Iliad, Book 5 — The Aristeia of Diomedes; Gods Wounded

Reading Troy — chapter 5 of 74 · Iliad, Book 5

Iliad, Book 5 — The Aristeia of Diomedes; Gods Wounded (Day 22 of the Iliad continues into Day 23; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; the plain before Troy, and briefly Olympus)

Athena fills Diomedes son of Tydeus with strength and daring, and lights an unquenchable fire from his helmet and shield as the star of late summer that rises bathed in the waters of Ocean — the longest single-figure simile yet in the poem, and the formal opening of an aristeia. She removes the mist from his eyes so that he may know god from man, and warns him: fight any mortal you meet, but lay no hand on the gods — only Aphrodite, if you find her on the field, you may wound.

The killing begins at once. Phegeus and Idaeus, the sons of the priest Dares, charge him; Phegeus dies on his first cast, Idaeus is whisked off by Hephaestus to spare their old father a double bereavement. Then a long catalogue: Diomedes drops named Trojan after named Trojan with one biographical sentence each — Astynous and Hypiron, Abas and Polyidus, Xanthus and Thoon, Echemmon and Chromius (two more sons of Priam). Aeneas finds Pandarus and tells him to mount the chariot and try the new man; Pandarus complains that his bow has done nothing all day, agrees to ride. They charge. Pandarus throws first and pierces Diomedes's shield and breastplate; Diomedes's spear answers and crushes Pandarus's face from nose to chin — and the spear came out beneath his jaw. So Athena's Book-4 instrument is paid off; Pandarus dies on the day after he broke the oath.

Aeneas leaps down to defend the body and is felled by a huge stone Diomedes lifts — a stone two men of our time could not carry — which crushes his hip. His mother Aphrodite winds her white arms about him and lifts him to carry him off, but Diomedes, remembering Athena's permit, drives his spear through the goddess's immortal robe that the Graces had woven, and pierces the heel of her hand. Ichor, the gods' silver blood, runs out; the goddess shrieks and drops her son. Apollo catches Aeneas in his arms, hides him in a dark mist, and bears him to the citadel of Pergamus, where Leto and Artemis tend him; a phantom-Aeneas is left on the field for the armies to fight over. Aphrodite borrows Ares's chariot, flies back to Olympus weeping, and is laid in her mother Dione's lap. Dione comforts her with a catalogue of other gods mortals have wounded — Otus and Ephialtes who jailed Ares in a bronze jar, Heracles who shot Hera in the breast — and Athena and Hera giggle in the background while Zeus tells his daughter to keep to the works of marriage and let Ares look after the fighting.

Back on the field, Diomedes thrice charges Apollo as the god stands shield-arm over Aeneas; on the fourth attempt Apollo himself rebukes him terribly — think, Diomedes, and give ground; the race of immortals is not the race of men who walk the earth. Diomedes gives back. Apollo summons Ares to come down and stop this man who would fight even Zeus. Ares enters the battle disguised as the Thracian Acamas and rallies the Trojans. Hector and Sarpedon push the Greeks back; Sarpedon kills Tlepolemus son of Heracles in a long set-piece duel; Odysseus, enraged at the death of his comrade, kills seven named Lycians in answer.

Then Hera and Athena ask Zeus's permission, harness their chariot themselves (the great wheels with their eight bronze spokes, the silver pole), and come down. Athena throws aside her father's robe, puts on her own armour, mounts beside Diomedes, takes the reins out of Sthenelus's hands, and tells him to drive straight at Ares. The god of war throws first; Athena pushes the spear over the chariot rail. Diomedes drives, and Athena's hand on the spear-shaft, and the bronze strikes Ares in the lower belly where his belt was fastened. Ares bellows — as loud as nine or ten thousand men cry in battle — and flies up to Olympus to show Zeus the wound. Zeus rebukes him as the most hateful of his children but heals him; Hera and Athena withdraw. The book closes on the gods bandaging each other and the war below still grinding on.

Analysis

What an aristeia is

Book 5 is the Iliad's first full aristeia — the formal sequence in which a single warrior, lit by a god, dominates the field for a stretch of poem before being checked. The pattern will repeat: Agamemnon in Book 11, Hector in Book 15, Patroclus in Book 16, Achilles in Books 20–22. Homer establishes the template here. A divine illumination (Athena lights Diomedes's helmet and shield); a great opening simile (the star bathed in Ocean); a catalogue of named victims; an encounter with a peer (Pandarus, then Aeneas); a brush with the divine (Aphrodite); a check by a greater god (Apollo's think, Diomedes, and give ground); a second swelling, often with divine help (Athena enters the chariot); the climactic wounding (Ares). The book is essentially a manual for what an aristeia is, and every later aristeia in the cycle reads as a variation on its template — Quintus's Penthesilea-aristeia, Virgil's Camilla-aristeia, even the Mnesterophonia in Odyssey 22.

