Iliad, Book 21 — Achilles's Aristeia at the River Scamander

Reading Troy — chapter 21 of 74 · Iliad, Book 21

Iliad, Book 21 — Achilles's Aristeia at the River Scamander (Day 27 of the Iliad, late morning into afternoon; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; the river Scamander on the plain before Troy, and Olympus)

The Trojans flee in two streams. Half make for the city gate; half are driven by Achilles into the river Scamander itself. He sets his spear against a tamarisk on the bank, leaps in with his sword, and the killing begins in the water. He drags out twelve young Trojans alive to be sacrificed on Patroclus's pyre — like fish that men pull out of the sea with their nets — and binds them with their own belts.

Then Lycaon, another young son of Priam, swims toward him exhausted, his arms reaching for Achilles's knees. The cycle's most-quoted single supplication-passage follows. Lycaon recognises Achilles — I am no full brother of Hector, only a half-brother; you took me captive once before, in my father's vineyard at night, and sold me as a slave to Lemnos for a hundred oxen; my friends ransomed me back twelve days ago, and here I am, fate has brought me to your hands twice — and clasps the spear with both hands. Achilles answers with the cycle's deepest piece of mortal-fate philosophy: die, friend; do not weep. Patroclus is dead, and he was better than you. I am dying too, soon enough; one morning or noon someone will kill me with a spear or arrow. Do not blame me. He kills Lycaon and throws the body into the river — let the fish eat your shining fat; your mother will not lay you on a bier and lament. Then he kills Asteropaeus, the Paeonian prince with two javelins (Achilles cuts him from navel to neck and the bowels spill out). Asteropaeus too is dragged into the river by his ankles, food for eels and fish.

The river-god Scamander, watching his waters choke with Trojan bodies, rises in protest. He addresses Achilles in human voice, courteously: enough; choke the plain with bodies but not my channels; the dead are spoiling my fair streams. Achilles answers respectfully — he will not stop the killing but will leave the dead clear of the water — and then resumes the slaughter on the bank. The river loses patience. He rises in a great wave, hurling his entire current at Achilles. The water churns up corpses and chariot-wreckage and the great Pelian spear is briefly knocked from Achilles's hand. Achilles flees up the bank; the river follows. He runs across the plain; the river rises with him in pursuit, the wave swelling like a cattle-tender's irrigation-ditch that has burst its banks and floods the orchard. Achilles cries up to Zeus: Father, none of the gods told me I would die in a river, swept away like a swineherd's boy in winter. Athena and Poseidon answer him, promising that no river shall take him: he is fated to die by the arrows of Apollo at the Scaean Gate, not here.

Hera then calls Hephaestus to put down the river. The smith-god comes out with his great forge-fire and sets it loose against Scamander. The water boils; the corpses in the water are scorched; the elms and willows on the bank burn; the eels and fish leap onto the bank gasping. Hephaestus, enough; do not destroy a god for a mortal man, Scamander cries; he yields and goes home. Hera calls back her fire.

The gods on Olympus then begin to fight one another. The Theomachy proper: Ares charges Athena with his great spear and lands it on her aegis; Athena hits him with a stone as big as a boundary-marker that men of old set up on a hill and lays him out flat on the ground, his hair fouled with dust, seven plethra he stretched himself out in falling. Aphrodite tries to drag him from the field; Athena strikes her with the open hand on her breast and she falls weeping beside Ares. Apollo and Poseidon face one another in a long exchange — Poseidon offers the duel; Apollo refuses, calling it shameful to fight for the sake of poor mortals who are as the leaves on the trees. His sister Artemis then mocks him to his face for refusing the fight; Hera, hearing this, descends on Artemis, snatches her quiver from her shoulder and boxes her ears with it; Artemis flees to her father weeping. The Theomachy ends in mostly slapstick humiliation.

On earth Achilles drives the Trojans toward the city. Apollo, in the shape of Agenor son of Antenor, draws Achilles off the route, taking him in a long chase across the plain. Meanwhile the Trojan survivors stream through the gates and the city closes behind them. All except one. Hector remains outside the walls. The book closes on Apollo continuing the chase, Achilles in pursuit of a phantom, and Hector waiting for him before the Scaean Gate.

