Part 2

As Achilles’s sacrifice of Patroclus is analogous to Agamemnon’s of Iphigeneia, so are its causes. The sacrifice is overdetermined—that is, it has more than one sufficient reason—like other events in the history of the curse; for example, the death of Agamemnon. Grinding with exactness, the daimôn insures against human caprice. Let me review some of the causes.

(1) First, a kind of formal cause: the well-timed interference I spoke of at the end of the last lecture. When the fleet is about to sail for Troy, the omen of the eagles and the hare prevents it; when Achilles is about to enter the battle, Patroclus forestalls him. In each case the one in command then learns what he has to do, what leadership entails: Agamemnon, from the seer Calchas; Achilles, from far-seeing Nestor, speaking through Patroclus. Each is compelled to act; neither grasps the consequences of his deed. —Is the fatal timing mere literary contrivance? No, that is the way things are: when we “think to burst out into sudden blaze, / Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears…”

Next, some more conventional causes. (2) The shame of dishonor: Agamemnon shamed Achilles at the assembly, so Achilles asked his due honor of Thetis, and she appealed to Zeus. Paris dishonored the table of hospitality in the house of Agamemnon and Menelaus (401, 412, 703), and Zeus (of hospitality, ξένιος 61, 362, 748) bent his bow at him (362). (3) The specific dishonor of the abduction of a young wife, for whom one had toiled. (“Toil” means trouble and suffering: love’s labors lost. The words are πόνος and μόγος, with their cognates.) As we know, wife and child go together; the toil is like that of rearing. Achilles, who took Briseis “after much toil“ (πολλὰ μογήσας 2.690, cf. μόγησα 1.162) has cared for the army, you recall, like a mother bird for her chicks—rather as Phoenix toiled for the infant Achilles, now heedless of advice (εμόγησα 9.492). The Atreidae having lost Helen are like birds that have “lost their toil of watching over their nurslings’ nest” (πόνον 53), or Artemis robbed of the pregnant hare she pities; and Agamemnon wounded suffers like a woman in labor, feeling sharp pains like the birth pangs sent by the goddesses of childbirth (the Eileithyae, whose epithet is μογοστόκοι [< μόγος “toil,” “trouble”] “of birth-pangs“ 11.270)—that is, his trouble recalls the wretched [μογεράν 136] hare’s. (In this connection cf. Hera’s toil [πόνον … μόγωι 4.26-27] for the army, which, she complains, is made vain by Zeus; and the saw …μάτην ὁ μόχθος [Ch 520; see LS on μόχθος = μόγος compared with πόνος].) (4) Solidarity with the host of Greeks, which Agamemnon felt at Aulis (λιπόναυς 212). Achilles (himself a kind of λιπόναυς) already felt it for Aias at the end of the embassy (9.644), and now seemingly feels it for the suffering Greeks (16.67; does he think of Aias 102?); but he is of two minds (16.52), and the fire is not there yet. (5) Self-interest, apart from considerations of vengeance: how can Agamemnon lead the “thousand-ship expedition” (45) and conquer Troy? He will take Briseis to show Achilles how far superior he is to him (1.184). How can Achilles get back in the fight, to his proper job as the warrior he is? And as Phoenix points out, he will be sorry when the army is destroyed (11.763). Each must save the expedition to pursue his own ends. But the pursuit of advantage is always formally subordinated to loftier aims.