The poem's only mortal who wounds a god

Diomedes is the Iliad's special case. No other mortal — not Achilles, not Ajax, not Hector — wounds an Olympian. He wounds two in one afternoon. Homer is being careful: Athena lifts the mist from his eyes so that he may know god from man, then she licenses the wounding of Aphrodite specifically, then she herself rides beside him to take down Ares. Diomedes is the goddess's instrument; he is permitted what no other mortal is permitted because he is exactly the kind of human a war-craftsman goddess wants — courageous, obedient, silent, capable of being told stop here and stopping. The contrast with Achilles is the structural point of the book. Achilles, too, is the favourite of a goddess; Achilles, too, will be lit by his mother's fire; Achilles will not obey. Diomedes is the disciplined warrior the Iliad shows us so that we feel Achilles's wildness fully when we get to him.

The aristeia and the off-stage Achilles

Book 5 is also Homer's solution to a structural problem: how to make the war visible without the man who is supposed to dominate it. The poem's central wager — the wrath that withdraws Achilles — is also the poem's central artistic problem, because for sixteen books the best warrior alive is sitting in his tent. Book 5 says: while Achilles is absent, the next-best warrior on the field gets his turn. Diomedes is Achilles-by-proxy, and the aristeia form lets Homer show us what a great warrior looks like while saving the actual presence of the greatest for later. The book even gestures at the comparison directly when Apollo summons Ares — come down and stop this man who would fight even Zeus. That line should be about Achilles. It is about Diomedes because Achilles is in his tent.

The ichor passage and the gods' bodies

The wounding of Aphrodite is the Iliad's most theologically explicit moment so far. The goddess bleeds, but she bleeds ichor — not blood — because the gods, who eat no bread and drink no wine, are bloodless, and are called immortal. This is Homer's only metaphysical aside in the poem, and it does double work: it explains why the wound is survivable, and it draws the line between human and divine bodies that the rest of the cycle will keep crossing. Aphrodite's flight to her mother Dione's lap, and Dione's catalogue of other mortal-on-god woundings (Otus and Ephialtes jailing Ares; Heracles shooting Hera in the breast), establishes the principle that the gods can be hurt but not killed — a principle Virgil inherits (Venus wounded at Troy in Aeneid 12) and Quintus complicates (Aphrodite weeping uselessly for Aeneas).

Aeneas is saved by name

Watch what Homer does with Aeneas. He brings the Trojan prince to the brink of death — felled, crushed, his mother holding him — and then has Apollo lift him out under a mist and a phantom-Aeneas takes the field in his place. This is the first appearance in the cycle of the doctrine that Aeneas must survive Troy. Poseidon will repeat the rescue in Book 20: it is fated that Aeneas should escape. Virgil reads this passage as the Iliad's own permission for the Aeneid. The Aeneid is built on the proposition that Homer himself excused Aeneas from Trojan death, and Book 5 is where that excuse is first granted. The phantom-Aeneas trope (a body the armies fight over while the real man is elsewhere) also seeds the phantom-Helen tradition of later antiquity, and rhymes with Athena's deflected-arrow trick in Book 4: divine intervention as conjuring.

Butler's prose and the long catalogue

Book 5 is the first of the long battle-books, and Butler's prose handles its catalogues by simply printing them. Where Pope's couplets are obliged to invent variation for every kill, Butler lets the sentences repeat: and the darkness of death came upon him, and his armour rang upon him. The flatness is the point. The catalogue of named obscure men killed in two minutes of a single afternoon is one of the things the Iliad is for, and Butler's neutral English keeps the ledger legible. The reader who wants the kills to feel different from each other should remember that the original Greek formulae are also repeated — Homer is keeping the ledger, not embroidering each entry.

