Iliad, Book 20 — The Theomachy: Gods Take the Field

Reading Troy — chapter 20 of 74 · Iliad, Book 20

Iliad, Book 20 — The Theomachy: Gods Take the Field (Morning of Day 27 of the Iliad; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; Olympus, the plain before Troy)

Zeus calls a council on Olympus. He lifts the Book-8 ban: go now, each of you, to whichever side you favour; help, fight, or merely watch, as you please. He keeps himself out of the action — for he is afraid, watching Achilles armed and driving against the city, that without divine restraint Achilles would take Troy this very day before the day allotted by fate. The gods divide along their familiar lines: Hera, Athena, Poseidon, Hermes, Hephaestus go to the Greeks; Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Leto, Aphrodite, and the river-god Xanthus (the Scamander) go to the Trojans. The earth groans; Hades in his underworld leaps up from his throne in fear that the earth above will crack and let mortals see the rotting houses of the dead.

The armies meet. Achilles in his new gear is like a wildfire on a parched hillside. Apollo, in the shape of Lycaon son of Priam, drives Aeneas forward to meet him. Aeneas hesitates — he and Achilles have met before, in the cattle-raid on Mount Ida years earlier, when Aeneas was a boy and Achilles drove him off the mountain — but Apollo presses him on. Aeneas approaches; Achilles taunts him; Aeneas answers with a long genealogy stretching back through Dardanus, son of Zeus, the founder of the Trojan line. Then he throws his spear: it dents the new shield but does not pierce. Achilles throws back; his spear passes clean through Aeneas's shield but misses the body. Aeneas grasps a stone two men of our time could not lift, ready to hurl. Then Poseidon — who hates the Trojans but who loves the line of Dardanus — speaks aloud in Hera's hearing: we must save Aeneas; it is fated that he should survive Troy and rule over the Trojans after, his children and his children's children. Hera coldly assents. Poseidon throws mist over Achilles's eyes, lifts Aeneas off the field, and sets him down at the far edge of the army with a warning: do not fight Achilles again until Achilles is dead. Aeneas obeys. Achilles, the mist lifted, finds the spear in the ground in front of him and Aeneas gone; he is briefly amazed, then resumes the killing.

The Trojans run. Hector, watching his brothers fall, prepares to charge Achilles. Apollo holds him back: do not face him in single combat yet; meet him in the press where he cannot strike at you alone. Hector obeys. Achilles kills Iphition, son of the river-god Otrynteus; Demoleon son of Antenor, the spear passing through his temple-bone; Hippodamas, hit in the back as he flees; Polydorus, the youngest of Priam's sons whom the old king had not yet allowed in the front line, hit in the back as he ran. Hector sees Polydorus fall and can stand it no longer; he turns and charges Achilles. The two meet. Achilles taunts him over Patroclus's death; Hector answers; Achilles throws and Apollo whirls Hector's body away in mist. Achilles thrusts at empty air four times, then roars in frustration and turns to the others. He kills Dryops, Demuchus, Laogonus and Dardanus (two sons of Bias), Tros son of Alastor who tried to clasp his knees in supplication and was speared anyway, Mulius, Echeclus, Deucalion, Rhigmus, Areïthous — Homer's longest single kill-list in the cycle. The book closes with Achilles as a flame through the dry woods of a mountain, the Trojans scattering before him, Hector withdrawn under Apollo's mist, and the river Scamander beginning to choke with bodies.

Analysis

The book where the gods come back

Book 20 is the lifting of the Book-8 ban. Zeus, who has held the Olympians out of the war for twelve books, sends them in. The reason is unusual: he is afraid Achilles will take Troy this very day. The fate that Troy must fall on the fated day (not before, not after) is invoked here as the constraint that requires divine intervention. The cycle is treating fate as a schedule: things must happen at the right time, not the time most likely. Apollo will save Hector now to be killed in Book 22, not Book 20. Poseidon will save Aeneas now to survive Troy entirely (the Aeneid). The cycle's divine machinery is the mechanism that keeps the schedule. Book 20 is the cycle's most explicit demonstration of how fate is administered: not by the suppression of mortal agency but by the deflection of mortal weapons.

