Iliad, Book 4 — The Oaths Broken; the Pandarus Arrow

Reading Troy — chapter 4 of 74 · Iliad, Book 4

Iliad, Book 4 — The Oaths Broken; the Pandarus Arrow (Day 22 continues, midday; Olympus, then the plain before Troy)

The gods are drinking nectar on the golden floor when Zeus begins the morning by needling Hera. Two goddesses help Menelaus, he says — you and Athena, sitting up here watching from far away — and only Aphrodite is down on the field. Shall we end this war now, return Helen, leave Priam's city standing? Hera erupts: she would let Zeus level her favourite cities — Argos, Sparta, Mycenae — if it meant Troy's destruction. Zeus gives in, telling her bitterly you can have your wish, but remember it the day I want to sack something you love. He sends Athena down to make sure the truce is broken from the Trojan side, so that Troy will fall under the cleanest available pretext.

Athena descends like a brilliant meteor, a fiery train of light following, and both armies see her fall. Disguised as Antenor's son Laodocus she goes to Pandarus, the great archer from Aesopus's banks, son of Lycaon, and seduces him into the one act that will guarantee the war's continuation. Shoot Menelaus, she says; Paris will load you with rewards. Pandarus, a fool and a believer, unstraps his great bow made of the horns of a wild ibex sixteen palms long, tipped with gold; his comrades raise shields to screen him; he chooses an arrow that has never been shot before, prays a brief prayer to Apollo, and lets fly.

Athena, having engineered the shot, now diverts it. She brushes the arrow aside as a mother brushes a fly from a sleeping child, so the iron does not strike home; instead it grazes through Menelaus's belt, cuirass, and inner mail, drawing only a thin line of blood. As when a Maeonian or Carian woman stains ivory with purple to make a cheek-piece for a king's horse, so were your fair thighs stained with blood, O Menelaus. It is one of Homer's most painterly similes, and the first time in the Iliad that a battlefield wound is offered as a piece of beautiful object-making.

Agamemnon sees the blood and goes pale. He gathers himself into one of the noblest speeches in the poem — the day will come when sacred Ilios shall be laid low, and Priam, and the people of Priam of the good ashen spear. The oath has been broken; Zeus, who saw, will not let it lie. He sends Talthybius for Machaon, the army's physician, son of Asklepios, who comes with the drugs Chiron once gave to his father, draws the arrow, and dresses the wound.

Then Agamemnon walks the line. The epipolesis — the king's review of the troops — is the book's long second half and one of the great rhetorical sequences of the Iliad. He praises Idomeneus (whose cup he keeps always full); he points at the two Ajaxes ordering the foot-soldiers like a goatherd watching a storm-cloud roll over the sea; he greets Nestor, whose lieutenants he names one by one. Then he comes upon Odysseus and Menestheus standing still at the rear, and he scolds them — you who first come to my feasts when the wine flows. Odysseus turns and answers him coldly: the father of Telemachus will be there when the lines meet, you will see. Agamemnon, hearing the tone, backs down and laughs. He moves on to Diomedes, who is also standing still beside Sthenelus, and rebukes him at length with the great tale of Diomedes's father Tydeus — Tydeus who alone defeated the fifty champions of Thebes. Sthenelus answers back: we are better than our fathers; we took the seven-gated city they could not take. Diomedes hushes him and accepts the king's rebuke in silence.

Then the armies meet. The Achaeans advance silent and disciplined, as the surf rolls onto a beach when the west wind has lashed it. The Trojans come on with the noise of many thousand ewes in a great farm's fold, bleating in many tongues — Homer's first ironic note on the multilingual character of the Trojan coalition. Ares marshals the Trojans; Athena, the Achaeans; Strife (Eris) marches with them, small at first but lifting her head until it touched the sky. The lines crash together, the bronze rings, and the earth ran red with blood.

The first deaths of the war as we have it: Antilochus son of Nestor kills Echepolus the Trojan with a spear through the helmet's projecting bone, and darkness covered his eyes. Elephenor of the Abantes tries to drag the body off and is speared in the exposed flank by Agenor. Telamonian Ajax kills the boy Simoeisius, named for the river by which he was born — he fell like a poplar that has grown straight and tall in a low meadow, and the wheelwright lays his axe to its root to fashion a felloe for a chariot. Antiphus son of Priam throws at Ajax and instead kills Leucus the companion of Odysseus; Odysseus, furious, comes forward and kills Democoon, another son of Priam (a bastard, the keeper of his father's mares at Abydos), with a spear through one temple and out the other. The Trojan line gives. Apollo, watching from the citadel, shouts down: they are not stone or iron, and Achilles is not in this fight. Diores of the Epeans is felled by a stone thrown by Peirous the Thracian; Thoas of Aetolia spears Peirous in return; both men lie face-down on the earth side by side, and no man could have made light of that battle if he had walked through it scatheless, with Athena leading him by the hand. The book ends on that image: bodies of friend and enemy laid out together on the plain, and the war that the duel was supposed to end now beginning in earnest.

