Iliad, Book 7 — Hector Duels Ajax; the Greek Wall Is Built

Reading Troy — chapter 7 of 74 · Iliad, Book 7

Iliad, Book 7 — Hector Duels Ajax; the Greek Wall Is Built (Day 23 of the Iliad continues into Day 24; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; the plain before Troy, the Greek camp, and Olympus)

Hector and Paris come back through the Scaean Gate and rejoin the line. The men of both armies rise to them like the wind sent by a god to weary rowers when their arms are slack. Hector kills Eïoneus; Glaucus kills Iphinous. Athena sees the Greeks giving ground and starts down from Olympus; Apollo, watching from the citadel, comes out to intercept her under a beech tree by the Scaean Gate. The two gods, opposed since Book 5, agree to a one-day truce: let the killing pause, and let a single Trojan champion challenge a single Greek to a duel. Helenus, the seer-brother who hears the gods' counsel, for he gathered into his heart their secret, puts the proposal into Hector's mouth.

Hector steps into the no-man's-land between the lines and asks for a Greek champion to face him, sworn on this condition: if Hector wins, he keeps the armour but returns the body for cremation; if the Greek wins, he keeps the armour and returns the body. The Greeks sit silent — ashamed to refuse, afraid to accept — until Menelaus rises in disgust and offers himself. Agamemnon pulls him back: you are no match for Hector, brother; even Achilles fears to meet him in battle, and Achilles is far better than you. Nestor then speaks one of his long indignant remembrance-speeches — if I were young as when I fought Ereuthalion at the river Iardanus and slew him with my spear — and shames the captains into action. Nine champions rise: Agamemnon, Diomedes, the two Ajaxes, Idomeneus, Meriones, Eurypylus, Thoas, Odysseus. They mark their lots and shake them in Agamemnon's helmet. The lot leaps out: it is Telamonian Ajax. Father Zeus, let it be Ajax, or Diomedes, or Agamemnon himself, the army prays — and the lot is Ajax's.

Ajax arms. He comes forward smiling grimly beneath his brows, planting his great striding feet — the bulwark of the Achaeans, carrying the famous tower-shield of seven oxhides covered with bronze made for him by Tychius the leather-worker of Hyle. Hector's heart quakes for an instant but cannot retreat now. They throw. Hector's spear strikes the outer bronze of the shield and pierces six oxhides; the seventh stops it. Ajax's spear pierces Hector's shield and grazes his neck; Hector ducks. They draw and close. Ajax lifts a huge stone and strikes Hector's shield, knocking him to the ground; Apollo lifts him up. They draw swords — and at that moment the heralds Talthybius (Greek) and Idaeus (Trojan) step between the duellists and held up their staves and bid them part: night is come; yield to the night. Hector and Ajax exchange gifts in the formal Homeric manner — Hector gives Ajax a silver-studded sword and belt; Ajax gives Hector a purple-dyed war-belt. The two armies cheer them off the field.

That evening the Greek captains feast in Agamemnon's tent. Agamemnon honours Ajax with the chine of the ox — the cut of the king's favourite. Nestor proposes two policies: pause the killing tomorrow morning long enough to burn the dead and raise a single great barrow-mound over them all; and then build a defensive wall and ditch around the ships, with towers and a wide gate to give the chariots passage. The captains approve. Meanwhile inside Troy, Antenor, the wise counsellor, rises in assembly and says what no one wants to hear: let us give back Helen and her possessions to the Atreidae and end the war. Paris answers that he will give back the possessions but never the woman — and adds, generously, more of his own gold. Priam sends the herald Idaeus to the Greek camp with the offer. The Greeks receive him cold. Diomedes speaks for them all: we accept nothing of Paris's, not even Helen back now, for the city's doom is fixed and a fool can see it. Agamemnon agrees; Idaeus returns to Troy with the refusal.

At dawn both sides come out under the truce. The corpses are washed in warm water and laid on biers and burned through the day, tears running down the men's cheeks. The Greeks raise a single great mound, build the wall behind it with towers and battlements and a wide gate, and dig the ditch beyond. Poseidon, watching, complains to Zeus that the wall they build will outshine the wall I and Apollo built for Laomedon. Zeus tells him not to worry: when the Greeks sail away, break it down and wash it into the sea with your rivers, and bury its trace. Poseidon, mollified, agrees. The sun sets; both camps eat; both armies drink wine from the ships that have just come down from Lemnos with their cargo of Pramnian wine. Zeus thunders all night, and the men pour libations and lie down terrified in their tents.

Analysis

A duel that does not decide

Book 7 is the second of the Iliad's three failed duels. Paris-Menelaus in Book 3 ended with one combatant magically removed; Hector-Ajax in Book 7 ends with the heralds parting the fighters under the rule yield to the night. (The third, Hector-Achilles in Book 22, will end the only way an Iliadic duel can actually end.) The repeated structure is doing something deliberate: Homer keeps showing us that the war refuses to be resolved by single combat. The narrative form most natural to a war-poem — the duel that settles things — is precisely the form the Iliad rejects. Each of these duels is interrupted by a god (Aphrodite in 3, Apollo in 7) or by the iron logic of mortal fate (in 22). The reader should mark the repetition: the poem is teaching us that the war will end by mass destruction, not by champions, because that is what wars do.

