Iliad, Book 11 — The Aristeia of Agamemnon; the Greeks Driven Back

Reading Troy — chapter 11 of 74 · Iliad, Book 11

Iliad, Book 11 — The Aristeia of Agamemnon; the Greeks Driven Back (Day 26 of the Iliad, dawn to evening; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; the plain before Troy and the Greek camp by the ships)

Dawn comes up from Tithonus's bed and Zeus sends Strife (Eris) down to the Greek ships, standing on the great ship of Odysseus in the middle of the line, that her cry might reach both ways. She shrieks a war-cry that puts strength into every Achaean heart. The captains arm. Agamemnon's arming-scene is one of the cycle's three great arming-scenes (with Patroclus in Book 16 and Achilles in Book 19): the greaves of tin with silver clasps, the cuirass-gift of Cinyras king of Cyprus with ten bands of dark-blue enamel and twelve of gold and twenty of tin and three coiled snakes of cobalt on either side of the throat, the great silver-studded sword, the shield with the Gorgon-face surrounded by Strife and Rout and Terror, the four-plumed helmet, the two bronze-tipped ash spears. Zeus and Hera and Athena thunder approval; both sides take the field.

Agamemnon's aristeia begins. He kills Bienor; he kills Oïleus the comrade-charioteer; he kills Isos and Antiphus, sons of Priam (one a bastard, one trueborn, both once captured by Achilles on Ida who took ransom for them — Homer's bitter aside that Achilles's old captives now die at Agamemnon's spear). He kills Peisandrus and Hippolochus, sons of Antimachus the Trojan elder who had once urged that Menelaus and Odysseus, when they came as envoys to demand Helen back, should be killed at the assembly. Agamemnon, hearing the family name, cuts off the brothers' arms and head and rolls them through the press like a log. The Trojan line breaks; the Trojans run.

Zeus, watching from Ida, sends Iris to Hector: stay out of the front line while Agamemnon is in his fury; the moment Agamemnon is wounded, charge to the ships. Agamemnon kills two more pairs of brothers — Iphidamas and his elder Coön, both sons of Antenor; Coön gets a spear in under the arm of the king and the iron grates on the bone before Agamemnon kills him too. The wound stiffens; Agamemnon mounts his chariot and retreats, the sharp pains shooting through him as the pangs of a woman in childbirth. Hector seizes the moment.

Hector's aristeia is short and dense. He kills Asaeus, Autonous, Opites, Dolops, Opheltius, Agelaus, Aesymnus, Orus, Hipponous — Homer prints the ledger and lets it run. He drives the Greeks back across the field. Diomedes and Odysseus turn and make a stand. Diomedes hits Hector's helmet with a long-throw spear; the bronze rim saves him, but the blow staggers him and he flees through the chariots. Diomedes shouts after him you dog, again you have escaped me; you owe your life to Phoebus Apollo — but Diomedes is then struck himself: Paris, hidden behind the pillar on the barrow of Ilus, shoots an arrow into his right foot, the iron going clean through and pinning him to the ground. Paris steps out and cries his glee. Diomedes pulls the arrow out, rebukes Paris as a long-haired pretty bow-archer, and limps to his chariot; Odysseus stands over him to cover the retreat. Odysseus is then surrounded; he kills Deiopites, Thoön, Ennomus, Chersidamas, Charops; he is wounded by Charops's elder brother Socus with a spear that pierces his side. Odysseus kills Socus, then shouts for help. Menelaus and Ajax come to him; Ajax stands the line while Menelaus carries Odysseus out.

The Greek collapse begins. Machaon the surgeon-prince is hit in the shoulder by Paris's arrow; Nestor takes him up in his chariot — for the surgeon is worth many other men — and drives him to the ships. Ajax fights a slow retreat as a stubborn ass that boys cannot drive from a wheat-field till he has eaten his fill; the simile is the longest and most loving in the book, and one of the cycle's most quoted, because it makes a great hero into a beast that simply will not be moved. Eurypylus, fighting beside Ajax, is wounded in the thigh by Paris's arrow; he limps to the rear.

