Iliad, Book 19 — The Reconciliation: Briseis Returned

Reading Troy — chapter 19 of 74 · Iliad, Book 19

Iliad, Book 19 — The Reconciliation: Briseis Returned (Dawn of Day 27 of the Iliad; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; the Greek camp at the ships)

Dawn rises yellow-robed from the streams of Ocean. Thetis comes down to the camp with the new armour, lays it gleaming at Achilles's feet — and the gear rang as it fell, and the Myrmidons could not bear to look at it for the brightness. Achilles alone gazes at it, and his eyes flashed terribly under his brows with the joy of a man who has been given the gift he most wants. He bids his mother go; he must now end the quarrel.

He walks the length of the beach, calling the captains to assembly. They come limping — Diomedes, Odysseus, Agamemnon — still bandaged from their Book-11 wounds; the rest follow. Achilles speaks first. He renounces the wrath publicly: let it be ended; let the day of the quarrel be as if it had never been; far better it had been if Briseis had died at her father's house and never come to me, or if I had quietly accepted the king's right then; my anger has cost the lives of more Achaeans than the war ever should. He calls for arms. Agamemnon answers him from his seat — he does not rise — and offers a partial apology that is one of the cycle's most studied speeches: I am not the cause; Ate is the cause, the daughter of Zeus, who blinds men's minds; she once blinded Zeus himself on the day Heracles was to be born; she blinded me on the day I took Briseis. He recites the gifts of Book 9, swears the oath about Briseis being untouched, and offers a sacrifice of a boar to seal the oath.

Odysseus rises to intervene. The army must eat before fighting; men cannot face Hector on empty stomachs; the gifts must be brought out from Agamemnon's tent in formal procession, the oath sworn over the boar, and only then the army arm. Achilles, impatient — he wants to fight at once and refuses food and drink until Hector is dead — yields to the formal procedure but only just. The gifts are brought out: the tripods, the cauldrons, the racehorses, the seven Lesbian women, then last Briseis, lovely as golden Aphrodite. The boar is killed, the oath sworn, the gifts laid before Achilles. He scarcely sees them.

Briseis sees Patroclus's body laid out on the bier in Achilles's tent and falls upon it, scratching her face with her nails, tearing her breast — Patroclus, dearest in my heart of all the men around me when I came here. She remembers him as the one who had told her she would be Achilles's lawful wife when they returned to Phthia — and that you were going to give a wedding-feast and I should be the lady of your house. The Trojan women lament with her — Trojan because all are spoils of war; the cycle's most concentrated single passage of female lament over a male corpse. Then the Achaean elders try to make Achilles eat. He refuses. Athena comes down from Olympus with Zeus's blessing and pours nectar and ambrosia into his chest like a dove so that he can fight without weakness.

Achilles arms. The arming-scene is the cycle's third and greatest — the greaves of tin with silver clasps, the cuirass that shone like a star, the silver-studded sword, the great shield bright as the moon, or as a campfire on a high lonely peak that wandering shepherds see from far off and grieve to know they are still on the open sea, far from those they love, the helmet with its golden crest waving terribly, and the great Pelian ash spear — which only Achilles can wield — that Patroclus had not taken. He mounts the chariot. Automedon takes the reins. As Achilles gives the order to drive, his horse Xanthus, with a voice given to him by Hera, speaks: we will save you today, lord Achilles; but the day of your death is near, and not we shall be to blame for it, but a great god and a strong fate. Achilles answers the immortal horse without surprise: I know I shall die here; I shall not flee from it; I shall press on into the killing till the Trojans have had enough of me. Then the Furies stop the horse's voice. Achilles lashes the horses and drives toward the wall of Troy.

Analysis

A book about formal closure

Book 19 is the cycle's most extended single ritual sequence. The wrath of Book 1 is publicly renounced; the gifts of Book 9 are publicly delivered; the oath about Briseis is publicly sworn over a sacrificed boar; the army is publicly fed; Achilles is publicly armed. Every action is a formal ritual that closes one of the cycle's open quarrels. The book is unusual in the Iliad — no killing, no combat-aristeia, no divine assembly with high politics — and the unusualness is structural. Homer is showing us that grievances open in the cycle's first book require ceremonial closure before the cycle's last movement (the killing of Hector) can begin. The reader who feels Book 19 is "slow" is feeling exactly what Homer wants felt: the ritual closing of a wound that was open for eighteen books.