(6) Lastly, the mysterious thing, or divinity, called  Ἄτη (Ᾱ), the blindness that impairs judgment, that leads men to outrageous acts, which Achilles identifies in Agamemnon, praying to his mother to bring Zeus to arrange it that “the son of Atreus … may know his blindness (γνῶι … ἥν ἄτην) in that he honored the best of the Achaeans not at all“ (1.411–12 = 16.273­–4). Adverting not to this, but to the promise of sacking Troy, Agamemnon twice in the same words declares that “Zeus has entangled (or ensnared) me in heavy (or grievous) atê“; the first time insincerely to test the troops, the second time weeping before the panicked assembly (Ζεύς με … ἄτηι ἐνέδησε [< ἐνδέω] βαρείηι 2.111, 9.18). Only later, when Achilles is ready to fight, does Agamemnon blame Atê (not himself) for his strife with Achilles (19.86ff): “eldest daughter of Zeus,“ he says, she beset his mind when he took Briseis; he does not mention his sacrifice of his own daughter. But he illustrates the power of Atê by the tale of how she blinded Zeus on the occasion of the birth of Heracles, so that “he seized Atê by her bright-tressed head, angered in his mind, and swore a mighty oath that never again to Olympus and the starry heaven should Atê come, who blinds all. So said he, and whirling (περιστρέψας) her in his hand flung her from the starry heaven, and quickly she came to the tilled fields of men. At thought of her would he ever groan, when he saw his dear son in disgraceful toil at Eurystheus’ tasks” (19.126). (In this connection we might think of Achilles toiling for Agamemnon.) Briseis can return to Achilles, but Iphigeneia will no more come again to Agamemnon than Atê to Zeus’s heaven.

So much for the Atê that Achilles perceived in Agamemnon. As for himself, Phoenix warns him that she is strong and fleet of foot; if Achilles denies the Prayers (Λιταί), Atê will catch him (9.502ff, cf. A 1124). But that is what his refusal to fight amounts to, denial of prayers; Atê could never have caught the swift-footed one if he had been active, but in his stillness he is lost. As he waits to hear the fate of Patroclus he remembers his mother’s words, that “the best man of the Myrmidons“ (18.12) would be slain; too late he knows his error, a misinterpretation that served his obsession. An anxious parent, he suspected that Patroclus would go too far (16.89ff), but Atê must have overridden his fear; later he acknowledges his friend “foolhardy” (18.13 σχέτλιος “hard to turn,” “stubborn”)—which he had known all along. Only after Agamemnon swears (truly or not) his mighty oath that he has never touched Briseis (19.258ff)—and the sacrificed boar is whirled about (ἐπιδινήσας) and flung into the sea, like Atê cast out of heaven—but then immediately, does Achilles all but acknowledge his own possession by Atê (19.270). The universal daimôn Atê (769) and the particular daimôn of the house of Atreus belong together: the one is brought on by the other, and the result is ruin (by the time of Aeschylus the sense of atê seems to have broadened somewhat to include its calamitous effect). As Agamemnon felt the weight of “heavy Atê,” so the Chorus understands Cassandra to tell of the “great daimôn heavy in wrath” of the house of Atreus, “insatiable of ruinous fate” (μέγαν … δαίμονα … βαρύμηνιν … ἀτηρᾶς τύχας ἀκόρεστον, 1481). It was Atê that drove Paris (6.356, 24.28, v.l. ἀρχῆς in both places; 386ff); the lion cub of the Chorus’s fable becomes a slaughtering priest of Atê (735); the house is said to suffer Atê’s bloody stroke (Ch 467).

Patroclus is sacrificed, after Zeus is obliged to lose his son Sarpedon to him, thus making his own child-sacrifice in the name of fate. And when Achilles gets the news—from Nestor’s son—he dies, in symbol, stripped of his armor, down on the earth like a felled warrior: having poured dust on his head, “in the dust he lay outstretched, mighty in his mightiness” (18.23ff). In consequence of the deception he was party to, he enters the gates of Hades. The description recalls Hector’s charioteer Cebriones that Patroclus slew, of whom we read, “in the whirl (ἐν στροφάλιγγι) of dust he lay mighty in his mightiness, forgetful of his horsemanship” (16.775); and indeed, down in Hades toward the end of the Odyssey Agamemnon describes Achilles slain in these very same words (Odyssey 24.39; μεγαλωστί, “in mightiness,” occurs only in these three places), as though the dead hero had been a charioteer. So he was, in the simile of the mother and daughter, where Achilles carried Patroclus—that is, bore him into the field of death. And when Achilles is about to enter that field in the chariot driven by Automedon (who had driven Patroclus, 16.219, 472, 684, 864), in addressing his horses he uses the word that elsewhere means “charioteer” (ἡνιοκῆα < ἡνιοκεύς 19.401) with evident reference to himself.

