Iliad, Book 10 — The Doloneia: Night-spies Diomedes and Odysseus

Reading Troy — chapter 10 of 74 · Iliad, Book 10

Iliad, Book 10 — The Doloneia: Night-spies Diomedes and Odysseus (Night of Day 25/26 of the Iliad continuing through to dawn; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; the Greek camp, the no-man's-land, the Trojan camp on the plain, and the Thracian outliers' bivouac)

Agamemnon cannot sleep. He gets up, throws on a lion-skin over his shoulders, and walks out into the camp. He sees the Trojan watch-fires blazing on the plain like the stars about the moon, and his heart fails him; he tears his hair as one tearing it by the roots and groans aloud. Menelaus, who also cannot sleep, comes to him; the two brothers agree to rouse the captains. Agamemnon goes to Nestor first. Nestor wakes and praises the king for once for moving in the night; together they rouse Odysseus (who comes out in his cloak, the famous spear in his hand), Diomedes (who sleeps with his shield as a pillow and his men around him in the open, like wild boars in their lair), Ajax, Idomeneus, Meges, and the rest. They go out beyond the trench to a clear place and sit on the cleared ground while Nestor proposes the night-mission.

A spy must go into the Trojan camp on the plain. Whoever volunteers will have a great prize when the city falls. Diomedes volunteers at once — but asks for a comrade, for two going together notice things the one might miss. Several rise; Diomedes chooses Odysseus. They arm in haste; Diomedes borrows a sword and a bull-hide shield; Odysseus is given by Meriones a leather kynee — a helmet of stitched hide reinforced with white boar's tusks, the work of Amyntor son of Ormenus, stolen by Autolycus from Amyntor's house at Eleon — a famous heirloom helmet whose pedigree Homer pauses to recite. They go out across the trench through the night-loud calling of a single heron sent by Athena as their sign. Odysseus prays to her; Diomedes prays to her; she promises both.

At the same hour Hector is calling for a Trojan to spy on the Greek camp. He offers as prize the horses and chariot of the best Achaean — which I judge to be those of Achilles. Dolon rises. He is described in some of the Iliad's most disdainful lines: son of Eumedes the herald, ill-favoured to look at but swift of foot, an only son with five sisters. He demands an oath that the horses and chariot will be his after the war and is given it. He throws on a wolf-skin, a marten-cap, takes a bent bow and a javelin, and lopes out toward the Greek camp.

Diomedes and Odysseus hear him coming through the corpses on the plain; they let him pass, then chase him down. Dolon, terrified, offers a great ransom: bronze, gold, wrought iron, all my father's wealth. Odysseus questions him gently. Where is Hector? In council with the elders by the barrow of Ilus. How is the watch set? Carelessly. Who are the new allies arrived in the camp? Then comes the detail that will kill him: the Thracians under their king Rhesus son of Eïoneus have arrived that evening and are bivouacked apart from the main camp — and his horses are the most beautiful and the swiftest I have ever seen, white as snow, swift as the wind, and his chariot is overlaid with gold and silver, and he wears great golden armour, a marvel to look at, more like a god's gear than a mortal's. Odysseus thanks him; Diomedes draws his sword. Dolon stretches his hand to Diomedes's chin in the gesture of supplication; Diomedes cut off his head as the word was on his lips, and his head spoke in the dust. They strip his wolf-skin, the marten-cap, the bow, and the javelin; Odysseus lifts them aloft and prays to Athena; they hide the spoil in a tamarisk bush, marking the spot with reeds.

They go on to the Thracian camp. The men lie asleep in three rows, each with his armour beside him and his horses tied at the chariot rail. Diomedes, as in his Book-5 aristeia, becomes a goddess-driven killer: as a lion comes upon flocks unshepherded and falls on goat or sheep. He kills twelve Thracians while Odysseus, behind him, drags the bodies aside so that the white horses would not shy at them as they were led out. The thirteenth man Diomedes kills is Rhesus himself — that very night a bad dream came to him, sent by Athena, and stood at his head: it was Diomedes son of Tydeus. Odysseus unties the horses, mounts them, and drives them away with the lash of his bow (he had forgotten to fetch the chariot whip). Athena warns Diomedes from above to break off; Apollo at the same instant wakes the Thracian captain Hippocoön, who runs to find the king and twelve of his men dead and screams aloud. The Trojan camp wakes in chaos behind them.