Agamemnon's Ate-speech

Agamemnon's apology is the cycle's most studied speech in the rhetoric of self-exoneration. He blames Ate, the daughter of Zeus, who blinds men's minds; he tells the story of how Ate once blinded Zeus himself on the day Heracles was born (Zeus swore that whoever was born first in Eurystheus's line that day would rule the Argives; Hera delayed Heracles's birth and Eurystheus was born first; Zeus, blinded by Ate, was bound by his own oath to Eurystheus's lordship over Heracles); Zeus hurled Ate down from heaven by the hair of her head. Agamemnon's logic: as Zeus was blinded then, so was I when I took Briseis. The apology is structurally important — it admits the wrong, it offers the gifts, it makes the oath — but it is also a careful refusal to take personal responsibility (Ate did it). The Iliad is unusual among ancient war-poems in showing the high king's apology as both genuine and self-exonerating; the cycle's late readers (especially the Greek tragedians, who built whole plays on the Atreidae's self-justifications) take this speech as the model of Greek leadership's deepest rhetorical mode.

Briseis's lament

Briseis's lament over Patroclus's body is the only sustained female speech in the Iliad after Helen's Book-6 and Andromache's Book-22 laments. The cycle has been almost entirely a male poem; here, briefly, the women's voice opens. Briseis remembers Patroclus as the one who comforted her after Achilles killed her husband and her three brothers in the sack of her home town Lyrnessus, the one who told her she would be Achilles's lawful wife in Phthia. The lament reveals a back-story the cycle has not told us: Patroclus, gentle, had promised Briseis a future as Achilles's wife. The lament is therefore also the cycle's only sustained look at Briseis as a person with a history and a hope, rather than as the geras (prize) over which Books 1 and 19 quarrel. The Posthomerica picks up Briseis directly in Book 4 (Briseis at Achilles's bier, lamenting again); the symmetry of the two laments (Briseis over Patroclus here; Briseis over Achilles in Quintus) is one of the cycle's most quietly devastating pieces of architecture.

The Trojan women and the cycle's female chorus

Behind Briseis the Trojan women lament. They are all spoils of war — captured in the same kind of raid that captured Briseis. The cycle keeps reminding us that the women of the Greek camp are the women of Trojan, Lyrnessian, Lesbian houses, distributed as honour-prizes to Greek warriors. Their lament is the cycle's only sustained moment when this fact is acknowledged emotionally. Euripides's Trojan Women and Andromache and Hecuba are built on this passage; the Posthomerica's Book 14 (the captive women weeping at the storm) is the Iliad-19 lament expanded. The female chorus is one of the cycle's permanent registers, and Book 19 is the moment it first speaks as a group.

The horse that speaks

The speaking of Xanthus, Achilles's immortal horse, is the cycle's only sustained moment in which an animal addresses a mortal in direct speech. (The Iliad has Athena disguising herself as a vulture in Book 7, and Penelope's dream-eagle speaks in Odyssey 19, and Polyphemus's ram is addressed by the blinded Cyclops in Odyssey 9 — but Xanthus is the only animal in the cycle who simply speaks as itself.) Hera grants him the voice; the Furies stop it after a single line. The line is the prophecy Achilles already knows: you will die soon, and not we shall be to blame for it. The cycle's treatment of the prophecy through an animal-mouth is one of its most theologically careful moves. Animals see things men cannot see; the horse who knows his master's death-day is the cycle's clearest single picture of the principle. The Aeneid borrows the figure for Aeneid 11 (the horse of Pallas, Aethon, weeping at the funeral); the Odyssey borrows it for Argus the dog in Odyssey 17 (the dog who knows his master and dies of recognition).