The salvation of Aeneas

Poseidon's rescue of Aeneas is the cycle's most consequential single divine intervention. The line it is fated that he should survive Troy and rule over the Trojans after, his children and his children's children is the Iliad's own permission for the Aeneid to exist. Virgil quotes the passage as the Iliad's own warrant for his epic: Aeneas survives because Homer's Poseidon said he must. The detail is one of the cycle's most extraordinary pieces of mythological continuity — a Greek god, who hates the Trojans (his own walls were unpaid-for by Laomedon), nevertheless saves Aeneas because the line of Dardanus must not end with Troy. The principle that some royal lines must survive their cities is one of the cycle's deep structures; it applies to Aeneas (founder of Rome via Lavinia), to Antenor (founder of Padua), to Helenus and Andromache (founders of Buthrotum in Aeneid 3), and to Neoptolemus (founder of Molossian kingship). Troy's fall is the Mediterranean's foundational refugee-event, and Book 20's rescue is the cycle's first articulation of it.

Achilles thrusting four times at empty air

The image of Achilles thrusting his spear four times at the space Hector's body was in just before Apollo's mist took him is one of the cycle's most concentrated single pieces of frustration-imagery. The number four is meaningful — three is the cycle's number for completed action (three duels, three flights, three Iris-missions), four is the number for the action that exceeds itself (the four charges of Patroclus at the wall in Book 16, the four thrusts of Achilles here, the four times Patroclus's aristeia exceeds its limit). The thrust-at-empty-air image is the cycle's clearest single picture of a god protecting his favourite from a peer — the mortal weapon falls on the space where the mortal body was; the body is elsewhere. Virgil quotes the image in Aeneid 10 (where Aeneas, in his rage, kills empty air with his spear at the moment Juno conjures up a phantom-Aeneas to draw Turnus off the field — the Iliad-20 figure of the rescued favourite is now the Aeneid's figure of the about-to-die enemy spared by divine deception).

Aeneas's genealogy

The long Aeneas-genealogy he recites in answer to Achilles's taunt — through Dardanus son of Zeus, Erichthonius, Tros, Assaracus, Capys, Anchises — is the cycle's only sustained account of the Trojan royal house's pre-history. It is also the cycle's most explicit single piece of permission for the post-Trojan Trojan tradition. Virgil quotes the genealogy at length in Aeneid 1, 3, and 6. The detail that Zeus loved Dardanus most of all his mortal sons, more even than Heracles, and gave him a hundred handmaids and as many princes as his portion — is the Iliad's deepest single piece of pro-Trojan theology. The cycle is unusually generous to the Trojans considering the Iliad is the Greek war-poem; the Trojan royal house is divine, ancient, blessed, and worth preserving. The Aeneid takes this generosity as licence; without it, no Roman epic would have a Trojan ancestor.

Polydorus and the family-tally of Priam

Watch the death of Polydorus, the youngest son of Priam — whom his father had not yet allowed in the front line, for he was his most beloved son and the fastest runner. The death is the structural quote of the death of Iphidamas in Book 11 (the young Trojan killed on his first day of fighting). The cycle keeps the tally of Priam's sons; he has fifty by Hecuba and several more by other women, and the Iliad systematically kills off the famous ones one by one. Polydorus's death is what at last brings Hector to charge Achilles, the moment that begins the chain that ends in Hector's own death in Book 22. The brother-falls-and-the-other-brother-charges pattern is one of the cycle's permanent structures; the Aeneid borrows it for Lausus-and-Mezentius (Aeneid 10) and for Nisus-and-Euryalus (Aeneid 9).