What to watch for

Watch Diomedes's silence — after Apollo's rebuke he gives ground without arguing; after Ares is wounded he simply continues. He is the Iliad's only major warrior who does not speechify; that economy of voice is part of why he can be the goddess's instrument. Watch Aeneas: he will be wounded, rescued, and survive again; the Aeneid is what happens after he survives. Watch Sarpedon — his duel with Tlepolemus introduces the Lycian prince who in Book 16 will be killed by Patroclus and mourned in the Iliad's only divine lament. Watch the gods' bodies — Ares's bellow as loud as nine or ten thousand men prefigures the divine sound-design of the Theomachy in Book 20, and Aphrodite's wounded hand prefigures Diomedes's own wounded foot in Book 11. The book also establishes the mathematical principle of the cycle: a god intervenes on the field; another god answers; the field becomes a board on which the Olympians move pieces — and the Iliad's last quarter, the Aeneid's Italian books, and the Posthomerica's first three books all assume this principle as given.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 5 closes the loop on Books 3 and 4. Pandarus, who broke the oath at Athena's prompting in Book 4, dies at Diomedes's spear in Book 5 — the goddess uses him, then discards him, and the moral arithmetic of the oath-breaking is paid off the next morning. Aphrodite's rescue of Aeneas re-stages, with a graver outcome, her Book-3 rescue of Paris: the same goddess, the same white arms, the same misted extraction — but this time she is wounded for it, and the rescue passes to Apollo. Athena's appearance beside Diomedes in his chariot answers her appearance beside Pandarus's mind in Book 4: the goddess who corrupted the Trojan archer now drives the Greek who kills him. And Diomedes's silent acceptance of Agamemnon's Book-4 rebuke is paid off here as the book's whole engine — the disciplined warrior who took the king's words is the warrior the goddess can use.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. The aristeia template established here governs every great single-warrior sequence still to come: Agamemnon in Book 11, Hector in Book 15, Patroclus in Book 16, Achilles in Books 20–22. The wounding of Aphrodite prefigures the wounding of Ares; both prefigure the open Theomachy of Book 20 in which gods fight gods directly. Aeneas's rescue by Apollo here is rehearsed for Book 20, where Poseidon — though pro-Greek — performs the same lift, with the explicit gloss it is fated that he should escape. Diomedes's restraint in obeying Athena's stop is the structural inverse of Achilles's failure to obey in Book 22, where the Trojan-camp scenes will read as an aristeia gone past its proper end. The chariot Hera and Athena harness here — eight-spoked wheels, silver pole — will be re-described in Book 8 when Zeus turns them back.

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus builds his Penthesilea-aristeia in Book 1 on the Diomedes template — divine illumination (Ares lights the Amazon), catalogue of kills, encounter with the peer (she meets Achilles as Diomedes meets Aeneas), divine attempt at rescue (Ares grieves and is restrained by Zeus). Quintus's Memnon-aristeia in Book 2 is the same shape. The phantom-Aeneas rescued under mist seeds the Quintus passages where Apollo conceals Achilles's killer Paris in cloud (Posthomerica 3) — the same conjuring trick, now serving Trojan death rather than Trojan survival.

Into the Aeneid. Aeneas's survival here is the premise of the Aeneid. Virgil reads Homer's rescue as a granted exemption: the Iliad itself permits the Aeneid to exist. The Aeneid's Italian books repeat the wounding-the-gods motif in a Roman key — Venus, daughter of Dione in Homer and called Venus genetrix in Virgil, is wounded again in Aeneid 12 when she sends an arrow to help her son. Camilla's aristeia in Aeneid 11 is the Diomedes template with the gender inverted (and the goddess Diana for Athena); Pallas's death in Aeneid 10 is the dark inverse — the aristeia that does not get checked in time. Virgil reads Diomedes specifically: he has Diomedes refuse to fight against Aeneas at Aeneid 11.255–293, citing the wounded Venus as the reason. Diomedes's Iliad-5 hand on Venus is what makes him, in Virgil, the man who knows not to lift it again.

Into the Odyssey. Diomedes will not return as a major character in the Odyssey, but the principle of his aristeia — disciplined warrior obedient to Athena — is the principle Odysseus enacts in Books 22–24, when Athena lights his armour at the Mnesterophonia and tells him exactly when to stop. The Odyssey is in this sense a Diomedes-poem about an Odysseus. And the divine machinery established here — the goddess on the chariot, the chastened mortal who knows when to give ground — is the machinery that gets Odysseus from the palace-killing through to the reconciliation of Book 24 without the unending blood-feud Achilles would have generated.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Diomedes — Athena's instrument; kills Pandarus, wounds Aphrodite, wounds Ares
• Athena — lights Diomedes's helmet, removes the mist from his eyes, drives his chariot against Ares
• Aphrodite — tries to lift Aeneas from the field, wounded in the hand, flies to Dione's lap on Olympus
• Aeneas — felled by Diomedes's stone, rescued by Aphrodite then Apollo, a phantom left on the field
• Apollo — rescues Aeneas in mist, rebukes Diomedes think and give ground, summons Ares
• Ares — fights for Troy disguised as Acamas, wounded in the belly by Diomedes and Athena, bellows as loud as ten thousand men
• Hera — drives the goddesses' chariot down to the field with Athena
• Zeus — gives permission for the goddesses to descend; rebukes Ares as most hateful of his children, heals him
• Odysseus — kills seven named Lycians in answer to the death of his comrade
• Agamemnon — fights in the front rank, kills Deicoön a comrade of Aeneas

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — the absent benchmark; Apollo's man who would fight even Zeus is structurally aimed at him
• Hector — rallies the Trojans alongside Sarpedon, presence felt throughout
• Thetis — Dione's catalogue of god-pities prefigures her own coming pity for Achilles
• Paris — the un-acting cause; his rescue in Book 3 is the structural model for Aeneas's 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.