Analysis

A book about who breaks the war open

If Book 3 had let the war end, the Iliad would be an epyllion: a duel, a verdict, Helen restored. Book 4 is the engineering of its continuation. Homer is unusually direct about the mechanism. Zeus does not want the war restarted; Hera demands it; Zeus concedes only by extracting from her the principle that one day he will be allowed to destroy a city she loves. Athena is then dispatched not to win the battle but to break the oath — and she does so by corrupting a Trojan, Pandarus, into shooting under truce. The Iliad is therefore explicit that Troy's fall is not just; it is the product of a goddess's deal with another goddess, executed through a credulous Trojan archer. This honesty about the unfairness of divine causation is one of the qualities that makes the Iliad unique among ancient war-epics.

The Pandarus arrow as engineered ambiguity

Watch what Athena does carefully. She tells Pandarus to shoot. She lets the bow draw and the arrow loose. Then she deflects the arrow so it only grazes Menelaus, like a mother brushing a fly from a sleeping child. She wants the oath broken but not the championed Spartan dead. Both effects are necessary: the death would end the war on Trojan terms; the unscratched survival would give the Greeks no rallying-point. The graze produces exactly the configuration she needs — Trojan treachery visible, Achaean revenge motivated. It is Homer's first sustained look at the goddess as field-craftsman.

The simile of the ivory cheek-piece

As when a Maeonian or Carian woman stains ivory with purple to make a cheek-piece for a king's horse. The simile compares the blood on Menelaus's thigh to the dyeing of horse-tackle — a precious, deliberate, female act of craft. The wound becomes a made object. Homer does this throughout the Iliad: he refuses to let battle-wounds be only horrors; he keeps placing them next to the rural, domestic, female world from which the warriors come. The same impulse will produce, in Book 18, the Shield of Achilles, where war and peace are inlaid on the same metal. The Pandarus-arrow simile is the first piece of that metal.

The epipolesis as political portrait

The long centre of Book 4 — Agamemnon walking the line, praising some captains and shaming others — is the epipolesis, the king's review. It is the most thorough portrait of Agamemnon as commander we will get. He is shrewd with Idomeneus, formal with the Ajaxes, fond and rueful with Nestor, wrong with Odysseus (who turns the rebuke aside coldly), and overbearing with Diomedes (who takes it). The scene shows us a king who is good at managing some men and disastrous with others — exactly the king whose mismanagement of Achilles set the wrath in motion. The Odysseus exchange is especially fine: the father of Telemachus will be there when the lines meet. That line, with its quiet self-naming, will resonate for the whole rest of the cycle.

The first deaths and the poetics of casualty

Books 1–3 had no battle. Book 4 opens the killing, and Homer immediately establishes the tonal contract that the Iliad will keep for sixteen further books: every death is a small biographical poem. Echepolus has a father with a name. Simoeisius was born by a particular river when his mother came down from Mount Ida with her parents; he fell like a poplar that a wheelwright would have made into a chariot-rim. Democoon was the bastard who kept the king's mares at Abydos. The Iliad treats the killing as a series of obituary-poems; the war becomes a great anthology of vanished lives. Compare any other war-epic — Posthomerica, Aeneid, even the long battle-books of the Mahabharata — and Homer's specific gift becomes visible: the named obscure, the man who exists in the poem only long enough to die.

Butler's prose and the language of wounds

Butler's plainness serves Book 4 unusually well. Where Pope had to find a couplet for darkness veiled his eyes and produced eternal night involved his sliding sense, Butler simply writes darkness veiled his eyes. The Homeric formula is preserved as formula, not embroidered. When Homer says the earth ran red with blood, Butler writes the earth ran red with blood. The effect is that the violence remains shocking rather than decorative. Butler also keeps the Maeonian-ivory simile clean — as when some woman of Meonia or Caria strains purple dye on to a piece of ivory — without making it grander than it is. The 1898 prose lets the Iliad's strangest gesture (a wound that is also a piece of craft) land as a gesture.

