Iliad, Book 12 — Battle at the Wall; Hector Breaks the Gate

Reading Troy — chapter 12 of 74 · Iliad, Book 12

Iliad, Book 12 — Battle at the Wall; Hector Breaks the Gate (Day 26 of the Iliad, afternoon; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; the Greek wall and ditch before the ships)

Homer opens with the cycle's most famous forward-prophecy. The Greek wall built in Book 7 did not stand long, for the Trojans pressed it; and after the Greeks sailed away, Poseidon and Apollo turned the rivers Rhesus, Heptaporus, Caresus, Rhodius, Granicus, Aesepus, Scamander, Simoeis upon the foundations and washed the stones into the sea, levelling the beach for nine days. The wall is not a permanent feature; it is the cycle's first object whose destruction is already in the poem before its near-loss is dramatised. Then the camera returns to the present afternoon: the Trojans have driven up to the ditch but their horses will not cross the steep sides and the pointed stakes planted in the bottom. Polydamas, Hector's most clear-headed lieutenant, advises that they dismount, leave the chariots with the charioteers, and assault on foot in five divisions.

Hector accepts. The Trojans form up in five waves: Hector and Polydamas leading the largest; Paris with Alcathous and Agenor; Helenus and Deïphobus; Aeneas with the sons of Antenor; and Sarpedon with Glaucus leading the Lycian allies on the right. As they form, a great bird-omen flies above them — an eagle on the left, flying high, holding a great red snake in its talons; the snake bit the eagle on the neck through the breast-plate of feathers, and the bird let it drop into the middle of the host, and flew screaming on the wind. Polydamas reads it: we will reach the wall, but we will not bring the spoil back; the host will fall in heaps in the gateway as the snake fell. Hector rebukes him scornfully: one omen is best, to fight for one's country. The line will echo through Greek political memory; Aristophanes will quote it in Athens four centuries later.

The wall is assaulted from many points at once. The Greeks defend the towers — Menestheus on his Athenian tower, the two Ajaxes on the central wall, Teucer the half-brother behind the great tower-shield of Telamonian Ajax shooting arrow after arrow from cover. The Lycians under Sarpedon attack the wall on the right. Sarpedon, son of Zeus, speaks to Glaucus the speech that is the Iliad's clearest single statement of the heroic-code logic: Glaucus, why is it that you and I are honoured before others with seat and meat and full cups, in our Lycia, and all men look on us as gods? Because we stand in the foremost place of the battle. He calls Glaucus to lead with him. Glaucus answers; the two great Lycians attack the tower together. Menestheus calls for help; the two Ajaxes come; Telamonian Ajax hurls a great jagged stone that knocks Epicles the comrade of Sarpedon dead off the wall; Teucer shoots Glaucus in the arm and wounds him; Glaucus retreats. Sarpedon presses on; he tears down a length of the wall as a child tears down the sand-castle he has built on the beach. The Greeks barely hold.

Hector at the central gate now lifts a stone that no two men of the present day could carry on a wagon. It tapers at the top and broadens at the base; he holds it lightly in his single hand, for Zeus made it light to him. He runs at the gates; the stone strikes the central oak doors with their iron-bound hinges; the hinges break, the bars snap, the doors fly open. Hector leaps through, his face like night, his eyes like fire, holding two spears, calling to the Trojans to follow. The Trojans pour over the wall and through the gate. The Greeks turn and run back toward the ships. The book ends on Hector at the broken gate, the Trojans flooding through behind him, the Greek line broken at the wall built five days ago to keep them out.