Analysis

A book about water

Book 21 is the cycle's only sustained book-length scene built around a single element — water — and the only book in which Achilles is fundamentally challenged by a non-mortal antagonist who is not an Olympian. The river Scamander is the cycle's clearest single personification of a landscape feature, and the book's structural innovation is to make the land itself fight the war. The earth that has been the war's setting for twenty books rises here to participate. The Iliad has been preparing for this since Book 4 (the simoeis-tree simile, the river-born Simoeisius) and Book 13 (Poseidon's sea-procession); Book 21 brings the principle to its head. The cycle's idea that places have agency will be carried into Aeneid 8 (Tiber speaks to Aeneas), into the Odyssey (Calypso's island, the Sirens' meadow, the sea itself), and into the Posthomerica (the storm of Book 14).

Lycaon and the failure of supplication

Lycaon's death is the cycle's deepest single failure-of-supplication. He clasps the spear and Achilles's knees in the perfect form; he recites his own back-story; he reminds Achilles of xenia (he was once Achilles's prisoner, ransomed honourably); he points at the cruelty of fate having brought him twice into Achilles's hands. He does everything the cycle's ritual of mercy requires. Achilles answers him with the deepest piece of mortal-fate philosophy in Homer: die, friend; do not weep. Patroclus is dead, and he was better than you. I am dying too, soon enough. The speech is the cycle's most concentrated single statement of the principle that mortality is the common fate, and that what is unbearable to one man's death is unbearable to all. Achilles's tenderness is part of his cruelty; he speaks to Lycaon as philos, friend, before killing him. The passage will be the model for Virgil's most extended failed-supplication scenes (the suppliants Aeneas kills in Aeneid 10, the failed ransom of Magus in Aeneid 10.521–536). It is also the cycle's clearest indication that Achilles is now living entirely in the knowledge of his own death — every man he kills is a man he is reminding himself he too will be.

The river's complaint

Scamander's complaint to Achilles — enough; choke the plain with bodies but not my channels; the dead are spoiling my fair streams — is the cycle's only sustained moment when a non-human voice protests the war's pollution. The river is not anti-Trojan or pro-Trojan in any deep sense; he is the keeper of the channel, and the channel is being ruined. The cycle's environmental ethic is unusual for an ancient war-poem; the Iliad treats the river's complaint as legitimate and Achilles answers respectfully (he does not stop killing, but he will leave the dead clear of the water). The principle that war pollutes the land is part of the cycle's deep moral framework — Hesiod's Works and Days shares it; Aeschylus's Persians shares it; the Aeneid's account of the Tiber receiving Pallas's body (Aeneid 10) shares it. Book 21's river-passage is the cycle's source for the principle.

Hephaestus burning the river

The image of Hephaestus pouring fire from his forge-fire onto the river, the water boiling, the corpses scorched, the elms and willows burning, the eels and fish leaping onto the bank gasping, is the cycle's most concentrated single image of cosmic violence applied to a place. The image is unique in Homer; nothing else in the poem has the scale and the elemental clarity. The cycle's reading: even the river-god, who is older than the Trojan war, who keeps the land, who has voice and dignity, can be silenced by the higher craft of the smith-god. The principle is that no place is sacred enough to be exempt from the war's destruction; the Greek wall in Book 12 was a sand-castle, the Trojan river here is a forge-puddle. The Aeneid quotes the technique twice — the burning of Anchises's altar in Aeneid 2 (the fire that consumes Troy is the smith-god's fire turned on the city itself), and the Tiber's calmed welcome of Aeneas in Aeneid 8 (the river-god, having seen what fire can do, knows when to yield). The Posthomerica's storm in Book 14 is the cycle's structural inverse — the sea-god raises water against the Greek fleet, and Hephaestus does not save them.