Athena pouring nectar into Achilles's chest

The image of Athena coming down from Olympus and pouring nectar and ambrosia like a dove into Achilles's chest so that he can fight without eating is the cycle's clearest single picture of divine sustenance overruling mortal need. Achilles has refused food and drink; the goddess provides what food and drink would have provided. The image is the structural antithesis of the human-sustenance imagery of the Odyssey, where Odysseus must eat and rest like any other man. The Iliad's Achilles is increasingly close to the gods; the Odyssey's Odysseus is increasingly close to the dogs. Book 19's ambrosia-passage is the moment Achilles passes a threshold; he is now divinely sustained, divinely armed, divinely angered. The cycle's last four books treat him almost as a god on the field — the Theomachy in Book 20 will let him fight gods directly; Book 21 will have him fight a river-god; Book 22 will have him fight Hector almost as a god kills a mortal. Book 19 is where the threshold is crossed.

Butler's prose and the formal speeches

Book 19 contains four of the cycle's most studied set-speeches: Achilles's renunciation of the wrath; Agamemnon's Ate-speech; Briseis's lament; Achilles's answer to the speaking horse. Butler's plain English handles all four with discipline. He keeps the Ate-mythological-aside straight (Pope made it grand; Lattimore made it ornate; Butler keeps it as an embedded story). He keeps Briseis's lament without grandiloquence (Pope made her into a Latinate widow; Butler keeps her as a captive woman speaking plain English). He keeps Achilles's answer to the horse short and clean. The reader who wants the four speeches as ritual rather than as oratory should read Book 19 in Butler.

What to watch for

Watch the renunciation. Achilles says explicitly that the wrath was a mistake — far better if Briseis had died at her father's house, or if I had quietly accepted the king's right. This is the only place in the cycle where Achilles names the wrath as a mistake. The cycle holds his judgement; everything that follows (his killing of Hector, his death by Paris's arrow, his ghost's Odyssey-11 speech) reads as the working-through of this admission. Watch the speaking horse — Xanthus will not speak again in the cycle, but the death-prophecy he carries is the prophecy Achilles will fulfil in Book 22. Watch Briseis. She will appear once more in Posthomerica 4, at Achilles's bier, and the cycle's only two female set-speeches by her are the two laments. Watch Agamemnon — he never rises from his seat to apologise; he is too embarrassed to walk to Achilles. The detail is part of the cycle's portrait of him as the king whose authority is half-extinguished by his original wrong. And watch Achilles arming. The arming-scene is the cycle's last — there will be no more after this, because no other warrior in the remaining books needs to arm. The cycle's three arming-scenes (Agamemnon in 11, Patroclus in 16, Achilles here) build a triangle, and the third is the climax. Books 20–22 are the consequence.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 19 is the formal closing of every quarrel opened in Book 1. The taking of Briseis (Book 1) is undone; the gifts refused in Book 9 are accepted; the oath about Briseis-untouched is sworn; the army is reunited; Achilles is publicly armed. Each ritual in Book 19 answers a wound in Book 1 — but with the difference that the cost (Patroclus's death) cannot be undone. The reconciliation is therefore both real and incomplete; the wrath is over, but its consequence is not. Agamemnon's Ate-speech echoes his Book-2 Diapeira (the testing of the troops, which also went wrong) — the same king, the same blindness, the same self-exonerating retrospective. Briseis's lament for Patroclus echoes her silent walk through the camp in Book 1 (the captive being led away to the king's tent); the cycle returns her to voice here, briefly, before the war takes both her men. Achilles's arming-scene echoes Agamemnon's Book-11 arming (the king's ceremonial gift-armour) and Patroclus's Book-16 arming (the borrowed deadly armour) — the cycle's three arming-scenes are a triptych, and Achilles's is the climactic third.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. Achilles armed and driving into battle is the picture-set for Book 20 (the Theomachy and Aeneas's near-death), Book 21 (the river-fight), and Book 22 (the death of Hector). The horse's prophecy (the day of your death is near) will be the structural over-tone of every Achilles-aristeia line in Books 20–22. Briseis's lament over Patroclus prefigures Andromache's lament over Hector in Book 22 — the cycle's two great female laments are matched. The vow to slaughter twelve Trojan youths at Patroclus's pyre is the engine that drives the human-sacrifice scene in Book 23. The Ate-mythological aside (Heracles's birth) is the cycle's only reference to the earlier Heracles-Trojan-cycle until the Odyssey's references to Heracles in the Nekyia (Odyssey 11).