Hector's quaking heart

Watch the line where Hector, told the lot has fallen to Ajax, quakes for an instant and then cannot retreat. Homer gives us his fear plainly. Hector is not the Iliad's most invulnerable warrior; he is its most honour-bound — he fights because retreat is unthinkable, not because he is sure of winning. Ajax, by contrast, comes forward smiling grimly beneath his brows, the only major Achaean who never fears anyone. The contrast between the two is the moral architecture of the Hector-arc all the way to Book 22, where Hector's quaking heart finally betrays him at the walls.

The wall the gods will destroy

Nestor's wall is a strange structure. The Greeks build it in Book 7, defend it in Books 8–13, lose it in Book 12, repurpose it in Book 14, and the poem then forgets about it. Why? Because the Iliad is the only ancient war-epic that takes the trouble to dismantle its own setting. Zeus's promise to Poseidon — break it down and wash it into the sea with your rivers, and bury its trace — is the cycle's most explicit statement that monuments do not survive. The wall built in Book 7 is gone by the time the cycle ends; only the poem remembers it. The same theological point will be made by Aeneas's flight in Aeneid 2 (Troy itself washed away), by Odysseus's return to an Ithaca whose great hall must be rebuilt after the slaughter, and most piercingly by the small Troy Andromache builds in Buthrotum (Aeneid 3) which is a model the gods have not bothered to destroy because it does not matter. Book 7's wall-building is the cycle's first monument and the first reminder that monuments fail.

Antenor's lost peace

Inside Troy, Antenor proposes the obvious moral solution: give back Helen and end the war. Paris refuses; Priam sides with Paris; the proposal dies. Homer is the only ancient war-poet who shows us the moment when peace was possible and politically refused. The detail is worth lingering on: Paris will return all the property he took with Helen and more of his own gold besides — the material restoration is offered — but he will not return the woman. The war then is plainly about ownership of a human being, and Antenor's defeat is the cycle's first articulation of how a city loses by failing to surrender what its prince has no right to keep. The detail will return in Aeneid 1 (Antenor himself, in the Aeneid's first invocation of Roman destiny, is named as the founder of Padua — the one Trojan whose post-war career goes well, because he was the one who tried to make peace).

Nestor's old memory and the function of the long speech

Nestor's speech shaming the captains into volunteering — if I were young as when I fought Ereuthalion — is the Iliad's first long Nestor-reminiscence (there will be more in Books 11, 23 and elsewhere). The form has a specific function: Nestor's old wars are a moral standard against which the present is measured, and the present always fails. Tomorrow's men are not what their fathers were is the old man's permanent theme, and it lets Homer set up a temporal depth behind the war we are watching. The Iliad becomes the latest chapter in a much older story of heroes and battles. Virgil borrows the technique for Evander in Aeneid 8, who tells the young Pallas about Hercules's killing of Cacus — a story that is to Pallas what Ereuthalion is to Diomedes.

Butler's prose and the duel-language

The duel of Hector and Ajax is one of the most cinematically clear passages in the Iliad, and Butler's prose carries it well. The spear cut through six folds, but the seventh stopped it. Then they came together at close quarters, like ravening lions or wild boars that no man could check. Butler keeps the lion-simile flat — Pope made it as savage lions that have long been keep'd / Hungry, in toils, on Mauritania's plain — and the flatness is right; the Iliadic simile is meant to be habitual, almost formulaic, and Pope's couplet over-decorates it. Butler also leaves the herald's yield to the night without ornament. The Greek phrase is nykti pithesthai, literally be persuaded by the night; Butler's plain yield to the night is close to perfect.

What to watch for

Watch Hector and Ajax's exchange of gifts. The silver-studded sword Hector gives Ajax is the sword Ajax will use to commit suicide in Posthomerica 5 after losing the judgement of Achilles's arms. Sophocles dramatises this directly in his Ajax — the sword is named as the gift of Hector, my worst enemy. The exchange in Book 7 is therefore a hidden double-suicide: Hector arms his own future killer's brother for his suicide, and is in turn armed by Ajax for his own death by Achilles (the war-belt Ajax gives him is what Achilles will drag him by behind the chariot in Book 22, the belt fastening Hector's body to the wheels). Watch Antenor: he will be the only Trojan elder spared in the sack (Aeneid 1) and the only one to found a successful post-war Italian city before Aeneas. Watch the wall: every battle-book from now to Book 15 is fought around it. And watch the silence at Hector's first challenge — ashamed to refuse, afraid to accept — which is the same silence that meets Hector when he calls again in Book 8 and the same silence that will fill the Greek camp on the night of the Embassy in Book 9.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 7 stages a second failed duel that consciously rhymes with Paris-Menelaus in Book 3. The setup is identical (formal challenge, sworn conditions, oaths, watching armies); the outcome is again that the war is not decided (Apollo lifts Hector at the moment of crisis, as Aphrodite lifted Paris). Antenor's call in the Trojan assembly to give back Helen is a direct echo of the oath-terms of Book 3 — the offer the Greeks had won and the gods then sabotaged. Hector and Ajax exchanging gifts after the duel is a structural rhyme with Diomedes and Glaucus exchanging armour in Book 6: both episodes show the war's ritual of recognition between enemies surviving the day's killing. And Nestor's wall-building proposal answers, belatedly, the panic of the Book-2 Diapeira (the false retreat to the ships) — the Greeks now genuinely fortify what they had pretended to abandon.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. The wall built here is the structural pivot of Books 8–15: Zeus's plan from Book 8 onward is to drive the Greeks back to it, breach it (Hector breaks the gate in Book 12), and burn the ships behind it (Book 15). Without the Book-7 wall there is no battle-at-the-ships, no embassy, no Patroclus-arming. The exchange of gifts between Hector and Ajax is paid off in two of the cycle's most famous later deaths: the war-belt Ajax gives Hector is the belt by which Achilles will lash Hector's corpse to his chariot in Book 22 and drag it round the city; the silver-studded sword Hector gives Ajax is the sword on which Ajax will fall in his suicide. The Iliad is constructed so that the gifts that close one episode are the instruments of another's death.