Analysis

A book that begins with its own erasure

The opening of Book 12 is the cycle's most extraordinary structural move. Homer pauses the action to tell us — in the future tense — what will happen to the Greek wall after the war ends: Poseidon and Apollo will turn the local rivers upon it and wash its stones into the sea. The wall is being defended in the present afternoon by men whose monument we are told, in the same paragraph, will not survive them. The Iliad is the only ancient war-epic that takes this view of its own setting. Even when it asks us to invest in the wall (the towers, the gates, the watch-fires), it has already told us the wall will be erased. The reader should mark how this forecast governs the whole cycle's attitude to monuments: Aeneid 2's Troy is razed by Greek fire; the Trojan houses in Aeneid 3 (Andromache's miniature Troy at Buthrotum) are noted but not destroyed because they do not matter; Odyssey 24's Ithaca palace is the home that must be rebuilt after the slaughter; Posthomerica 14's storm wrecks the Greek fleet on the way home. Monuments fail; the poem remembers.

Polydamas and the omen of the eagle

Polydamas is the Iliad's third significant Trojan counsellor (with Antenor and Helenus), and the only one Hector consistently overrules. Their exchange in Book 12 is the cycle's most explicit single staging of the principle that heroic-code stubbornness sometimes refuses what intelligence offers. Polydamas reads the omen exactly: the Trojans will reach the wall but will not bring the spoil back, as the snake fell from the eagle's beak into the middle of the host. Hector rebukes him with one omen is best, to fight for one's country — a line so famous it has been quoted at almost every nation-state in the West (Aristophanes in Birds, Pericles in Thucydides 2, Tacitus, Sidney). The line's irony is that Hector is right to fight for the country but wrong to ignore the omen, and the Iliad refuses to resolve the contradiction. Hector's one omen is best will be requoted by him in Book 18 when Polydamas again advises caution (retreat inside the walls after Achilles returns to the field) and Hector again refuses — that refusal will be the one that kills him.

Sarpedon's speech as the heroic code at its purest

Sarpedon's call to Glaucus before they assault the wall is the Iliad's most compact and famous statement of why warriors fight. Glaucus, why is it that you and I are honoured before others with seat and meat and full cups, and all men look on us as gods? Because we stand in the foremost place of the battle, where the bronze is hardest. If, having escaped this battle, we could escape old age and death for ever, then I would not fight in the front line myself, and I would not send you. But the spirits of death stand over us in their thousands, and no mortal can run from them. Let us go and win glory for ourselves or yield it to another. The speech is the Iliad's heroic-code in its purest articulation: the privileges of nobility are earned by exposure to death; if death could be avoided, nobility would be unjustified. Achilles's Book-9 refusal is a refusal of exactly this logic. Sarpedon will die in Book 16 at Patroclus's hand; his death is the only death in the cycle that prompts Zeus to consider intervening. The Iliad puts Sarpedon's speech in Book 12 precisely to make his Book-16 death weigh.

The wall-storming as architectural set-piece

Book 12 is the cycle's only sustained piece of siege-craft narrative. Homer's other battles are field-engagements; this one is a wall-fight. The reader should note the architectural specificity: a ditch with pointed stakes, a battlement-wall with towers, a central gate with iron-bound oak doors, defensive shields ranged along the parapet, archers shooting from cover, attackers carrying ladders implied if not described, lifting stones from below. Virgil reads this passage with extreme attention: Aeneid 9 (the siege of the Trojan camp by Turnus) is built scene for scene on Iliad 12 — the same ditch, the same wall, the same gate-stone, the same single warrior breaking through (Pandarus and Bitias in Virgil; Hector in Homer). The Posthomerica's last battle (Book 11) is a wall-siege quoted in the same form. The Aeneid's last book of the Italian campaign, the storming of Latinus's city in Aeneid 12, is again Iliad-12 transposed. Homer wrote the cycle's only mass-siege scene; everyone else borrowed it.

The stone that no two men could carry

The cycle has three great stones: the stone Diomedes lifts in Book 5 to crush Aeneas's hip (two men of our time could not carry it), the stone Aeneas lifts in Aeneid 12 to throw at Turnus (a vast stone, an ancient boundary-stone of the field, twelve men could not have lifted it), and the stone Hector lifts here at the gate of the Greek wall (no two men of the present day could carry it on a wagon). The three stones are deliberately matched. Each is lifted at a structural crisis; each is supernatural in scale; each is followed by a sentence of similar form (for the gods made it light to him; for Aeneas felt his old strength fail). Hector's stone is the cycle's middle term — Diomedes in Book 5 wounded a god with smaller bronze; Aeneas in the Aeneid will not throw the great stone successfully (it will fall short). Only Hector's stone breaks the gate. Watch for the matching at each book.