Now Patroclus comes into the poem in earnest. Achilles, watching from the prow of his beached ship, sees Nestor's chariot fly past with Machaon in it and calls Patroclus from inside the tent: go and ask Nestor whom he has brought wounded. Patroclus runs, and this was the beginning of evil for him. He comes to Nestor's tent. Nestor's slave-girl Hecamede mixes Pramnian wine with barley-meal and grated goat-cheese in the famous Nestor-cup (described in detail: four handles, two dove-figurines on each handle, two supporting bases, an old man could scarcely lift it when full). Nestor pours Patroclus a draught. Then Nestor speaks the long persuasion that will arm Patroclus a book later: Achilles will be no use to anyone when we are all dead; if he will not come himself, let him send you in his place — let you put on his armour, let the Trojans take you for him and run, and so save us. Patroclus listens. He turns to go back, full of the idea.

Along the way Eurypylus, limping wounded, calls to him for help; Patroclus, a man both kind and skilled, takes him into a tent, washes the wound, lays him on a couch, and crumbles bitter mountain root onto the bleeding to deaden the pain. The book ends on Patroclus tending Eurypylus and the Greek lines breaking outside.

Analysis

The longest book and the cycle's structural pivot

Book 11 is one of the Iliad's longest single books and the moment when the wrath becomes mortal. The arc is exact: Agamemnon has his aristeia; he is wounded; the Greeks collapse; Diomedes and Odysseus are wounded; Machaon is wounded; Eurypylus is wounded; Patroclus is sent to ask whom Nestor has brought to camp; Nestor proposes the Myrmidon-armour stratagem; Patroclus turns back into the action with the idea. By the end of the book the only major Greek warriors still on the field are Ajax (limping in his slow retreat) and Idomeneus. The Greek captains are in the surgeon's tent. The poem is precisely positioned for the breaking of the wall (Book 12) and the burning of the ships (Book 15) and Patroclus's intercession (Book 16). Book 11 is the engine that drives all of it.

Agamemnon's arming-scene as portrait

The arming-scene of Book 11 is the cycle's first; it functions as a deliberate counterpoint to the arming-scenes that will follow (Patroclus in Book 16 puts on Achilles's armour and dies in it; Achilles in Book 19 puts on Hephaestus's god-forged armour and kills Hector in it). Agamemnon's armour is the king's armour — a diplomatic gift from Cinyras of Cyprus, dense with cobalt snakes and silver clasps, ornamental beyond function, a piece of foreign-court diplomacy worn as battle-kit. The poem is careful to show us the king's armour as ceremonial; the contrast with the armour that will follow is part of the cycle's running critique of Agamemnon's command. The king who fights in diplomatic gold is the king who must one day be saved by warriors fighting in plain bronze.

Antimachus, Iphidamas, and Homer's long memories

Watch the genealogies of the warriors Agamemnon kills. The sons of Antimachus are killed in revenge for their father's vote to murder Greek envoys; the sons of Antenor are killed despite their father's vote (in Book 7) to give Helen back. Iphidamas — Antenor's son — is given a particularly tender obituary: he had married his uncle's daughter and had not enjoyed her embraces yet, paying a hundred oxen and promising a thousand more in goats and sheep; he was killed on his first day of war. Homer keeps the ledger of who voted for which Trojan policy and rewards or punishes the family accordingly. The Iliad is unusual among war-epics in tracking political affiliations into the killing-fields. Virgil borrows the technique for Aeneid 7–12, where the Italian dead are catalogued with their towns' political histories; the Posthomerica picks it up for the Trojan late-arrivals (Memnon, Penthesilea, Eurypylus, each with a political dossier).

The cup of Nestor

Homer pauses in the middle of a collapse to describe Nestor's cup in twelve lines: four handles, two dove-figurines on each handle, two bases, four ounces of wine. The cup is the only Mycenaean artefact whose Homeric description has been argued to correspond to an actual archaeological find — the Cup of Nestor from Ischia (an 8th-century BCE Greek cup with a hexameter inscription claiming to be the cup of Nestor), and a possible Mycenaean original (a gold dove-cup from Shaft Grave IV at Mycenae). The cup's pause-in-the-action is part of Homer's persistent practice: the great moments of crisis are always sided by a piece of close-attention craft. The Maeonian-purple simile in Book 4, Achilles's lyre in Book 9, Agamemnon's diplomatic cuirass at the top of this book, the cup of Nestor at its middle — these are the cycle's craft-objects, and they appear precisely when the poem most needs to slow down. The Shield of Achilles in Book 18 will be the masterpiece in this tradition.