I mention another view of Patroclus: since Achilles is like a charioteer, Patroclus can be associated with Achilles’ trace-horse Pedasus which “being but mortal, kept pace with immortal steeds” (16.152), in the same way as Patroclus undertakes to fight in the place of Achilles; then Pedasus is slain in Patroclus’s stead by Sarpedon (16.464; the horse’s name reversed), as Patroclus is in turn slain in Achilles’ stead. In view of Achilles’ simile, perhaps Πήδασος may suggest παῖδος, a form of the word for child. In any case, the trace-horse is significant, because the only specific horses killed, or even wounded, in the Iliad are two trace-horses (though Aias kills “horses,” 11.497); this is manifestly absurd, and besides, on the battlefield “the single trace-horse looks particularly impractical, and may have been imported from chariot racing“ (Kirk’s commentary 8.87–89); the poet is using them to stand in for the main horses, whose deaths like Achilles’ are omitted. Thus a trace-horse is a sacrificial animal, which is what Patroclus is. —Without going into detail I’ll briefly note two other points. First, traces and trace-horses, whenever mentioned, are associated with Nestor; the previous slain one was his (8.80 ff); he cut away its traces, as he was to prepare the severing of Patroclus from Achilles. Secondly, in chariot racing the trace-horse gets you round the bend, past the difficult place (cf. 344). That is what Nestor does; he is the trace-horse for the Iliad as a whole, he moves it out of deadlock. Patroclus specifically does it for Achilles, gets him back into the fight; Odysseus does it for Agamemnon, gets him into Troy—by means of a horse; that may be why Agamemnon back at Argos calls him his trace-horse (σειραφόρος 842).

To return to the symbolic death of Ac: when he goes lamenting to his mother she says, “the things have been brought to fulfillment for you / by Zeus,” as he had prayed (τὰ μὲν δή τοι τετέλεσται / ἐκ Διός—enclitic τοι = σοί); and he responds, “the things indeed the Olympian fulfilled for me” (τὰ μὲν ἄρ᾽ μοι Ὀλύμπιος ἐξετέλεσσεν, 18.74ff); but Patroclus is dead, whom, he says, “I honored … equally with myself” (literally, “my head,” ἶσον ἐμῆι κεφαλῆι 18.82; the arrow of Paris struck Nestor’s trace-horse on the head, 8.81). Thus the sacrifice of Patroclus, by which Achilles has doomed himself, is a kin- or self-murdering (αὐτοφόνος) deed, the kind that Cassandra will recognize as characteristic of the house of Atreus (1091). The fulfillment of the prayer is in fact a formal end of the first Achilles, whom we may now call Achilles1, although he will persist and recur in powerful lives after this ending, so that to dispatch him finally will be a labor of more than one hand. Achilles1 fought for Agamemnon, he sacrificed one equal to himself, and now he is complete; so Achilles must be reborn, and so he is: ὄρσεο, “Rise up,” says Iris (sent by Hera) (aor. impv. m. ὄρνυμι, 18.170); ἀλλ᾽ ἄνα, μηδ᾽ ἔτι κεῖσο, “But up then, lie here no longer” (18.178); so he ὦρτο, “rose up” (18.203), like the child-avenging wrath Calchas warned of; rose up naked—not clothed in armor, though Athena like a mother put the aegis on him—and screaming, like an infant that will become the warrior we may call Achilles2.

This one carries not a beloved child, but the spear given his father by Cheiron, who taught Achilles medicine; that craft he could pass on to his comrade, but the spear was too heavy for Patroclus (16.140, 19.388), as the new shield “great and sturdy” (19.373) would have been, laden as it was with the world, a representation beyond the hero’s understanding. Alone with Patroclus he suffered a human solitude, now in the midst of the host he alone exists in a quasi-divine isolation. When he shows himself to the Trojans fire flares from his head like beacons making appeal from an island city under siege (18.206), and later the gleam from his shield is like a fire in a lonely mountain farmhouse seen from afar by sailors (19.375). Meat and drink are not for him; Zeus orders nectar and ambrosia to be dropped into his breast (19.209, 303, 319, 345ff). But to realize his power is not easy: it will be hard for him to become Achilles2. —I remark that Achilles is usually regarded as single, Odysseus as multiple; rather, Achilles is at least double, while Odysseus is always the same.

