Iliad, Book 13 — Poseidon's Aristeia by the Ships

Reading Troy — chapter 13 of 74 · Iliad, Book 13

Iliad, Book 13 — Poseidon's Aristeia by the Ships (Day 26 of the Iliad, late afternoon; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; the Greek camp at the ships, Samothrace, and Mount Ida)

Zeus, certain that no god dares cross his Book-8 ban, turns his eyes away from Troy to the Thracians, the noble Mysians, the Hippemolgoi who drink mare's milk, and the Abii the most righteous of men. He believes none of the Olympians will interfere. But Poseidon, watching from the topmost peak of Samothrace shaggy with wood, has seen the Greeks broken at the gate, the Trojans pouring through; pity comes upon him. He plunges down to Aegae, his deep palace beneath the sea where his bronze-hooved horses with golden manes are stabled; yokes them; drives across the waves and the sea-creatures come up from their lairs everywhere, recognising their king. He arrives at the ships disguised as the seer Calchas. He touches the two Ajaxes and pours strength into them — their limbs grow light, their feet swift, their hands sure; he calls Idomeneus and Meriones and the other captains and stirs them with reproach and encouragement.

The Greek line braces. The two Ajaxes form a single battlefield-pillar — Telamonian with his great tower-shield, Oilean lighter at his side — and the Trojans break against them like surf on a rock. Hector hurls a stone at Telamonian Ajax; it falls short. Then the book turns to its long centre, an extended sequence of named combats — the longest single battle-narrative in the Iliad. The poem hands the camera to Idomeneus the king of Crete, in the prime of his middle age, his hair beginning to silver, who has come back to the front from the surgeon's tent. He arms in his cabin, meets Meriones on his way out, exchanges a long martial conversation about courage that reads like two veterans speaking by the door of a barracks. Then they go out together.

Idomeneus's aristeia is the book's set-piece. He kills Othryoneus, a Trojan suitor who had come to Priam asking for Cassandra in marriage with no bride-price, offering only the promise of driving the Greeks from Troy — now you know what comes of that promise; he kills Asius, who had refused Polydamas's advice and tried to keep his chariot at the ditch; he kills Alcathous, the husband of Aeneas's sister, and the man stood transfixed staring at his killer, like a stone column. The dead pile up around him. Aeneas comes to challenge him; the two fight in the chariot-rank but neither falls; Idomeneus retreats supported by Meriones. The wave of combat passes to Menelaus, who kills Peisandrus in a long set-piece duel; Helenus and Deïphobus charge; Helenus is wounded in the hand by Menelaus's arrow and limps off; Deïphobus is wounded by Meriones.

Through it all the two Ajaxes hold the centre. Hector tries the line again and again and cannot break it. Polydamas comes to him with the Book-12 pattern of clear advice — gather the captains, hold council, the line is wavering — and Hector for once accepts. He goes back along the line to find Helenus, Deïphobus, Othryoneus, Asius, Alcathous; all are dead or wounded. He finds Paris instead, with the survivors of the Lycians and the centre. Paris answers Hector's first taunt with unexpected dignity: it is not that I am idle; today even my heart has not been failing. Since you came to the line we have been fighting Greeks. The book ends with Hector and Paris together returning to the front for one more push. The Greeks hold; the Trojans push; Poseidon, still in Calchas's shape, walks among the captains; the line bends but does not yet break. Night is coming.

Analysis

The book that breaks the divine ban

Book 13 is the moment Zeus's Book-8 ban on divine intervention fails. Poseidon's pity comes upon him — exactly the phrase the Iliad keeps using for a god's decision to act despite a higher command. He drives down to the field. He cannot openly defy Zeus; so he comes in disguise (as the seer Calchas), and he limits his help to touching captains rather than killing Trojans directly. But the principle of the Book-8 ban is broken, and once one god has crossed Zeus's line, the others will follow. By Book 14 Hera will lull Zeus to sleep with Aphrodite's borrowed girdle so that Poseidon can push the offensive further; by Book 15 Zeus will wake and order Apollo to drive Poseidon back; by Book 20 the gods will be openly fighting each other (the Theomachy). Book 13 is the structural moment when the ban collapses, and the cycle's middle theology — gods carefully not intervening — gives way to its late theology — gods constantly intervening.

Poseidon's processional ride

The image of Poseidon driving across the sea in his bronze-hooved gold-maned chariot, and the sea-creatures came up from their lairs everywhere, recognising their king, is the cycle's most magnificent single divine processional. Homer is careful with the detail: the horses are stabled at Aegae under the sea (a real Achaean place, sacred to the god); the sea-creatures rising at his passage is the only moment in the Iliad when the sea is treated as inhabited by anything other than Poseidon himself. The image is the foundation of every later sea-god processional — Virgil's Neptune calming the storm in Aeneid 1, Quintus's Thetis rising from the sea to claim Achilles's body in Posthomerica 3, the Odyssey's Poseidon raising the storm against Odysseus in Book 5. Homer establishes the form here and the cycle works it.