The cycle's longest kill-list

Achilles's final kill-list in Book 20 — Dryops, Demuchus, Laogonus and Dardanus, Tros, Mulius, Echeclus, Deucalion, Rhigmus, Areïthous — is the longest single kill-list in the cycle and the most pitiless. The pace is deliberately fast. Each man has a one-sentence obituary (where he was born, who his father was, what he was doing when the spear hit). The catalogue-style is the same as the earlier battle-books but the register is harsher; Achilles in his new armour is past the threshold where the named obscure receive Homer's customary tenderness. Tros tries to clasp Achilles's knees in the classic supplication-pose and is speared anyway; the failure of supplication is the cycle's first explicit rejection of the ancient ritual. The detail will rhyme structurally with Lycaon's failed supplication in Book 21 and Hector's failed supplication in Book 22. The cycle is showing us, book by book, how the late-Achilles of Books 20–22 is past the gestures of normal heroic exchange.

Butler's prose and the longest kill-list

Butler's plain English serves Book 20 well at the level of the kill-list (the obituaries are printed at speed; the cycle's bitter ledger keeps moving) but less well at the level of the Aeneas-genealogy (where the formal recitation feels flatter in Butler than in Pope or Lattimore). The Theomachy's divine line-up is given in Butler in a single paragraph of careful naming; Pope made it a grand entrance, Lattimore made it a structured catalogue. The reader who wants the kill-list at full speed should read Book 20 in Butler; the reader who wants the genealogy as ceremonial should sample Lattimore. The cycle's central crisis (Achilles past the threshold of heroic restraint) is in any translation the same.

What to watch for

Watch Aeneas. He is rescued here for the Aeneid; the cycle's structural permission for Roman epic is granted in Poseidon's three lines. Watch Hector under Apollo's mist. He has been protected three times now (Book 7's stone, Book 17's mist, Book 20's mist); the Apollo-protects-Hector pattern is the cycle's slow build to the cruel inversion of Book 22, where Apollo finally abandons him. Watch the river Scamander beginning to choke with bodies — the book closes on the choking, Book 21 opens with the river's rebellion. Watch Tros's failed supplication. The cycle's ritual of mercy-by-knee-clasp is here for the first time refused; Book 21's Lycaon and Book 22's Hector will both find the same refusal. And watch the kill-list as a ledger: Achilles is no longer killing for kleos but for grief, and the cycle's bookkeeping of mortal death continues without the dignifying obituaries that marked Books 4 and 5. The cycle's last three books are the wrath's redirection from anger-at-Agamemnon to grief-at-Patroclus, and the catalogue's hardening is one of its most carefully managed measurements.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 20 is the long-form response to Book 8. Zeus's ban there is lifted here; the divine sides assemble for open intervention. Aeneas's rescue here pays off his first rescue in Book 5 (Aphrodite then, Poseidon now); both rescues are explicitly framed as the survival of the Trojan line for a future beyond Troy. Achilles's wildfire-simile here is the structural rhyme of his Book-19 arming-scene (the new armour shone like a star) — the warrior who arms like a star fights like a fire. Hector's three rescues (Book 7's stone, Book 17's mist, Book 20's mist) build the cycle's pattern of Apollo-protects-Hector that Book 22 will finally inverter; the present pattern is establishing the height from which Hector will fall. The Aeneas-genealogy is the cycle's first sustained look at the Trojan royal house's pre-history — the same house Antenor, Polydamas, and Aeneas come from, the house whose pre-Trojan-war history has been alluded to in the Heracles-back-stories of Books 7, 14, and 19.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. The Theomachy here sets up the divine line-ups for Books 21 (Achilles vs the river Scamander; Hephaestus burns the river back) and 22 (Athena tricks Hector into facing Achilles; Apollo finally lets him die). The cycle's last three books are fought in a permanently divine-intervening atmosphere; Book 20 establishes the rules. Aeneas's rescue is paid off in the Aeneid; Hector's third rescue is paid off (in reverse) in Book 22; the kill-list is the structural foundation of the river's complaint in Book 21 (the corpses choking the water).