Into the Posthomerica. Book 7's wall is paid off in Posthomerica 14 when the Greeks sail and Poseidon washes the whole structure away — Quintus dramatises the sack-storm Zeus promised here. The Ajax-suicide using Hector's sword is the climax of Posthomerica 5, which Quintus stages as if it were the answer to a question first asked in Iliad 7: who would kill Ajax? — and the answer is Hector, from the grave, through his gift. Antenor's Book-7 peace-offer, refused, is paid off when Quintus narrates the sack in Book 13: the Trojans who escape the slaughter are those of Antenor's house, by the same ancient ethics that here named him the city's one honest voice.

Into the Aeneid. Virgil starts the Aeneid with a direct reference to Antenor: Antenor potuit, mediis elapsus Achivis, / Illyricos penetrare sinus — Antenor, slipping away from the Achaeans, was permitted to reach the Illyrian coast (Aeneid 1.242). Antenor's peaceful escape is the foil to Aeneas's harder path, and Virgil names him at the Aeneid's first deliberation between Venus and Jupiter precisely because of his Book-7 role here. The Hector-Ajax duel is rehearsed structurally as the Aeneas-Turnus duel of Aeneid 12, where again a single combat is supposed to resolve a war and again the gods almost intervene to deflect it. The Greek wall and ditch, washed away by Zeus's storm, prefigure the Trojan walls of the Aeneid washed away by Greek fire — both monuments built and unbuilt in the same poem.

Into the Odyssey. The wall-and-ditch motif returns in negative in the Odyssey: Ithaca has no defensive wall, no ditch, no fortifications, and that absence is what allows the suitors to occupy the palace. The Odyssey's house-as-fortress is the inversion of Book 7's camp-as-fortress, and Odysseus's defence of his own hall in Book 22 is the structural answer to the Greeks' inability to hold their wall against Hector. Ajax in particular — the bulwark of the Achaeans of Book 7 — is the warrior Odysseus meets in the Nekyia (Odyssey 11) still silent with grief over the judgement of the arms, and the silence at that meeting goes back to the silver-studded sword Hector gave him here. The Hector-Ajax meeting at the duel and the Odysseus-Ajax silence in the underworld are the two ends of the same arc — the one begun on the windless plain of Troy and finished in the asphodel of Hades.

The book's residue: a wall the gods will erase, gifts that become murder weapons, a peace refused, and a duel that resolves nothing. The Iliad's middle is being made.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Hector — issues the formal challenge; duels Ajax to a draw; exchanges the famous gifts
• Ajax Greater — drawn by lot from nine volunteers; carries the seven-hide tower-shield; smiles grimly beneath his brows
• Agamemnon — restrains Menelaus from accepting the duel; presides over the council; honours Ajax with the king's cut of meat
• Menelaus — rises first to accept Hector's challenge in shame at the Greek silence
• Nestor — shames the captains with his Ereuthalion-memory; proposes burning the dead, the great barrow, the defensive wall
• Diomedes — among the nine volunteers; voice of the Greek refusal of Paris's offer
• Odysseus — among the nine volunteers
• Ajax Lesser — among the nine volunteers
• Apollo — meets Athena under the beech tree, agrees the duel-truce; later lifts Hector after Ajax's stone
• Athena — descends from Olympus; agrees the duel-truce with Apollo
• Zeus — thunders all night over both camps; tells Poseidon he may wash the Greek wall away when the war ends
• Poseidon — complains that the Greek wall will outshine the Trojan wall he and Apollo built for Laomedon
• Paris — refuses to give back Helen but offers all her property and more gold

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — Agamemnon names him explicitly: even Achilles fears to meet Hector in battle
• Helen — the offer to return her is refused by Paris and the offer to take her back is refused by the Greeks
• Priam — presides over the Trojan assembly; backs Paris over Antenor
• Thetis — implicitly behind every reference to Achilles's mood

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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.