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus's Book 4 is built scene for scene on Iliad 19's Briseis-lament. The funeral of Achilles in Posthomerica 3 and the funeral games in Book 4 are the structural mirror of Patroclus's funeral in Iliad 23; the lamenting women — Briseis, Tecmessa (Ajax's captive), the Trojan female chorus — all descend from the Iliad-19 chorus. Briseis at Achilles's bier in Posthomerica 4 is the same woman, the same lament-position, the same arc — the cycle's only consistent female figure across the four epics is Briseis (matched in Helen and in the structurally smaller arcs of Andromache and Hecuba). Achilles's arming-scene is the structural model for the arming-scenes of Penthesilea (Posthomerica 1), Memnon (Posthomerica 2), and Eurypylus (Posthomerica 8); each god-favoured Trojan or Trojan-ally late in the war is armed in the same form Iliad 19 establishes.

Into the Aeneid. Virgil reads Iliad 19 as the model for two of his cycle's most important formal closures. Aeneas's reconciliation with Latinus in Aeneid 12 (after the duel with Turnus) is the structural quote of Achilles's reconciliation with Agamemnon here — the public ritual, the oath, the closing of the quarrel before the cycle's last action. Aeneas's arming for the final duel in Aeneid 12 quotes Achilles's arming here directly (the shield of Aeneas was already forged in Aeneid 8 — the structural analogue of Hephaestus's shield in Iliad 18 — and the arming-scene of Aeneid 12 puts it on). The speaking horse Xanthus is the structural source for Aeneas's horse-of-Pallas Aethon in Aeneid 11 (weeping at the funeral procession) and for the talking sacred boughs of Aeneid 3 (when Aeneas pulls them and they bleed and speak).

Into the Odyssey. The renunciation of the wrath here is the moral foundation of Achilles's Odyssey-11 ghost-speech: I would rather be a serf to a poor man on earth than king of all the dead. The line is impossible without the Book-19 admission that the wrath was a mistake. Briseis's lament is the structural seed of Penelope's laments in Odyssey 19 — the long-suffering female voice mourning an absent or dead male, with a back-story of forced loyalty and uncertain return. The speaking horse is the structural seed of every Odyssean animal-recognition: Argus the dog (Odyssey 17), Polyphemus's ram (Odyssey 9), Athena's various bird-disguises. The Athena-pouring-nectar passage is the structural seed of the Odyssey's Calypso-feeds-Odysseus-with-mortal-bread-and-ambrosia-for-herself (Odyssey 5) — the cycle's recurring image of divine and mortal sustenance as parallel systems.

The cycle's reconciliations are formal closures; the cycle's killings are not.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Achilles — publicly renounces the wrath; receives the new armour from Thetis; arms in the cycle's greatest arming-scene; answers the speaking horse
• Thetis — brings down the new armour at dawn; lays it gleaming at her son's feet
• Agamemnon — apologises from his seat; speaks the Ate-speech; swears the oath over the boar
• Odysseus — intervenes for the formal procedure: oath, gifts in procession, army fed first
• Briseis — returned in procession with the gifts; falls upon Patroclus's body in the cycle's most-quoted female lament
• Athena — pours nectar and ambrosia into Achilles's chest like a dove
• Zeus — sends Athena down to feed Achilles; silent in council
• Automedon — yokes the chariot; takes the reins for the field
• Diomedes — among the limping wounded captains who attend the assembly
• Xanthus — the immortal horse, given voice by Hera; prophesies Achilles's death

Mentioned / off-stage

• Patroclus — the body on the bier; the centre of Briseis's lament
• Hector — preparing for the morning's confrontation, off-stage
• Helen — the cause; not named in this book
• Andromache — implicit in references to Hector
• Hera — gives Xanthus his voice
• Heracles — named in the Ate-mythological-aside

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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.