Iliad, Book 14 — The Beguiling of Zeus by Hera

Reading Troy — chapter 14 of 74 · Iliad, Book 14

Iliad, Book 14 — The Beguiling of Zeus by Hera (Day 26 of the Iliad, late afternoon to dusk; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; the Greek camp at the ships, Mount Ida, and Olympus)

Nestor, hearing the battle pressing closer, leaves the wounded Machaon and goes out to look. He meets Agamemnon, Diomedes, and Odysseus — three wounded captains who have walked out from the surgeon's tent to see the line. They confer. Agamemnon, broken again, proposes for the third time in the poem to launch the ships and sail; Odysseus turns on him in scalding contempt — to think a king who carries the sceptre of so many men would say such words; you should command warriors of less worth; the army would never agree. Diomedes proposes the middle course: go back to the line, even wounded, to encourage the men. The three captains start back toward the wall.

Poseidon meets them on the way, in the shape of an old man. He pours strength into the wounded; he sweeps the field with his battle-cry, as great as the shout of nine or ten thousand men; the Greeks rally.

Meanwhile Hera, watching from Olympus, sees Zeus on Ida and decides to seduce him out of his Book-8 ban so that Poseidon can push the offensive further. The Hera-seduction sequence — the Dios apate, the deception of Zeus — is one of the cycle's most playful long passages. She bathes herself with ambrosia and anoints with sweet olive-oil whose fragrance shaken in Zeus's bronze hall reached up to earth and to heaven; she combs her hair and dresses it in shining plaits; she puts on the immortal peplos Athena had wrought for her with many embroideries; she clasps her breast with golden brooches; she ties on a girdle with a hundred tassels; she fixes her veil bright as the sun; she binds golden sandals on her feet. Then she goes to Aphrodite and asks, in pretended innocence, to borrow the goddess's love-girdle — the embroidered band that holds all loves and all desires and persuasion that beguiles even the prudent. She lies about her purpose: she wants to go and visit Oceanus and Tethys to make peace between them. Aphrodite, unsuspecting, gives the girdle.

Hera then goes to Sleep — Hypnos, brother of Death — and asks him to put Zeus to sleep after she has lain with him. Sleep refuses; the last time he put Zeus to sleep at Hera's request (during the homecoming of Heracles), Zeus woke and would have hurled him from heaven into the sea if Night had not received him into her dark folds. Hera offers a bribe: one of the younger Graces, Pasithea, whom Sleep has long desired, as a wife. He agrees. They fly to Ida together, Sleep settling into a fir-tree disguised as a bird.

Hera comes to Zeus on the peak. He sees her coming and is seized with desire — Homer's wonderful catalogue of the women he has previously slept with that Hera now surpasses (Ixion's wife, Danae, Europa, Semele, Alcmena, Demeter, Leto) is the cycle's most unembarrassed divine love-list. Hera demurs prettily and asks for privacy. Zeus answers: let me cover us with a golden cloud through which neither sun nor mortal eye shall pass. They lie together on Ida; the earth beneath them flowers with crocus, hyacinth, and lotus thick and soft, which lifted them off the ground; Zeus falls asleep in her arms. Sleep flies down to Poseidon and tells him: the way is open, the sea-god may help the Greeks as much as he pleases.

Poseidon takes off the disguise of Calchas and stands openly at the head of the Greek line. He leads them in a fresh charge. Hector lifts a great stone to throw at Ajax; Ajax answers with a still greater stone that strikes Hector in the chest above the rim of his shield, knocks him to the ground, and leaves him sprawled in the dust, vomiting black blood. His comrades — Polydamas, Aeneas, Agenor, Sarpedon, Glaucus — carry him out of the line. The Trojans break. The book closes on a long set-piece killing-list: Telamonian Ajax kills Satnius; Polydamas kills Prothoenor; Ajax kills Archelochus son of Antenor; Acamas kills Promachus; Peneleos kills Ilioneus cutting the eye out on the spear-point and lifting the head still wearing the helmet, holding it up like a poppy on its stem. Night falls; the Trojans are in flight; the Greek line is at the wall again. Hera has done what she came for.