The Theomachy proper

The fight of god against god on Olympus is the cycle's most extended single piece of divine slapstick. Athena lays out Ares with a boundary-stone (seven plethra — about two hundred yards — he stretches in his fall); Aphrodite tries to drag him off and is open-palmed on the breast; Hera boxes Artemis's ears with her own quiver. The tone is almost comic; the cycle does not want the gods' fight to register as tragedy. The Theomachy is therefore a counterweight to Book 22's mortal duel — the gods squabble and recover; the mortals die. The cycle's principle is that the gods' wars are entertainment for themselves; the mortals' wars are tragedy. Aristotle in the Poetics noted Book 21's mostly comic Theomachy as evidence that Homer was careful to keep tragic register for mortal action; the cycle follows the principle. Virgil borrows the Theomachy form for Aeneid 10's divine councils (where the gods squabble and Jupiter sits silent) but raises the register; Quintus's Posthomerica gives its god-fights only briefly. The Iliad's Theomachy is the cycle's most fully developed and the most consistently parodic.

Apollo as Agenor

Apollo's drawing of Achilles off the route to the city by impersonating Agenor son of Antenor is the cycle's structural delay. The Trojan army needs time to escape through the gates; Apollo's trick gives them the time. The image of Achilles pursuing a phantom across the plain while the real men stream into the city is one of the cycle's clearest single pictures of divine deception protecting mortal survival. The Aeneid quotes the same form in Aeneid 10 (Juno conjures a phantom-Aeneas to draw Turnus off the field) and Aeneid 12 (Juturna takes her brother Turnus's place as charioteer). The principle is that gods can deflect mortal action by substitution, but cannot deflect mortal death; Achilles still kills Hector at the end, just not the men inside the gate. Apollo's Agenor-trick saves the city for the night; Hector remains outside.

Butler's prose and the river

Butler's plain English handles the river-fight surprisingly well. The river's speech — enough; choke the plain with bodies but not my channels — is in Butler short and clear, exactly the courteous protest the Greek has. The boiling-the-river passage is in Butler a long present-tense description of water turning to steam, fish leaping onto the bank, elms burning. The plainness lets the elemental imagery land at full force; Pope made it operatic, Lattimore made it stately, Butler keeps it as a vision. The reader who wants the river-fight as a piece of pure elemental drama should read Book 21 in Butler in one sitting.

What to watch for

Watch the twelve young Trojans bound with their own belts — they will be slaughtered at Patroclus's pyre in Book 23, the cycle's most explicit human-sacrifice scene. Watch Lycaon's speech; it is the cycle's structural source for every later failed-supplication, and Achilles's die, friend answer is the cycle's deepest single piece of mortality-philosophy. Watch the river. The Scamander will not appear again in the cycle, but his complaint here is the cycle's only sustained ecological protest; he speaks for the land. Watch Apollo as Agenor — the same god who has saved Hector three times now saves the Trojan army from Achilles for one more night; the pattern of Apollo-as-Trojan-deliverer is at its peak here and will be inverted in Book 22. And watch Hector. He alone is left outside the walls when the gate closes. The cycle's last single mortal action begins in the next book. Apollo who saved everyone else does not save him.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 21 is the long-form payoff of every river-image in the cycle. Simoeisius in Book 4 (the young Trojan born by the Simoeis, falling like a poplar by a meadow); the eagle-and-snake omen of Book 12 (read by Polydamas in river-vocabulary); Achilles's chariot crossing the rivers in Book 20 (the kill-list at the water-edge); the Scamander mentioned in the Book-12 forecast of the wall's destruction (Scamander and Simoeis turned upon the wall). The river that washes the Greek wall away in the post-war forecast is the same river Achilles fights here, and the cycle has been preparing for the river's voice since the cycle's first water-image. Lycaon's failed supplication is the structural answer to Tros's failed supplication in Book 20; the cycle is showing us, book by book, the late-Achilles past the gestures of normal heroic exchange. Apollo's pattern of saving Hector and the Trojan army (the stone-rescue of Book 7, the mist-rescues of Books 17 and 20, the Agenor-trick here) reaches its peak in Book 21 — and will be inverted in Book 22.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. The twelve young Trojans bound with their own belts here are slaughtered at Patroclus's pyre in Book 23 (the cycle's most explicit human-sacrifice scene). Achilles's die, friend speech to Lycaon is the philosophical foundation of Book 22's killing of Hector — Achilles speaks the same mortality-acknowledgement to the man whose death will buy his own. Apollo's Agenor-trick is the structural delay that puts Hector alone outside the walls at dawn; Book 22 opens on Hector waiting. The Theomachy's mostly comic tone is the cycle's last divine-action moment; Books 22, 23, 24 are mortal-only books, with Olympus reduced to occasional supervision.