Diomedes and Odysseus reach their own lines. They retrieve the spoils of Dolon from the tamarisk; they wash off the sweat and dust of the killing in the sea; they bathe in polished tubs at home; they offer libation to Athena and sit down to wine. The book ends in a strange ritual cleanness — the killing of the Thracians in their sleep purified by sea-water and prayer, and the snow-white horses of Rhesus standing tethered at Diomedes's tent in the first grey of dawn.

Analysis

The most anomalous book in the Iliad

Book 10 has been treated as a separate poem since antiquity. The Alexandrian scholar Zenodotus put a marginal mark suggesting it was an interpolation; some modern scholars (most influentially M. L. West) still hold that it was composed later than the rest of the Iliad and stitched in. The case for anomaly is real: Book 10 has unique vocabulary, unique armour-types (the leather kynee with the long pedigree), no plot consequences whatsoever for the following books (Rhesus's death does nothing to the war), and a sustained tone of nocturnal viciousness unlike any other battle-book. Read straight through, you can feel Book 9 ending on Achilles's refusal and Book 11 opening with Agamemnon's morning aristeia — Book 10 between them is the night that the war forgets. The case against anomaly is equally real: every ancient text we have includes it, the Greek is Homeric, and Aristotle treats it as canonical. The reader should hold both: read it as Homer's, but read it knowing it stands apart.

Why it stands apart

The book is the Iliad's only sustained night-piece, and night changes what the war is. Combat in daylight has formulae for prayer, oath, taunt, and stripping. Night-killing has none. Diomedes cuts off Dolon's head as the word was on his lips — there is no aristeia-formula for that. The killing of the Thracians in their sleep is the cycle's first treatment of war as massacre — the warriors slaughtered without armour, the chariots looted, the horses stolen. The same form will be the moral problem of the sack of Troy (Posthomerica 13, Aeneid 2) — Trojan warriors and old men and women killed in their homes at night. Book 10 is the cycle's first staging of war's nocturnal mode, and the reader should mark how the rest of the cycle returns to this mode at every great catastrophe.

Diomedes and Odysseus as a pair

The pairing of Diomedes and Odysseus here is the cycle's foundational picture of Greek partnership. They will reappear together in the lost epic the Little Iliad (Diomedes and Odysseus steal the Palladium); they will be paired in Sophocles's Philoctetes (Odysseus brings Diomedes — or Neoptolemus, in the surviving version — to Lemnos); they are the two Greeks who in Posthomerica 9 are sent to Lemnos to fetch Philoctetes. The Book-10 pair is the working partnership the Iliad gives us. Diomedes is the killer; Odysseus is the planner. Diomedes prays and Athena answers; Odysseus also prays and Athena answers the same prayer twice over. The two prayers are notable: it is the only scene in the Iliad in which the same goddess is supplicated by both members of a working pair, and both supplications are granted. The pair is the favourite of Athena.

Dolon and the deformed eikon of the enemy

Dolon is the Iliad's least-defended Trojan. He is ill-favoured to look at but swift of foot, an only son with five sisters, the son of a herald (a non-warrior household), and Hector has had to bribe him to volunteer with the promise of Achilles's horses. Homer paints him as the cowardly intelligence-gatherer who breaks the heroic code at every turn — he wears a wolf-skin (the predator masquerade), a marten-cap (the cunning-animal mask), an animal-archer's bent bow (not a hoplite's gear), and at his capture he offers ransom (forbidden in the night-mode), and gives up the Thracian camp's location to save himself. The Iliad's other Trojan deaths are dignified; Dolon's is grotesque, and the reader is meant to feel that grotesqueness. The detail rhymes with later cycle-portraits of treacherous figures — Sinon in Aeneid 2 (the Greek who lies the wooden horse into the city), the suitors in the Odyssey (especially Eurymachus, who tries to ransom his life at Odysseus's feet in Book 22). Each is a study in the cycle's recurring picture of the man who breaks the code and dies for it.