Analysis

The cycle's most playful long passage

The Hera-seduction is the Iliad's most extended piece of pure narrative pleasure. Homer slows the cycle's catastrophe down for two hundred lines of bathing, dressing, borrowing, lying, bribing, flying, embracing, and flowering — and then resumes the killing with Hector spitting black blood under Ajax's stone. The two registers are jarring on purpose. Homer is showing us, with as much craft as he ever uses, the contrast between Olympian time (where one afternoon's seduction is a leisure) and mortal time (where the same afternoon is a massacre). The same Zeus who lies with Hera in the crocus and hyacinth has been weighing fates of death since Book 8. The juxtaposition is the Iliad's clearest single statement that the gods' attention to mortal suffering is, even at its most engaged, also a kind of play.

What Hera actually achieves

Hera's seduction is not a marriage-comedy. It is a tactical operation, planned to the minute and executed to deceive: bath, oil, peplos, brooches, girdle, sandals, veil; Aphrodite tricked into lending the love-girdle; Sleep bribed with Pasithea; Zeus on Ida specifically because he is the one obstacle to Greek victory. Hera achieves exactly what she set out to achieve — the Greek line is at the wall again by the time Zeus wakes in Book 15. The Iliad treats female agency in the seduction-tradition with unusual respect: Hera is not seduced by Zeus, she is the seducer; Aphrodite is the tricked party, not the trickster; Sleep is the male bribed by the female. The cycle's later seduction-passages — Calypso holding Odysseus on Ogygia in Odyssey 5, Circe in Odyssey 10, Dido and Aeneas in Aeneid 4 — are all in the long shadow of the Dios apate. The Iliad puts the female-as-tactical-seducer in the cycle's frame here, and the cycle works it.

The girdle of Aphrodite

The kestos himas — the embroidered love-girdle — is one of the cycle's few divine objects with a specific name. In it were all loves and all desires and persuasion that beguiles even the prudent. The thing is treated as material, sewn, an object that can be unpinned from one goddess and tied around another. The treatment is unembarrassed: love is a thing, woven, transferable, the work of a goddess's hands. The girdle returns in the cycle's vocabulary at three notable points: Aphrodite invokes its power (without naming the girdle itself) in Aeneid 1 when she seduces Cupid into helping with Dido; Hera again invokes its memory in the Hera-Athena chariot-charge of Iliad 8 (Hera's belt is described in the same vocabulary); and the only mortal woman in the cycle who is described in the girdle's vocabulary is Helen at her first appearance in Book 3 (her kestos, her embroidered binding). The vocabulary connects three powerful and dangerous women — Aphrodite, Hera, Helen — across the cycle.

Sleep's old grievance

Watch the small mythological aside in Sleep's refusal. He tells Hera the last time he put Zeus to sleep at her request was during the homecoming of Heracles from Troy — a reference to the earlier sack of Troy by Heracles, who came to punish king Laomedon for breaking his promise to pay for the building of the walls (the same wall Apollo and Poseidon built in Book 7's grievance). Hera, during that homecoming, sent storms after Heracles that drove him off course; Zeus woke and hurled the gods who had helped her down from heaven; only Sleep escaped because Night sheltered him. The aside is the Iliad's clearest single reference to the previous Trojan war (Heracles's sack), which is the background to the current Trojan war. The cycle is conscious that Troy has been sacked once before; the prior sack is the back-mythology of Aeneas's father Anchises and the Trojan elder Antenor and the Trojan walls themselves. The detail is one of the small jewels of the Iliad's mythological memory.

The Ilioneus image and the poppy

The closing kill of the book — Peneleos's spear through the eye of Ilioneus, and he lifted the head still wearing the helmet on the spear-point and held it up like a poppy on its stem — is the Iliad's most studied single battlefield image after the wounding of Menelaus in Book 4. The simile is unbearable because it makes the killed-warrior's head into a piece of garden-craft: a single spring poppy lifted on its stem. The Iliad consistently does this — pairs the moment of greatest brutality with the moment of greatest beauty — and the Ilioneus image is the cycle's most concentrated single instance of the principle. Pope translated it as the bleeding head he rears, / The bleeding trophy then aloft he bears — gilding the gesture. Butler keeps it close to the original: holding it up like a poppy on its stem. Lattimore restores the full force: as though it were the head of a poppy. The reader who reads Book 14 in any translation should pause at this line and watch the poppy lift on the spear; it is the cycle's most condensed single picture of war as horticulture, the warrior as flower, the field as garden.