By his appearance and outcry Achilles has saved Patroclus’s body, and of course he aims to avenge Patroclus, to make amends to him, by killing Hector; but to attain that object he will have to perform two still more daunting tasks. Having imitated Agamemnon in sacrificing his dear one, he now will follow him in striving, if not to undo the act, at any rate to renounce the actor. And as he could only learn the meaning of his prayer to Zeus by seeing it granted, so it is in pursuit of his purpose that he discovers what that implies. The first of his tasks is to undo his time of idleness by a slaughter that sets him quite apart from all the other heroes, even the once seemingly matchless Diomedes, not to mention mighty Patroclus himself; the second is to repudiate the guilty self-regarding hero he has been, to destroy the past Achilles1 in the form of the figure that slew Patroclus and wears his old armor, which is Hector. The latter task is the more surprising; but as already observed, self-slaying is regular enough. Not only does Achilles doom himself, more remotely by sacrificing Patroclus, and immediately by killing Hector (18.95); Agamemnon did likewise, according to Clytaemestra (1397); so did Clytaemestra, according to Orestes (Ch 923); and of course the Furies say the same of Orestes (E 264, etc.). Each of these tasks will try Achilles to the utmost; neither can he accomplish alone. And in each he confronts a masked figure—he that hates as the gates of Hades one who conceals his meaning.

As he begins his slaying, he experiences repetition, recalling his repeated fruitless labors for Agamemnon (1.163)—repetition strangely reiterated. (1) Apollo sends Aeneas against him, who complains that he has narrowly escaped him once before, saved by Zeus (20.89); when they meet, Achilles reminds him of that (20.187); and in danger again this time Aeneas is whisked away by Poseidon, who also (2) returns Achilles’ thrown spear to him, as though it had never been hurled (20.323); he beholds it with astonishment. (3) Encountering Hector (whose spear also returns, this one ineffectually at the breath of Athena), Achilles attacks him again and again, four times, thwarted each time by Apollo. (4) As he goes about his slaying, his horses trample the dead and their shields like bulls treading barley in a threshing floor (20.495)—which surely means that they go round and round. (5) Then he forces half of the Trojans into the river Scamander, where they too go round and round, “whirled about in the eddies” (ἑλισσόμενοι περὶ δἰνας 21.11). (6) And he comes upon Lycaon, somehow returned from the slavery into which Achilles had sold him, a revenant like Banquo’s ghost to Macbeth, there to be conquered over again—“Even the great-hearted Trojans I have slain will rise up again!” he exclaims (ἀναστήσονται 21.55); but this time he corrects his earlier failure to slay, (7) telling Lycaon, θάνε καὶ σύ, “you too die,” like Patroclus, and as Achilles himself will, repeating the lot of mortals.