Butler's prose and the future-tense forecast

The opening forecast of Book 12 (the wall will be washed away) is one of the test passages for translation. The Greek future-tense narration is unusual; the passage stands outside the poem's normal temporal frame. Butler renders it in simple English future (shall): the wall shall not stand long. Pope makes it into a grand prophecy: Doom'd, by the wrath of Heav'n, to certain Falls, / And ne'er to triumph in completed Walls. Lattimore retains the cooler narrative voice. The reader should sample the three for the same paragraph: Butler shows you what Homer is doing structurally (a pause for foresight); Pope shows you the prophecy as grandeur; Lattimore shows you the cool of the original. For the cycle's only sustained future-tense passage, Butler is the best teacher — the structural innovation is more important than the music.

What to watch for

Watch Polydamas. He returns in Books 13, 17, and 18 with the same role — clear advice, refused. His Book-18 advice (retreat inside the walls now that Achilles is back) is the cycle's most important single political moment, and Hector's refusal there is the decision that kills him. Watch Hector at the gate. The image — his face like night, his eyes like fire, two spears, leaping through the broken oak — is the cycle's frozen picture of him at the height of his power; it is the image Achilles will erase in Book 22. Watch Sarpedon and Glaucus. They will fight the rest of the central battle together, Sarpedon will die in Book 16, Glaucus will mourn him; the pair carries one of the Iliad's tenderest small arcs. And watch the wall itself. The Trojans now hold it; in Book 14, when Poseidon comes back to the field, the Greeks will push them back across it; in Book 15, when Zeus wakes from Hera's seduction, the Trojans will cross it again and reach the ships. The wall is the cycle's most contested object — built in Book 7, breached in Book 12, defended in Book 13, recovered in Book 14, lost again in Book 15, and finally washed into the sea, as forecast, after the Greeks sail. Five Books of fighting around an object the poem promised on its first paragraph would not survive.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 12 is the catastrophic answer to Book 7. The wall Nestor advised, the Greeks built, and Poseidon resented is now under direct assault. Hector's one omen is best is the dark counter-line to Nestor's pious tomorrow take counsel. The five-wave assault is the Trojan answer to the Greek captains' walk-the-line in Book 4's epipolesis. Sarpedon's speech to Glaucus is the cycle's structural response to Achilles's Book-9 refusal: Sarpedon articulates the same heroic-code logic Achilles rejected, but he articulates it as still operative, still binding on him. The two great speeches answer each other: Achilles in Book 9 says the system is broken and I am out; Sarpedon in Book 12 says the system is binding and I am in. Sarpedon's choice will get him killed in Book 16; Achilles's choice will get Patroclus killed in Book 16. The Iliad is keeping the symmetry visible.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. The breaking of the gate is the moment the Greek camp is no longer a sanctuary; Books 13–15 are fought on the beach itself. The image of Hector at the broken gate — face like night, eyes like fire — is the cycle's defining picture of him; it will be unmade in Book 22 when he stands alone outside the wall waiting for Achilles. The forecast of the wall's destruction is paid off in Book 24's epilogue (the funeral games are held on a beach the gods have already promised to erase). Polydamas's clear-sighted advice here is the model for his Book-18 advice (retreat inside the walls now that Achilles is back), again refused — and that refusal is the choice that kills Hector and the city.