Ajax as the stubborn ass

The simile of Ajax fighting his slow retreat as a stubborn ass that boys cannot drive from a wheat-field till he has eaten his fill is one of the most studied lines in Homer, because the heroic-poem comparison of a great captain to a donkey has scandalised every reader from antiquity onward. Aristarchus marked the simile as low; Pope reluctantly translated it as the lazy beast / Stripp'd of the harvest, and the field decreas'd; Lattimore restores the donkey directly (and he, like a stubborn donkey going past a field). The simile is the cycle's clearest single statement that the Iliad's similes are not heroic-poem ornaments but observations from rural life pressed into service. Ajax is not a beast made grand; he is a man made comprehensible by reference to a beast every Greek farmer knew. The Iliadic simile is anti-heroic at root, and Book 11 is the place it shows its hand.

Patroclus's first errand

Watch how Patroclus enters the poem. He is named occasionally before Book 11 (as Achilles's silent companion in Book 1, as the wine-mixer in Book 9, as the still-sleeping figure in Book 10), but Book 11 is the book that makes him a character. Achilles sees Machaon fly past and asks who is wounded? and Patroclus runs. The little errand starts the long chain that ends in his death five books later. Homer marks the threshold explicitly: and this was the beginning of evil for him. The line is unusual — Homer does not often editorialise so directly — and the reader should mark it. From the moment Patroclus runs out of the Myrmidon tent, the wrath's tragic engine is engaged. Nestor's persuasion at the end of Book 11 supplies the idea that will arm him; Patroclus's tending of Eurypylus delays him long enough for the wall to fall; by Book 16 he will plead with Achilles and die in the armour.

Butler's prose and the casualty-ledger

Book 11 is the longest single battle-book in the Iliad, and Butler's plain English keeps the ledger legible where Pope's couplets would have to vary the formula for every kill. Butler simply prints them: he fell heavily and his armour rang upon him, darkness came upon his eyes, he bit the dust. The repetition is the point — the Iliad is keeping count, and Butler lets the count run. Where Butler's plainness fails — and Book 11 is the test case — is in the long similes (the bristly boar, the stubborn ass, Hector as a black storm-cloud rushing down the mountain over the sea), which read in Butler as if they were quoted reportage rather than poetry. Read the similes in Lattimore or Fagles for their music; read the killing-formulae in Butler for their pace.

What to watch for

Watch every wound. The wounding of Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus, Machaon, and Eurypylus in a single afternoon is the cycle's most catastrophic single-book loss for the Greeks. Watch Paris's arrows — three of his five Iliad-kills are in this book, all by ambush, all from the shelter of the barrow of Ilus; he is the cycle's specialist in long-range cowardice, and his bow will eventually kill Achilles by the same method (Posthomerica 3). Watch Hector's restraint — Zeus's instruction through Iris (stay out till Agamemnon is hit) is part of Hector's coming portrait as a warrior who fights to a divine rhythm he half-understands. And watch the Greek surgeons — Machaon's wounding is the cycle's first illustration of the principle Patroclus will instance at the book's end: in a long war, the surgeon is irreplaceable, and his fall is structural. The Posthomerica's mass-deaths will repeatedly turn on the absence of medical care. Watch Patroclus's hands at the close — the bitter mountain root crumbled into Eurypylus's wound is the gesture of the man who in five books' time will have no one to bind his own.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 11 picks up exactly where Book 8 left off — the war on the plain, Zeus's plan grinding down the Greek line — and adds the consequences Book 9's failed embassy made inevitable. Agamemnon's aristeia is the king's belated proof of competence, the answer to Diomedes's Book-9 scalding (Zeus has given you a sceptre but not the courage). The arming-scene rhymes with Achilles's arming in Book 1 (when he half-drew his sword before Athena restrained him): the same warrior-type, but ceremonially extended for the high king. The killing of the sons of Antimachus pays off the back-story of Book 3's failed envoys; the killing of Iphidamas pays off the back-story of Book 6's Antenor-house. The Iliad has been keeping the ledger for ten books, and Book 11 collects.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. Patroclus's errand to Nestor is the action that arms him for Book 16. Nestor's persuasion (put on Achilles's armour and let the Trojans take you for him) is fulfilled exactly in Book 16's arming-scene and exactly in Book 16's death — the Trojans do take him for Achilles, until Apollo strips the armour from him at the moment of the kill. Eurypylus's wound, and Patroclus's delay to tend it, is the cycle's first delay that has fatal consequences for the delayer's friend; Patroclus's care for Eurypylus is the gesture that puts him at the right hand at the wrong hour. The simile of Hector as a black storm-cloud over the sea prefigures the storm-imagery that will close the Iliad and govern the Aeneid (the storms of Aeneid 1 and 3) and the Odyssey (the storms of Odyssey 5 and 12).