Then he fills the river with corpses, and it rises against him. Now a striking thing about that river is its eddies, its deep eddies, alluded to no fewer than 22 times, 17 of them in this twenty-first book. (“Eddy” is δινή; the root is -δῑν-.) Four other rivers are called eddying in the Iliad—three of them once each, and the fourth, which shares the divine name Xanthus (20.74) with the Scamander, twice (one in the catalogue of ships, 2.753; one of them by Achilles vaunting over a fallen foe, 20.392; another, the ancestor of  someone he is about to fight, 21.143; and Lycian Xanthus, 2.877, 5.479)—so mention of the feature is to be expected; but with Scamander in the present episode the poet calls attention to it with a frequency beyond all apparent need. I regard this as significant, profoundly symbolic of the plight of Achilles. The Scamander, I want to say, besides being a river and a god (son of Zeus 14.434, etc.), represents Time, both time in itself and time experienced; as the latter of which, at any rate, it has a direction, but not an equable flow. I don’t know how old the notion of “Time’s fleeting river” (Shelley) may be, although the famous saying of Heraclitus certainly suggests it. But Achilles, who knows that his time is short, is undoing his past existence that led to the death of his friend by filling the river with the corpses he owed, and this is an affront to Time, for which the past is settled. Then his existence was static, a mental circling round and round his offense, like the robbed birds over their nest, while he stayed literally and figuratively in the same place; that is, it was the state of a man trapped in an eddy of time, repeating in speech that was only song deeds of the past without using them (as Nestor does) to advance. Therefore Atê caught him, and in his blindness he condemned his friend; now the river, whose deep nature he cannot recognize, will rise up against him, aiming to restore order by entrapping him in its eddies.

The river has called on Achilles to leave off filling it with dead, and he has just agreed (21.223), when it complains to Apollo that he is not protecting the Trojans; and seemingly Achilles continues to hear its voice as it addresses the god, for he acts to defy it, leaping into the middle of the stream (ἔνθορε μέσσωι 21.233), thereby challenging the authority of Time. This is to claim a poet’s privilege, to take charge of the narrative (remember Achilles’ poetical nature) like Homer beginning his work—ἄειδε, θεἀ, … ἐξ οὗ δὴ … ; but it is not his to command: “O let not Time deceive you,/ You cannot conquer Time” (Auden)—and the river rushes upon him, with an angry gesture that asserts the real difference between past and present: it casts out the dead and saves the living (21.237). Springing out from the eddy Achilles flies, but he has dammed the river (21.242ff) that he has defied, so it behaves unnaturally in answer to his challenge, leaving its banks to pursue him. Unnaturally, I say, because a river should not move, only its waters go by; likewise for time, which is swift in the sense that its parts are quickly past. “All-powerful time,” says old Oedipus, “confounds (συγκεῖ) all things” save only the gods—pours them together, that is, a liquid metaphor—for “measureless time in its going brings forth countless nights and days” (μυρίας ὁ μυρίος / χρόνος  τεκνοῦται νύκτας ἡμέρας τ᾽ ἰών) in which to undo them (Oedipus at Colonus 607), so Achilles tells Lycaon that “There will come a dawn or evening or midday, when my life too will some man take in battle” (21.111)—the final portion of time for him, when “time that gave doth now his gift confound.” That is how time is meant to behave.

All Achilles’ fleetness cannot save him, any more than his team will be able to outrun the arrow of Paris and Apollo when that dawn or evening or midday arrives: “We could run swift as the West Wind’s blast,” says the horse Xanthus, which shares the river’s divine name, and still you would perish (19.415). In his present plight “the river was ever wearing out his knees” (γούνατ᾽ ἐδάμνα 21.270), eating away the ground from under his feet (“ground” is κονίη, elsewhere “dust,” cf. διψία κόνις “thirsty dust“ 495—so, the dry earth that affords footing)—which is to render him old, for strength is in the knees, and the old lose it. Thus, e.g., Agamemnon wishes that Nestor’s knees would keep up with his spirit (4.313), and Achilles speaks of how he will be as long as he is alive and his knees move, i.e. do their part—until, that is, “His Golden lockes, Time hath to Silver turn’d,” as it has done to Nestor’s.