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus reads Book 21 as the cycle's template for elemental violence. The storm of Posthomerica 14 — Poseidon raising the waves against the Greek fleet — is the structural counter-quote of Hephaestus burning the river here. Both are the cycle's principle that elements fight on behalf of the gods, and that no place is sacred enough to be exempt. The failed-supplication pattern (Lycaon, Tros) is rehearsed in Quintus 11 (the Trojan suppliants Neoptolemus refuses to spare in the sack) and in Quintus 13 (the entire sack as a long failed-supplication scene). Quintus's Achilles does not appear in the river-fight directly (he is dead by Book 3 of the Posthomerica) but the river's voice returns as the cycle's reproach to the war's pollution in Quintus 13 — the Scamander running with blood after the sack of Troy is the same river that complained here.

Into the Aeneid. Virgil quotes Book 21 explicitly. The Tiber speaks to Aeneas in Aeneid 8.31–65 — the river-god in human voice, courteous, advising — and the structural quote of Scamander's speech here is exact. Aeneas's burial of Misenus in Aeneid 6 includes the explicit cleansing of the body before the rites — Virgil's response to Achilles's throwing Lycaon into the river to let the fish eat your shining fat; Virgil's Aeneas does the opposite, returning bodies to the earth. The Hephaestus-burns-the-river image is the cycle's source for the Aeneid 2 burning of Troy itself — the smith-god's fire, turned on the city, is the cosmic violence Book 21 first staged in a river. The failed-supplication speeches of Aeneid 10 (Magus, Tarquitus, Lucagus, Liger) are all structurally descended from Lycaon's speech here. Apollo's Agenor-trick is the structural model for Juno's phantom-Aeneas in Aeneid 10 — the god draws a hero off the field by impersonating his peer.

Into the Odyssey. The river-with-voice is the structural source for the Odyssey's animate landscapes — Calypso's island, the river at Phaeacia where Nausicaa washes the clothes, the sea-cave of the Sirens, Charybdis the whirlpool, the great bowl of the sea itself. The principle that places have agency is established in Iliad 21 and the Odyssey works it constantly. Achilles's die, friend speech to Lycaon is the philosophical seed of the Odyssey's repeated meditations on mortality — Calypso's offer of immortality refused (Odyssey 5), the dead in the Nekyia weeping (Odyssey 11), Achilles's own I would rather be a serf line. The Theomachy's mostly comic tone is the cycle's source for the Odyssey's Olympus — gods squabbling in Books 1, 5, 13, 24, never fully in earnest until the last possible moment. And the twelve-young-Trojans-for-sacrifice is the structural inverse of the twelve maidens hanged at Odysseus's order in Odyssey 22 — both passages are the cycle's most uncomfortable single staging of the cost of vengeance.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Achilles — slaughters Trojans in the river; binds twelve young Trojans for sacrifice at the pyre; kills Lycaon and Asteropaeus; flees the river; defies Scamander; chases Apollo-as-Agenor across the plain
• Scamander — the river-god speaks in human voice; protests the pollution of his channels; rises in a great wave to chase Achilles
• Hephaestus — sent by Hera to put down the river; boils the water with his forge-fire; the cosmic-violence image
• Hera — calls Hephaestus; later boxes Artemis's ears with her own quiver
• Apollo — refuses to fight Poseidon; later takes Agenor's shape and draws Achilles across the plain
• Poseidon — offers Apollo the duel; reassures Achilles he will not die in the river
• Athena — lays out Ares with the boundary-stone; strikes Aphrodite on the breast
• Ares — knocked out by Athena's stone, seven plethra in falling
• Aphrodite — tries to drag Ares off; struck open-handed on the breast
• Artemis — mocks Apollo; ears boxed with her own quiver; flees weeping to Zeus
• Zeus — silent on Olympus, watching the gods' brawl

Mentioned / off-stage

• Patroclus — the body still on the bier; the twelve youths are bound for his pyre
• Hector — alone outside the gates by the close of the book
• Priam — Lycaon's father; the Trojan survivors stream through the city gate
• Helen — the cause; not named in this book
• Andromache — implicit in Hector's danger

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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.