Butler's prose and the seduction-passage

Book 14's seduction-passage is the Iliad's most ornamented single sequence and the test case for Butler's plain English at its most ambivalent. Butler renders Hera's dressing-scene in flat prose: she bathed herself; she anointed herself with oil; she combed her hair; she dressed in the immortal peplos. The Greek is more sensuous: the oil's fragrance reaches earth and heaven; the peplos is described in terms borrowed from the Shield of Achilles; the binding of the breast with the brooches is given in metrical detail that makes the woman's body the focus. Butler's plainness drains the sensuality. For Book 14 specifically — and only for Book 14 — the reader who is not bound to one translation should sample Pope (whose couplets are made for this) and Fagles (whose blank verse keeps the rhythmic body of the original). The cycle's most playful long passage deserves to be read at full sensuous extension at least once.

What to watch for

Watch Aphrodite. She lends the girdle to her own enemy (Hera is the implacable enemy of Troy; Aphrodite is its great divine patron). The girdle's lending is the cycle's clearest single example of one goddess outmanoeuvring another by appearing to flatter. Aphrodite's defeat here will be replayed in Aeneid 1 (Juno tricks Venus's son's voyage with Aeolus's storm) and Aeneid 4 (Juno and Venus cooperate in the Dido-and-Aeneas pact, each thinking she is outmanoeuvring the other). Watch Hector's wound — the great Ajax-stone in his chest is the first serious wound Hector has received in the poem; Apollo will heal him in Book 15, but the body of Hector that takes the stone here is the body that will lie outside Troy's walls in Book 22. Watch Sleep — he appears in the cycle exactly twice (here and at Pasithea's wedding, off-stage in the cycle but in later mythography); his Book-14 bribery is the Iliad's only sustained portrait of him, and the brother-of-Death pairing is the cycle's clearest single picture of the kinship between rest and dying. And watch the crocus, hyacinth, and lotus rising beneath Zeus and Hera. The earth flowers under the gods at the moment the war's tide turns; the cycle will not show the earth flowering again until Aeneid 6 (the Elysian fields). The image is unique in the Iliad — a piece of Olympian-time pastoral inset into the killing-day — and the reader should hold it.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 14 is the calculated answer to Book 1's Hera-pleading-for-Achaeans and Book 8's Zeus-bars-the-gods. Hera could not openly oppose Zeus's ban; she therefore moves him personally. The seduction is the structural inverse of the Book-1 quarrel — the quarrel was about power asserted by demand; the seduction is about power asserted by withdrawal of attention. The bathing-and-dressing scene rhymes with Hephaestus's craft-scenes (the chariot of Book 5, the shield of Book 18) — Hera's body is worked into seduction-form the way the shield will be worked into an artefact. The Sleep-bribery rhymes with Hera's old grievance over the Heracles homecoming, the cycle's only sustained reference to the earlier sack of Troy. And Poseidon's open intervention here pays off the disguise-Calchas of Book 13 — Zeus's ban once broken silently is now broken openly.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. Zeus's sleep allows the Greeks to push the Trojans back from the wall; Book 15 will open with Zeus waking and the Trojan tide returning. Hector's wound here is the first serious wound he has taken; it puts him out of the line for the rest of Book 14 and the opening of Book 15, during which Apollo will heal him. The healing-and-return arc is the cycle's first sustained example of a major warrior being put down by a god-favoured opponent (here Ajax) and lifted up again by the patron god (Apollo) — the same pattern will govern Aeneas's near-death and rescue in Book 20 and Achilles's own near-drowning in Book 21. The killing-list at the end of the book ends with the Ilioneus-poppy image, which will rhyme exactly with the Sarpedon-as-falling-tree image of Book 16 — the cycle's first hint that Sarpedon is being prepared for the great death.