So he has confronted this most formidable of opponents, Time itself, that devours all that is, here below (tempus edax rerum, tuque, invidiosa vetustas, Ovid Met. 15.234); with which, it may be said, Achilles’ history from first to last displays a strong connection; above all, showing him subject to that Homeric specialty, delay, the suspension of action. It is nine days before he calls the assembly (1.53), after a weary time at Troy (2.134); he must wait for the gifts Athena promises (1.205, 213), hence wait with Zeus for the fire to reach the ships, and then wait again to enter battle; then he must wait for news of Patroclus (18.3), and wait to honor him with funeral rites (18.333); and so on, right up to his last words, to “hold back the battle for such time as you [Priam] command” (24.670). And now he has to wait for another devourer, that like Time confounds as well as bringing forth—the fire of Hephaestus, forger of the shield, already matched against Xanthus for the coming battle of the gods (20.7, 32, 73)—to chasten the river of Time. Achilles prays to Zeus to stop the unnatural onrush of time that is frustrating his mother’s promise (21.273), and the immortals act to consume the one devourer with the other. So Time returns to its nature, and thereby Troy is doomed; Achilles has vanished from the scene, only to return after the gods conclude their strife to cause toil and woe like smoke from a burning city (21.520). —A further word about this pair, Time and Fire. Each would destroy with finality, but neither is wholly successful in that aim. Achilles1, I have said, whose time is past, will yet return; and as the Chorus assures Orestes about Agamemnon, “The spirit (or mind, φρόνημα) of the dead is not subdued by fire’s ravening jaw” (Ch 324, cf. πῦρ ἐσθίει 23.182).

I now pass to Achilles’ final encounter with Hector, a new revenant, the figure of his former self Achilles1, whom he pursues around Troy, in a new eddying motion like the stopping of Time. If undoing past idleness was an affront to Time, reaching into the past to abolish one’s perished self would surely be something more. Time prevents me from trying to do justice to this terrific climax of the epic, but I want to address the part that seems most closely connected to the foregoing account.

Achilles leapt daringly into the middle of the river of Time, which is where we find ourselves every day, and the whole stream pursued him, bearing the dead within it (21.235, 302, 325). Its unnatural assault gave the hero a glimpse, Nietzsche might say, of the horror that lies under the bright surface; Achilles was given to know time as the rétiaire infâme that casts the inescapable net. Now we go deeper still. Achilles and Hector set off running, and come at once “to the two fair-flowing fountains, where well up the two springs that feed eddying Scamander. The one flows with warm water, and round about it smoke goes up from it as from a blazing fire, while the other even in summer flows cold as hail or chill snow or ice that water forms.” These springs are not in the middle of the stream. They are the very sources of Time; hence they lie “at the sources of the poem,” to borrow a phrase from Paul Valéry. How this is so will be clarified by a passage from my book with Hugh McGrath on a work of that poet.

The ordered whole [or The world, kosmos], the same for all, neither any of the gods nor any man made, but it ever was and is and will be, fire everliving, kindled in measures and quenched in measures.” Thus enigmatic Heraclitus, who in another fragment says, “The same … living and dead and the waking and the sleeping and young and old. For the latter transferred [or changed] are the former, and the former transferred are again the latter.” As Charles H. Kahn interprets this, “Such reversals constitute the very principle of cosmic order. More specifically, these three pairs define the structure of human experience as an alternating pattern of being kindled and going out.” They fall under “the general law of nature with its rhythmic alternation between opposite poles”; in other words, “the regular pendulum swing back and forth between opposites, the endless recurrence of ‘everliving fire’ in the same forms.” And Kahn proposes that when Heraclitus says, “Lifetime [aiōn] is a child at play, playing pessoi [a board game],” the same idea is intended: moving pieces back and forth, taking turns, starting a new game when the old one is concluded. Here the word aiōn can mean, besides “lifetime” or “life,” a “(long) space of time,” an “age”; cognate with aiei, “always,” “forever,” it came to mean “time” (chronos), and later “eternity”: our time (chronos), explains Plato’s Timaeus, is a moving likeness of the eternity (aiōn) that belongs to the nature of the intelligible kosmos.

To the anthropologist E. R. Leach the “pendulum view of time, […] the notion that time is a ‘discontinuity of repeated contrasts’ is probably the most elementary and primitive of all ways of regarding time.

That is why it is when the runners come to the springs for the last time that Zeus lifts up his golden scales: he is acknowledging the ultimate contrast between the heat of life and the chill of death that mortals alone know, creatures of time that they are—and as such, subjects of poetry.