Idomeneus and the old man's aristeia

Idomeneus is the only major Greek captain whose hair the Iliad explicitly notes as greying. His aristeia in the middle of Book 13 is the cycle's only aristeia given to a warrior past his prime, and Homer treats it with particular tenderness. The arming-scene in his cabin is intimate; the conversation with Meriones on the way out is the Iliad's longest single dialogue between two warriors about courage itself (Idomeneus says: you can tell a brave man from a coward by what his cheeks do when he is sent into ambush — the coward's colour changes, his heart pounds, his teeth chatter; the brave man's colour is steady). The aristeia itself is brutal but unspectacular; he kills competent enemies in middle-distance set-pieces and is supported off the field by Meriones at the end. The whole is a portrait of the seasoned veteran fighting one of his last days; it is unmatched elsewhere in the cycle. Virgil borrows the seasoned-veteran-aristeia template for Mezentius in Aeneid 10, but inverts the tone (Mezentius is a tyrant, Idomeneus a king of clean reputation).

The Othryoneus-Cassandra subplot

Watch the brief obituary of Othryoneus. He had come to Troy to ask for Cassandra's hand without a bride-price, promising as his counter-offer to drive the Greeks from Troy. He dies in his first day of fighting; Idomeneus mocks him over the corpse: now you know what comes of that promise. The episode is one of the Iliad's few hints that the Cassandra-tradition — Cassandra as the unmarried daughter whose suitors line up because of her beauty and her prophetic gifts — is already in Homer's frame. Cassandra herself never speaks in the Iliad. She is named only in passing (in Book 24 she sees Priam returning with Hector's body and raises the alarm). But the Cassandra-tradition is dense across the cycle: Aeschylus's Agamemnon, Euripides's Trojan Women, the Lesser Iliad's narration of her rape at Athena's altar (by the lesser Ajax), her killing by Clytemnestra at Mycenae (named in Odyssey 11). Othryoneus's brief appearance here is the Iliad's only hint of the Cassandra-suitor tradition; Homer keeps it small.

Paris's unexpected dignity

The exchange at the end of the book between Hector and Paris is one of the cycle's most surprising. Hector goes back to find his lieutenants and finds them all dead or wounded; he encounters Paris and is ready to taunt him as he taunted him in Book 3 and Book 6 (you sit here while the people perish). Paris answers him for the first time with dignity: it is not that I am idle; today even my heart has not been failing. Homer does not develop Paris's reform; he merely notes it, and lets the two brothers return to the line together. The detail is part of the cycle's portrait of Paris as the man who is something more than the cowardly bow-archer his epithets call him — the prince who once stood between Helen and the Greek envoys, the prince who chose Aphrodite over Hera and Athena, the prince who in the Posthomerica's Book 10 will be the cycle's most pitied dying figure (the arrow of Heracles in his side, Oenone the mountain-nymph refusing him). The reform Homer hints at here is the basis for the more sympathetic Paris of the post-Homeric tradition.

Butler's prose and the long battle

Book 13 is one of the Iliad's longest books and contains the longest single uninterrupted battle-narrative (no extended divine assembly, no shift to the city, no embedded autobiography). Butler's prose is at its most patient here. He prints the kills, prints the speeches, prints the supports and rescues, prints the captains' coming and going. The book in Butler reads like a long sober chronicle of an afternoon. Pope, by contrast, gives it heroic-couplet energy that sometimes obscures the slow exhaustion of the fighting. The reader who wants Book 13's accumulated weight should read it in Butler in one sitting; the slow build of the Trojan failure to break the line is best felt at Butler's pace.