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus's Books 11 and 13 are wall-and-gate-storming sequences built explicitly on Iliad 12's model. The Posthomerica's storming of the Trojan walls in Book 13 (by Greeks pouring out of the Wooden Horse) is the structural reversal of Iliad 12's storming of the Greek wall by the Trojans — same architectural specificity (gate, towers, ditch), opposite outcome. Sarpedon's heroic-code speech is paid off in Quintus 1 with Penthesilea's parallel speech (the Amazon's articulation of the same logic, also leading to the same death). Quintus reads the wall-destruction forecast as the cycle's permission to narrate the parallel destruction of Troy itself: if Homer's Greek wall could be washed into the sea, then Troy's walls too can be — and Quintus's storm at the end of Book 14 fulfils both prophecies at once (the Greek wall washed away, the Trojan walls overthrown).

Into the Aeneid. Virgil reads Book 12 as the cycle's master-siege text and rewrites it twice. Aeneid 9 (the Italian siege of the Trojan camp) is Iliad 12 with the sides reversed: Trojan defenders, Italian attackers, Pandarus and Bitias as the Greek-style defenders, Turnus as Hector breaking through the gate. The image of Turnus inside the Trojan camp, isolated, leaping into the Tiber to escape, is Virgil's deliberate inversion of Hector inside the Greek camp here. Aeneid 12 (the storming of Latinus's city) is Iliad 12 with the sides reversed again: Trojans attacking the walls, Latins defending. Virgil's Aeneas at the wall of Latium with a torch is the structural quote of Hector at the gate of the Greeks. The cycle's siege-grammar is established here and Virgil works it both ways. Polydamas's failed counsel is the model for Drances's failed counsel in Aeneid 11 — the wise advisor whom the proud captain (Turnus) overrules with disastrous consequences.

Into the Odyssey. The forecast of the wall's destruction is the cycle's structural pre-echo of the Odyssey's Ithaca-as-fortress: the only house in the Odyssey that does not need a wall because its master returns to defend it from within. Sarpedon's heroic-code speech is the position Odysseus partially refuses by choosing the long life (the nostos) over the kleos — but Odysseus has it both ways, because his nostos requires him to enact a small private aristeia (the killing of the suitors) inside his own house. The hall in Odyssey 22 is the Iliad's wall reduced to a single room; the bow that closes the suitors is the great stone that broke the gate. The architectural set-piece of Book 12 is the Odyssey's structural inheritance. And the eagle-and-snake omen here is the cycle's bird-augury seed: the eagle of Odyssey 2 (Telemachus's omen), the eagle of Odyssey 15 (the homecoming-omen), and the eagle of Odyssey 19 (the eagle-and-geese in Penelope's dream) all descend from Polydamas's reading here. Reading bird-omens is the Odyssey's central form of foresight; the Iliad puts the form on the page here.

The wall has fallen. The ships are next.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Hector — overrules Polydamas with one omen is best, to fight for one's country; lifts the great stone; breaks the central gate; leaps through with face like night and eyes like fire
• Ajax Greater — holds the central wall; hurls a jagged stone that knocks Epicles dead
• Ajax Lesser — fights alongside his namesake on the central wall
• Sarpedon — speaks the Iliad's purest articulation of the heroic code; tears down a length of wall as a child tears a sand-castle
• Glaucus — leads the Lycians beside Sarpedon; wounded in the arm by Teucer; retreats
• Paris — leads the second wave with Alcathous and Agenor
• Aeneas — leads the fourth wave with the sons of Antenor
• Zeus — sends the eagle-and-snake omen; makes the stone light to Hector's hand
• Apollo — named in the forecast as the god who will wash the wall away
• Poseidon — named in the forecast as the god who will turn the rivers on the wall

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — silent in his tent; the structural absence whose existence Hector still feels as a check
• Patroclus — still tending Eurypylus, off-stage; the chain to Book 16 is being built
• Helen — the cause; her name not in this book but the wall's storming is for her
• Agamemnon — wounded, in the surgeon's tent; off-stage
• Diomedes — wounded, in the surgeon's tent; off-stage
• Odysseus — wounded, in the surgeon's tent; off-stage
• Andromache — implied behind every reference to Hector

---

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.