At length divine deception releases the force of Achilles2, and he slays his enemy, thinking to put an end to the one who was guilty of denying the Prayers that alone thwart Atê. But on the point of death Hector warns that he may become “a cause of the gods’ wrath” against Achilles when Paris and Apollo slay him (22.358), θεῶν μήνιμα (μήνῑμα only here in Iliad, once in Odyssey by the shade of Elpenor): the term is from μῆνις, but suggests μιμνήσκω, “remember,” as well; thus Hector is warning that wrath remains in memory; as we recall, Calchas at Aulis had feared the μνάμων μῆνις τεκνόποινος, the “child-avenging remembering wrath” (155). “Lie dead,” Achilles replies, “my fate will I accept (δέξομαι) when Zeus is minded to bring it to pass and the other immortal gods” (22.365). But far from leaving Hector to lie, Achilles then drags him behind his chariot, carrying him through the field, thereby taking the place of Hector’s slain charioteer, the one who died in the dust before Achilles1 did so; and then he lays the body on its face in the dust.

Now the funeral of Patroclus is due, but there is delay, and his ghost grows impatient; and then Achilles must wait yet again, and pray, before the fire will begin to burn the pyre (23.192). The North Wind and the West Wind are summoned from their home in Thrace (23.200, 229; they “blow from Thrace” 9.5), whence came the wind that held the fleet at Aulis (193); that wind brought about the sacrifice of Iphigeneia (cf. 1418), these complete the sacrifice of Patroclus. Not only does Achilles follow Agamemnon in sacrifice and its attempted reversal; he even shares some of the king’s experience in detail. Soon Achilles is exalted far above Agamemnon at the funeral games; but when they are over he cannot sleep for memories of Patroclus. He keeps turning (ἐστρέφετ’) this way and that, then rises up to wander in an eddying motion (ὀρθὸς ἀναστὰς / δινεύεσκ’) along the shore; and when dawn comes he finds himself obsessively repeating the circular course, dragging unforgotten Hector around the burial mound—three times around, and day after day, repeated repetition of the race around Troy, as if he had been unable to reach Achilles1 and destroy him. The repetition is emphasized by a series of iterative verbs: δινεύεσκ’, λήθεσκεν, δησάσκετο, παυέσκετο, ἔασκεν (24.12ff). If now Achilles could voice his inmost need, he would speak the first words of the Watchman: “I ask the gods release from these weary labors.”

And Zeus answers the unspoken prayer, by a divine and a human messenger. The divine command is to be obeyed, but obedience is not understanding. Upon the death of Patroclus, and then in battle, Achilles2 had accepted his own coming death, but did not have knowledge of what that was, any more than he had known what future the taking leadership, and then withdrawing, held within them. Release through understanding will only come with the help of Priam, whose sight and words (24.477ff) bring him to feel the full weight of the death of children. Thetis has already brought word that Achilles is to give up Hector (24.137), and has urged him to remember to eat and make love (24.129, he is still μεμνημένος οὔτε τι σίτον / οὔτ᾽ εὐνῆς); so he has just eaten (24.475)—like the mortal he is—and at that moment Priam appears. (Had Achilles eaten at 23.48? Homer avoids saying so.) Because Priam mourns his child, Achilles can weep for Patroclus himself, not as his victim to sacrifice, nor as his representative; and because Priam mourns his child, Achilles can weep for his father’s sorrow at the fate he has brought upon himself, not his own regret. Responsibility replaces the wrath that sacrifices, and the indifference that slays. But in his eagerness Priam blunders with respect to time (24.552), and the unforgetting wrath awakens momentarily. Then they eat together, a striking courtesy since Achilles has already eaten; and then Achilles lies with Briseis, obeying his mother’s second injunction. With that he is freed to face the bow of Apollo that began his liberation at the beginning of his story. Achilles2 like Achilles1 is complete, purified of his deed; but the second Achilles as well will return in another guise. And why not? We never see Achilles die in reality: in the Iliad his death is always future, in the Oresteia it goes unmentioned. Even after Apollo guides the arrow of Paris, the gods will not be done with Achilles.