What to watch for

Watch Poseidon's disguise. He spends most of the rest of the cycle's middle in disguise as Calchas, then as a Greek captain, then as himself. The disguise-then-revelation pattern that the Odyssey will live by is established by Poseidon in the Iliad. Watch the two Ajaxes as a pillar — the pair-of-Ajaxes formation is the cycle's clearest single image of the army-as-shield-wall, and the Posthomerica's middle (with only Telamonian Ajax surviving, in his suicidal grief) is the broken half of this picture. Watch Idomeneus — he will not be named again as a fighter in the Iliad's last books, but his return to Crete is one of the cycle's complete sub-stories (the vow he made to sacrifice the first thing he met if he came home alive, the son who met him; the exile to Calabria). Homer holds the foreshadowing back; the Posthomerica and Apollodorus do not. And watch Hector. He cannot break the line. The Greeks are bending and not breaking. Book 14 will require gods to make it move further — and gods will arrange it.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 13 is the deferred answer to Book 7. Poseidon's resentment at the building of the Greek wall (it will outshine the wall Apollo and I built for Laomedon) is paid off here in his pity-driven intervention to defend it. Book 7's Zeus-mollifies-Poseidon-with-the-promise-of-future-destruction is the structural set-up for Book 13's Poseidon-helps-the-Greeks-now-knowing-the-wall-will-be-his-anyway. The Ajax-Hector duel of Book 7 is restaged here as a wall-defence: the same two warriors, the same standoff, but now in the context of a collapsing Greek line. Idomeneus's aristeia echoes Book 5 (Diomedes) and Book 11 (Agamemnon) with the difference that Idomeneus is the old man among aristeiai, the seasoned king fighting his last great day. Poseidon's disguise as Calchas connects backward to Book 1, where Calchas was the seer who named the cause of the plague; the same shape returns to name the cause of the Greek collapse — and the cause is, of course, the same: Apollo's anger then, Zeus's plan now, but both eventually traceable to Agamemnon's first quarrel.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. Poseidon's intervention here is the structural opening for Book 14 (Hera's seduction of Zeus to extend Poseidon's room to act) and Book 15 (Zeus's awakening and the reversal of Poseidon's tide). The Ajax-anchored centre will hold through Books 14 and 15 until the Trojans finally reach the ships in Book 16. Idomeneus's hair-greying-at-the-temples is rehearsed for Book 23 (the funeral games of Patroclus, where Idomeneus is the chariot-race steward — the only old-man's-craft moment in the games). Hector's final inability to break the line here is the cycle's first hint that he cannot win without divine help; the help will come in Book 15, and the moment Patroclus enters the field in Book 16, it will be withdrawn.

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus's Book 8 (the Eurypylus aristeia and death) is built on the Idomeneus-template established here — the seasoned warrior coming back from rest, the long set-piece kills, the personal encounters with named enemies, the final wound, the carrying off the field. The Ajax-as-pillar image is paid off in Posthomerica 5 (Ajax's suicide) — the pillar collapses, the army loses its anchor; Quintus stages the funeral as the loss of the Iliad's defensive backbone. The Poseidon-in-disguise pattern is recapitulated in Posthomerica 14, where Poseidon raises the storm against the Greek fleet — the same god, the same pity-and-anger, but now turned against the men he saved here. The cycle's symmetry is exact.

Into the Aeneid. Virgil reads Poseidon's chariot-and-sea-creatures procession as the model for Neptune's calming of the storm in Aeneid 1.124–156 — and the waves quiet down at his command. The Roman Neptune is Virgil's Poseidon, and the processional form is the same. Aeneas in Italy will repeatedly be helped by the god in moments of structural crisis (Tiber speaking to him in Aeneid 8, the god calming the sea throughout the Italian books). Idomeneus's seasoned-king aristeia is the model for Latinus's portrait in Aeneid 7 (the old king at the crisis-point) and for the long set-piece fights of Aeneid 10 (Mezentius's brutal old-soldier aristeia, with its inverted moral charge). The Hector-Paris reconciliation at the close of the book is the structural seed for the brother-and-brother bonds of Aeneid 9 (Nisus and Euryalus) and Aeneid 10 (Pallas and his elders) — the war-poem's recurring picture of solidarity at the end of a difficult day.

Into the Odyssey. Poseidon in disguise here is the structural origin of the disguise-pattern that governs the entire Odyssey: Athena disguises herself as Mentes (Book 1), Mentor (Book 2), a young shepherd (Book 13), and an old woman (Book 22); Odysseus disguises himself as a beggar (Books 13–22). The principle that gods walk among mortals in borrowed shapes is Book 13's contribution to the cycle. Poseidon's sea-creatures rising at his passage prefigure the long sea-passages of the Odyssey (Book 5, Book 12) and the Odyssey's repeated image of the sea as the god's living realm. And Idomeneus himself, off-stage in the Odyssey, is mentioned in Book 3 (Nestor names him among the survivors who reached home) — his Cretan return is the only major Greek captain's nostos not told in the Odyssey itself, and the gap left by his absence is the cycle's invitation to the post-Homeric tradition that filled it.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Poseidon — pities the Greeks, drives across the sea from Aegae, disguises himself as Calchas, pours strength into the captains
• Ajax Greater — anchors the central line with his namesake; Hector's stone falls short of him
• Ajax Lesser — fights at the side of his namesake; the Locrian half of the cycle's pillar
• Hector — cannot break the Ajax-line; accepts Polydamas's counsel; returns to find his lieutenants dead or wounded
• Paris — fights all day; answers Hector with unexpected dignity at the close of the book
• Aeneas — fights Idomeneus in the chariot-rank; neither falls
• Menelaus — kills Peisandrus in a long set-piece; wounds Helenus with an arrow
• Zeus — turns his eyes away to the northern peoples, certain his ban is being kept
• Calchas — Poseidon takes his shape

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — silent in his tent; the structural absence
• Patroclus — still tending Eurypylus, off-stage
• Cassandra — named through Othryoneus's broken bride-price; her tradition glimpsed
• Andromache — implied behind every reference to Hector
• Helen — the cause; not named in this book

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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.