What to watch for

Watch Pandarus. He will appear once more, in Book 5, where Diomedes kills him during his aristeia. Athena will be there at his death too — the same goddess who used him will use him again, this time as the prize-kill that launches Diomedes's day. Watch the epipolesis — Odysseus's polite refusal to be shamed is the first crack in Agamemnon's authority since Achilles's withdrawal, and the Book 9 embassy will widen it. Watch Diomedes. He is silent here under rebuke but will be the dominant Greek warrior of Books 5–6, the man who fights a god and is wounded. Watch the rivers. Simoeisius was born by the Simois; the corpse-tally is being kept along Trojan waterways, and the river Scamander, who has not spoken yet, is gathering grievance for Book 21. And watch Strife — Eris — who lifts her head until it touches the sky. The Iliad treats her as a literal force on the field; she will not appear by name again, but the long lines of casualties that begin here are all hers.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 4 closes the duel-arc opened in Book 3 by destroying it, and reaches back through the Trojan story to its deepest premise. Zeus's reluctant I will let you destroy Troy if you let me one day destroy one of your cities is Homer's gloss on the long Mycenaean memory of Argos and Mycenae's later ruin; it is the Iliad's deepest piece of historical irony, that the gods of the victors have already promised away the victors' own cities. The Pandarus arrow re-stages, with sharper teeth, the Aphrodite-rescue of Book 3: a goddess intervenes in a man's act and bends the outcome. Athena's deflection of the arrow like a mother brushing a fly from a sleeping child echoes her hand in Achilles's hair in Book 1 — the same goddess, the same restraining gesture, but turned now to manipulation rather than counsel. And the epipolesis is structurally a redo of the failed assembly of Book 2: instead of testing the troops with a false retreat, Agamemnon walks the line and praises or shames them face-to-face. He learns from Book 2's disaster — but only just.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. Pandarus's arrow opens the chain of bow-shots that will define the poem's middle: Pandarus will be killed by Diomedes in Book 5; Paris will wound Diomedes with an arrow in Book 11; Paris will eventually kill Achilles offstage (told later in the cycle). The Iliad becomes increasingly an archery-poem from this book on, and the arrow is increasingly a treacherous weapon. Diomedes's silence under rebuke here is the seed of his aristeia in Books 5–6. The first deaths catalogued here — Simoeisius the poplar, Democoon the bastard at Abydos — establish the tonal contract for every battle book to come.

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus reads the Pandarus-arrow as the template for Paris's death by Philoctetes's arrow in Posthomerica 10: a Trojan archer who broke an oath here is structurally mirrored by a Trojan archer who must die by a Greek bow to balance the moral books. The first-deaths-of-the-war ledger that starts here is precisely the ledger Quintus completes — Penthesilea, Memnon, Achilles, Paris, all the last names of the war.

Into the Aeneid. Virgil reads the epipolesis as the model for Aeneas walking the line in Aeneid 10 and 12. He reads the Pandarus-arrow as the template for the truce-breaking in Aeneid 12, where a Latin breaks the oath sworn before Aeneas's duel with Turnus — the structural quote is exact. The whole Iliadic-half of the Aeneid (Books 7–12) is built around the principle Homer establishes here: a truce that is supposed to end a war can be broken by a divine intervention that goes through a credulous mortal. Allecto in Aeneid 7 is Virgil's Athena-as-Pandarus-corrupter — same machinery, different goddess. The casualty-as-craft-object (Menelaus's thigh as ivory cheek-piece) is the model for the moments when Virgil pauses over a young dead body — Euryalus in Aeneid 9, Pallas in Aeneid 10 — and treats the corpse as something deliberately made.

Into the Odyssey. Odysseus's quiet the father of Telemachus will be there when the lines meet is one of the most self-naming lines in the Iliad and the seed of his Odyssey identity. The Odyssey will be the epic in which the father-of-Telemachus returns; the line here is its earliest articulation. Athena's role as field-craftsman of the war's continuation here prefigures her role as field-craftsman of Odysseus's homecoming in the second half of the Odyssey: same goddess, same instinct for managing outcomes through human agents. And the bow that breaks the war here will rhyme with the bow that ends the suitors in Odyssey 21 — both moments built around an archer's act and a divine watcher.

The truce had to break. Book 4 shows us how, and through whom, and at what cost.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Zeus — taunts Hera, concedes the truce-breaking, accepts that he will one day be permitted to destroy a city Hera loves
• Hera — demands Troy fall, names her own cities (Argos, Sparta, Mycenae) as future hostages to her wish
• Athena — descends like a brilliant meteor, corrupts Pandarus into shooting Menelaus, then deflects the arrow herself
• Agamemnon — sees Menelaus bleeding, swears Troy will fall, then walks the line in the epipolesis
• Menelaus — grazed by Pandarus's arrow, treated by Machaon with Chiron's drugs
• Odysseus — coldly rebukes Agamemnon's accusation of laziness; later kills Democoon son of Priam in revenge for Leucus
• Nestor — marshals knights and foot-soldiers by his rules of order; cowards in the middle
• Diomedes — silent under Agamemnon's rebuke, named through his father Tydeus's prior valour
• Apollo — shouts down from the citadel that Achilles is not in this fight
• Ajax Greater — kills the young Simoeisius (the great poplar-simile)
• Ajax Lesser — Locrian; marshalled by Agamemnon together with his namesake
• Aphrodite — named as Menelaus's enemy goddess in Zeus's opening provocation; she does not act in this book

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — Apollo names him explicitly: he is not in this fight; the wrath is the framing condition of the whole battle
• Paris — the truce that protects him is what Athena breaks
• Helen — the prize the broken oath was meant to settle; her name is the entire reason any of this is happening
• Priam — and the people of Priam of the good ashen spear — named in Agamemnon's prophetic curse
• Calchas — the seer's authority hangs over the broken oath, though he does not speak here

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.