The horses of Rhesus

There is a tradition outside the Iliad (preserved in the Euripidean Rhesus and in later mythographers) that an oracle foretold that if Rhesus's horses ever drank from the Scamander and grazed on Trojan grass, Troy could not fall. The Iliad does not mention this oracle. But the strange ritual cleanness at the end of Book 10 — the sea-bath, the offering, the horses tethered at dawn — has been read as Homer's silent recognition of it: the horses are stolen before they drink from the river, and the war remains winnable. Whether or not Homer knew the oracle, the image is large enough to carry it. The white horses of Rhesus, standing in the grey dawn at Diomedes's tent, are one of the cycle's loveliest pieces of pure picture.

Butler's prose and the night-language

Book 10 is the test case for Butler's plain English. The Greek of the original is unusually staccato, almost noir — short sentences, sudden verbs, none of the long similes of the day-books. Butler reproduces the tone exactly. His head fell speaking in the dust (where the Greek is phthengomene de kara koniesi emichthe) is Butler's his head spoke in the dust — a perfect short English equivalent that other translators have struggled to match. Pope made it His severed head, in the warm dust expir'd / The flying ghost; Lattimore, his head fell into the dust still speaking. Butler's is closest to Homer's nine words and is the right model for the book's tone. Read Book 10 aloud in Butler and the sentences come at you the way the killing comes at Rhesus — short, fast, dark.

What to watch for

Watch Diomedes's silence. He kills twelve Thracians and Rhesus without speaking; the night-Diomedes is the daylight-Diomedes stripped of his single virtue (he speaks before mortal action in Books 5 and 6). Watch Odysseus with the bow — he forgets the whip and uses the bow as a lash, the first time in the cycle that the bow is used not as a weapon but as a tool of escape; the same bow will be wielded as the cycle's most important weapon in Odyssey 21. Watch the Thracians: their absence from the rest of the Iliad has been read as a proof that Book 10 is interpolated, but it can also be read as Homer's discipline: the Thracians appeared, were killed, and the war returns to its main combatants in the morning. Watch the boar's-tusk helmet: it is one of the few Homeric armour-pieces that has been confirmed by archaeology (boar-tusk helmets survive from Mycenaean burials), and its pedigree-recitation is the Iliad's most explicit gesture to the antiquity of its own material. And watch what does not happen — Hector is in council by the barrow of Ilus all night; Achilles is asleep in his tent; Patroclus is asleep beside him. The two principals of the war's coming day are off-stage for the night-book. They will both be on-stage the morning after, and Book 11 opens with the gods themselves coming back.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 10 reads as a deliberate inversion of Book 9. The same night, the same Greek camp, the same insomnia, but the daylight diplomatic mission to Achilles is replaced by a night raid into Trojan space. The Book-9 embassy fails because Achilles refuses to come out; the Book-10 raid succeeds because the right men volunteer at once. Odysseus's diplomatic-Odysseus of Book 9 is rewritten here as Odysseus the trickster-spy, and the same goddess (Athena) who silently edited his Book-9 speech now provides the heron-sign and answers both prayers. Diomedes's silent acceptance of Agamemnon's rebuke in Book 4 (Tydeus's son took the king's words in silence) is paid off twice — first as his Book-5 aristeia, now as the night-killer-by-stealth. The Greek wall of Book 7 is the structural threshold the pair crosses to enter the night, and the corpses they step over on the plain are the dead of Book 8's reverse.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. Book 10 has remarkably few internal consequences — neither Rhesus nor Dolon is mentioned again — but the night-mode it establishes returns at three later moments: the night-watch of Book 14 (the Dios apate, the beguiling of Zeus); the secret embassies of Book 24 (Priam's night-journey through the lines to Achilles, with Hermes as guide — a structural quote from the heron-led night-spy of Book 10); and the strange purificatory bath at the end of the book, which is the cycle's first staging of post-killing ritual cleanness and prefigures the bath Achilles takes in Book 23 after Patroclus's pyre.

