows falling on the camp. The wrath and the great oath and the withdrawal to the ships. The embassy by night, the treasure refused, the long life glimpsed and almost chosen. The friend in the borrowed armour, the bright hour, the warning forgotten, the fall beneath the walls, the black cloud of grief, and the dust poured over the fair head, the forge of Hephaestus, and the shield with the whole round world upon it, the weddings and the harvest and the dancing floor and the great river flowing around the rim.

the jewel at the Skyen Gate, the old king crossing the dark plain alone, the hands kissed, the tears shared, the body given back with honour, the funeral of Hector, breaker of horses, the arrow guided to the one small heel, the two friends mixed together in a single golden urn, the great mound on the headland watched by sailors on the sea. These are the figures of Achilles' story, and you do not have to hold them. They are mentioned only so that they may settle. Let the names drift down like leaves into water. Let the images soften. Let the long story of the swift-footed hero become a quiet wait in the room, the way bronze armour laid down beside a banked fire is a quiet wait. Warm from the day, but no longer asked to do anything, no longer raised against anyone, only resting in the dark. Now let the story loosen, the way every long-telling must when sleep approaches. Let the ships rest on the long shore, drawn up on the dark sand, their work of crossing done. Let the plain before Troy lie empty and quiet under the stars, the dust settled, no chariot crossing it, no spear raised upon it. Let the great walls of the city stand in the moonlight, the watchmen drowsing at their posts, the rights within groan still. Let Hector sleep in his tomb within the walls he died defending, mourned and honoured, the rights all properly done. Let Patroclus and Achilles rest together in their single urn beneath the great mound on the headland the two friends no longer The grief between them, healed by the only thing that heals such grief, which is the lying down at last in the same quiet ground.

Let the shield of Hephaestus lean against the tent wall, the whole world it carries gone quiet too, the painted plowmen resting from the furrow, the painted dancers stilled in their turning. The painted river of ocean, flowing softly around the rim of everything, let Thetis sink back beneath the grey water to the halls of her father, her grief carried down into the deep, where the old sea-powers keep their long silences. Let Charon, far away on his mountain, lay Lay aside his lyre for the night, The last of his pupils gone now into the songs.

Let the immortal horses graze In some quiet meadow, unharnest, the war forgotten. Let the bow of Paris hang unstrung. Let the arrow rest. Let the heel be only a heel again, A small ordinary part of a body long since laid to rest. Good evening and welcome back, one last time, to the slow, gentle work of letting the story rest. The night has carried Achilles a long way. From the unwilling wedding of a sea goddess, to a great mound on a headland watched by passing sailors. There are many other tellings of him, many other deeds, many other companions and enemies, and small, bright moments the songs preserved. But that is a story for another day. The plane of his mythology is wide enough that no single night can walk all its paths. There is a final image the old singers like to leave with their listeners at the end of an Achilles story. It is the image of the The great mound by the sea, raised over the golden urn on the headland above the water where the two armies had fought for ten years.

The war is long over. Troy has fallen and been rebuilt and fallen again. The kings who fought there are dust. But the mound is still there, in the old imagination, and the sea still moves below it, grey and silver, the same sea that Thetis came from, the same sea that carried the ships, the same sea that will be moving long after all of us are gone. And on the mound the grass grows, and the wind passes over it, and far out on the water a ship goes by. And a sailor lifts his eyes and sees the mound on the headland and says, quietly, to whoever stands beside him, that is the tomb of Achilles. And the name is spoken once more, as it has been spoken for three thousand years, and the bargain holds, and the bright brief life is remembered again, for one more moment on one more passing ship under one more evening sky. For now, remember this, tonight the work of the tale is done. It simply was, like all old stories, the carrying of the swift-footed hero through the long inheritance of knights. Let the name settle. Let the room settle.

Let the knight gather you up. Imagine the long shore before Troy far behind you, the and the plain and the high walls and the great mound by the sea, no longer pressing on your thoughts. In your mind, reach back and close an invisible door to the field of the war, feeling it move on silent hinges, sealing the wrath, the grief, the shield, the friendship and the shared tears of two grieving men in calm and order. Then see a single candle, its flame steady in the darkness. With a slow, gentle breath, blow that candle out, and let the last curl of light fade into the night.

Rest well. Sleep deeply. And let the ancient stories carry you into the night. You