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus reads the Hera-seduction as the structural model for several of his goddess-set-pieces — Athena's appearances in Posthomerica 5 and 12, Aphrodite's grief in Posthomerica 3 (echoing her trickery here in reverse). The Poseidon-openly-intervening pattern is paid off in Posthomerica 14, where Poseidon raises the storm against the Greek fleet — the same god, the same dramatic shift from disguise to open intervention. The Ilioneus-poppy image is the cycle's seed for Quintus's most extended young-warrior deaths (Penthesilea in 1, Eurypylus in 8); each is described in floral or arboreal imagery that descends from Iliad 14's poppy.

Into the Aeneid. Virgil reads the Dios apate as the model for two of his cycle's most important seductions. Venus's Book-1 visit to Vulcan to ask for the shield — Venus seduces her own husband (Aeneid 8.370–406, the night-scene where she winds her white arms around the smith's neck) — is the closest direct quote of Hera's seduction of Zeus that Latin literature gives. Juno's manipulation of Aeolus in Aeneid 1 (bribing him with the nymph Deiopea) is the structural quote of Hera's bribery of Sleep with Pasithea — the same pattern, divine intermediary bribed with a wife. Dido and Aeneas's union in the cave (Aeneid 4) is described in the same vocabulary as Zeus and Hera's union on Ida — the earth flowering, the storm and lightning the marriage's witnesses; Virgil is acknowledging the Iliad-14 source as he reverses the politics (Hera's seduction helps her side; Juno's seduction of Dido destroys it).

Into the Odyssey. The Hera-seduction is the cycle's structural source for the long pattern of female seduction-and-detention that governs the Odyssey's middle: Circe in Book 10, Calypso in Book 5, the Sirens in Book 12. Each is a woman who detains a hero through erotic means; each is the structural descendant of Hera's tactical use of seduction here. The Odyssey turns the form's politics inside-out — where Hera seduces a god to liberate mortal warriors, Odyssean women seduce mortal men to detain them. The Aphrodite-girdle as transferable object is the cycle's seed for Helen's drug in Odyssey 4 (the pharmakon nepenthes that takes pain away) and for Circe's drugs in Odyssey 10 — the principle that female craft can be embodied in a transferable object. The Ilioneus-poppy image is rewritten in Odyssey 11 as the unending field of asphodel where the dead walk — the flower made for the dead, in a place where war is permanently after the fact. And the brother-of-Death-and-Sleep image here is the structural seed for Odyssey 24's psychopomp Hermes leading the suitors' souls to the asphodel — the night-figure who eases the passage from waking to dying, established in Book 14, paid off in the cycle's final book.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Hera — bathes, dresses, borrows Aphrodite's love-girdle, bribes Sleep, seduces Zeus on Ida; the Dios apate
• Zeus — seized with desire on Ida, lists his prior loves, covers the union in a golden cloud, falls asleep in Hera's arms
• Aphrodite — tricked into lending her love-girdle on a false pretext of peace-mission
• Poseidon — sweeps the field with his battle-cry; reveals himself openly when Zeus sleeps; leads the Greek charge
• Ajax Greater — hurls the great stone that knocks Hector down spitting black blood
• Hector — felled by Ajax's stone, carried out of the line by his comrades
• Agamemnon — proposes a third time to launch the ships; rebuked by Odysseus
• Odysseus — scolds Agamemnon for the third flight-proposal
• Diomedes — proposes returning to the line even wounded to rally the men
• Nestor — leaves Machaon and walks out to find the captains
• Aeneas — among those who carry Hector off the field
• Sarpedon — among those who carry Hector off the field
• Glaucus — among those who carry Hector off the field
• Paris — fights on but does not lead in this book

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — silent in his tent; the structural absence
• Patroclus — still tending Eurypylus, off-stage
• Thetis — implicit in every reference to Achilles
• Helen — the cause; her name not in this book
• Andromache — implicit in the wounding of Hector

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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.