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus quotes Book 10 directly when he stages the night-mission of Posthomerica 9: Diomedes and Odysseus (again the pair) sail in secret to Lemnos to fetch Philoctetes. The same goddess (Athena) again sends the favourable sign; the same pair again succeed where lesser men would have failed. The whole Posthomerica reads as a poem about Odysseus learning to be the man Book 10 already showed him to be. The slaughter of the sleeping Thracians is the structural model for the Greek slaughter of the Trojans in the night of the sack — Posthomerica 13 turns Book 10's brief night-raid into the war's culminating massacre.

Into the Aeneid. Virgil reads Book 10 with extreme attention. The night-mission of Nisus and Euryalus in Aeneid 9 is a deliberate Latin re-staging: two friends, night-camp infiltration, sleeping enemies slaughtered, treasure-stripping, an interrupted return, divine sign, dawn-revelation. The differences are the meaning. Virgil's pair fail — Euryalus is killed because he stops to put on a captured helmet whose crest catches the light; Nisus dies trying to save him. The Iliadic pair return clean and ritually bathe; the Aeneid pair die uncleansed on the plain, their heads paraded by the enemy. Virgil reads Homer's purification at the end of Book 10 as a moral problem and rewrites the whole structure as tragedy. Sinon in Aeneid 2 is Virgil's Dolon — the cunning-animal liar (Sinon plays the abandoned victim, Dolon the volunteer spy), and Sinon's success at deceiving the Trojans is the Aeneid's structural answer to Dolon's failure with the Greeks.

Into the Odyssey. Odysseus's bow-as-whip moment (he uses the bow to lash the white horses because he forgot the chariot whip) is the Odyssey's structural seed: the bow that drives horses here is the bow that will drive the suitors to death in Book 22. The night-spy mode is the Odyssey's home mode — the disguised Odysseus walking through his own palace at night in Books 17–20 is the night-spy of Book 10 applied to a domestic theatre. Diomedes's silent killing of Dolon prefigures Odysseus's silent killing of Antinous (Odyssey 22), and the bath-and-libation at Book 10's end is the structural quote that closes Odyssey 23 (Odysseus bathes after the slaughter; Athena pours grace upon him; husband and wife sit by the fire). The Doloneia's night-Athena is the Athena who walks beside Odysseus through the suitors' last feast. The Iliad's strangest book is the Odyssey's clearest source.

The cycle's nightmode begins here. Every subsequent night-action — embassy, raid, sack, infiltration — works in the form Book 10 set up.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Diomedes — chooses Odysseus as comrade; kills Dolon, then Rhesus and twelve sleeping Thracians; the night-aristeia
• Odysseus — wears the famous boar's-tusk helmet of Amyntor; interrogates Dolon; drags bodies aside; uses his bow as a lash to drive the white horses
• Agamemnon — sleepless at the watch-fires, tearing his hair; throws on a lion-skin; goes through the camp rousing the captains
• Menelaus — also sleepless; comes to his brother; helps rouse the captains
• Nestor — proposes the night-spy mission; speaks the council with the captains beyond the trench
• Athena — sends the heron-sign; answers both prayers; warns Diomedes to break off; sends the bad dream to Rhesus
• Apollo — wakes the Thracian Hippocoön to discover the slaughter
• Hector — calls his own night-council; offers Achilles's horses as prize; sends Dolon

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — Hector names his horses as the spy-prize; the structural absence again driving the night
• Patroclus — asleep beside Achilles in the tent; not yet stirring
• Paris — in the Trojan night-council; not active
• Zeus — silent on Ida, his ban from Book 8 still in force on the field
• Thetis — implicit in every reference to Achilles

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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.