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus's Memnon-aristeia in Book 2 is built on the Agamemnon-template established here — divine illumination, arming-scene, catalogue of kills, encounter with the peer (Memnon meets Antilochus as Agamemnon meets Coön), the wound, the retreat. The Posthomerica's Eurypylus (the same name as the wounded captain here) returns in Quintus 6–8 as the Trojan champion who arrives late and is killed by Neoptolemus — Quintus is playing on the name's Iliadic associations, and the Posthomerican Eurypylus inherits the resonance of his wounded namesake. Paris's ambush-arrows here are the structural model for his arrow that kills Achilles in Posthomerica 3 — the same shooter, the same hidden position, the same divine guidance (Apollo); Paris in Book 11 of the Iliad is rehearsing for his cycle-defining shot. Quintus knows this and quotes the gesture explicitly.

Into the Aeneid. Virgil reads the Agamemnon-arming-scene as the template for his own three great arming-scenes: Aeneas in Aeneid 8 (the shield forged by Vulcan), Turnus in Aeneid 11, and Mezentius in Aeneid 10. Each Aeneid arming-scene includes a piece of ornamental armour with a backstory, and the practice descends directly from the Cinyras-cuirass here. The Iphidamas-obituary (married, paid bride-price, killed before consummating) is the model for some of Virgil's most piercing young-warrior deaths — Euryalus in Aeneid 9, Pallas in Aeneid 10, Lausus in Aeneid 10 (each killed before manhood is consummated). The Antenor-family thread reaches forward into Aeneid 1 (Antenor founds Padua) and Aeneid 3 (Antenor's house spared at the sack); Iphidamas's death here is the family's price for the peace Antenor proposed.

Into the Odyssey. Odysseus's wounding here — the bronze grated on the bone — is the cycle's first explicit wound on Odysseus, and the scar that will identify him in Odyssey 19 (Eurycleia's recognition by the boar-scar) is the other old scar; Homer is careful to keep them distinct, but the Book-11 wound is part of the cumulative scarring that makes Odysseus identifiable. The Nestor-cup pause-in-action is the structural model for Eumaeus's hut in Odyssey 14, where again the close-attention craft-piece (the swineherd's herder's-bag) sided a moment of structural crisis. Nestor himself appears in Odyssey 3 as the still-living survivor of the war, retelling the events of Book 11 to Telemachus — I lost two strong sons at Troy, and your father saved my old life. Patroclus's tending of Eurypylus's wound is the cycle's structural seed for the medical-care motif of the Odyssey (Helen's drug for forgetting in Book 4; Penelope's salve and bath for the disguised Odysseus in Book 19) — the practice of being kind, which the Iliad notes here as both kind and skilled, is the Odyssey's quiet through-line.

The cycle's catastrophe accelerates from this book. The wrath is now mortal; Patroclus is now sent.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Agamemnon — the great arming-scene; kills the sons of Antimachus, Iphidamas, Coön; wounded by Coön's spear; retreats with the pangs of childbirth
• Hector — held back by Iris until Agamemnon falls, then charges; staggers under Diomedes's spear but is saved by the helmet-rim
• Diomedes — wounds Hector, mocks him; then shot in the foot by Paris and pinned to the ground; carried out by Odysseus
• Odysseus — covers Diomedes's retreat; surrounded; wounded by Socus; rescued by Ajax and Menelaus
• Paris — ambushes from behind the barrow of Ilus; wounds Diomedes, Machaon, Eurypylus with three arrows in an afternoon
• Ajax Greater — slow retreat as a stubborn ass; the cycle's most-discussed simile
• Nestor — drives the wounded Machaon to the ships; persuades Patroclus to wear Achilles's armour
• Patroclus — sent by Achilles to ask whom Nestor has brought wounded; this was the beginning of evil for him; tends Eurypylus's wound
• Achilles — watches from the prow of his ship; sends Patroclus on the fatal errand
• Menelaus — carries the wounded Odysseus out of the press
• Zeus — sends Strife to the ship of Odysseus; instructs Hector through Iris when to charge
• Iris — carries Zeus's instruction to Hector

Mentioned / off-stage

• Thetis — implied as the watcher behind every reference to Achilles's mood
• Helen — the cause; the war's casualties are her cost
• Andromache — implicit in Hector's command-figure
• Aphrodite — silent presence; Paris is her favourite
• Apollo — Diomedes's you owe your life to Phoebus Apollo names him

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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.