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus reads Book 20 as the cycle's permission for his own god-fights. The Theomachy is rehearsed at smaller scale in Posthomerica 5 (the contest of arms, with Athena, Hera, and the river-gods in dispute), in Posthomerica 12 (the goddesses' council before the Wooden Horse), and in Posthomerica 14 (Poseidon raises the storm against the Greeks). The kill-list pattern (named obscure men dying in catalogue at speed) is the structural template for Quintus's Penthesilea-aristeia (Book 1) and Achilles's last killings (Book 3). Aeneas does not appear in the Posthomerica — Quintus simply observes the Iliad-20 rescue and excludes him from the war's last events. The Posthomerica is the only cycle-poem that respects the Iliad's rescue-Aeneas-for-the-future-of-Troy as a hands-off principle.

Into the Aeneid. Virgil's Aeneid is structurally inconceivable without Iliad 20. Poseidon's three-line speech (it is fated that he should escape) is the Iliad's own permission for the Aeneid to exist, and Virgil quotes the passage explicitly in Aeneid 3 (Helenus's prophecy to Aeneas) and obliquely throughout. The Dardanid genealogy here is the foundation of Virgil's repeated use of the same lineage (Aeneid 1.380, 3.94, 6.756, 12.166). The Achilles-thrusts-at-empty-air image is rewritten in Aeneid 10 (Juno conjures a phantom-Aeneas to draw Turnus off the field; Turnus pursues the phantom and is taken aside; he learns of Aeneas's true presence only after his rage is exhausted) — the structural quote is exact, with the moral charge reversed (now the rescue saves not the favourite but the enemy from a fate Juno is delaying). The Tros-supplication-failed sequence is the model for the failed suppliants of Aeneid 10 and 12 (the Latin suppliants Aeneas refuses to spare).

Into the Odyssey. The Theomachy is the cycle's structural source for the council-of-the-gods that opens Odyssey 1 and 5; the open divine intervention in the war is the structural precondition for the open divine intervention in Odysseus's homecoming. The rescue-of-Aeneas-for-the-future pattern is the cycle's structural seed for Odysseus's repeated rescue by Athena (the cycle's pattern of the favourite of the patron-god survives because of fate is the same in both directions). The kill-list pattern returns in the Mnesterophonia of Odyssey 22 (the suitors killed in a long catalogue at speed); the same hardening of the catalogue-tone (no dignifying obituaries, the killing past heroic restraint) is the Odyssey's signature in its only mass-killing scene. Tros's failed supplication is the structural model for Leiodes the soothsayer's failed supplication in Odyssey 22 (the suppliant who clasps Odysseus's knees and is killed anyway).

The gods are on the field. The river will be next.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Zeus — lifts the divine ban; presides over the gods' dispatch to both sides
• Achilles — drives against Troy like a wildfire; meets Aeneas, then chases Hector through empty air; the cycle's longest single kill-list
• Aeneas — driven by Apollo to meet Achilles; recites the Dardanid genealogy; rescued by Poseidon for the future of Rome
• Poseidon — saves Aeneas with the it is fated that he should escape speech; the cycle's pro-Aeneid moment
• Apollo — drives Aeneas to the fight; holds Hector back; whirls Hector away in mist when Achilles closes
• Hector — restrained by Apollo; charges only when Polydorus is killed; saved by Apollo's mist
• Hera — coldly assents to Poseidon's rescue of Aeneas
• Athena — on the Greek side, watching
• Aphrodite — on the Trojan side, watching
• Ares — on the Trojan side
• Hephaestus — on the Greek side
• Hermes — on the Greek side

Mentioned / off-stage

• Patroclus — the body on the bier; the grief that drives the killing
• Priam — named through Polydorus's death and through the Dardanid genealogy
• Helen — the cause; not named in this book
• Andromache — implicit in Hector's danger
• Dardanus — founder of the Trojan line, named in Aeneas's genealogy
• Anchises — Aeneas's father, named in the genealogy

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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.