Iliad, Book 24 — Priam's Ransom; Hector's Funeral

Reading Troy — chapter 24 of 74 · Iliad, Book 24

Iliad, Book 24 — Priam's Ransom; Hector's Funeral (Eleven days after Hector's death, into Day 39 of the Iliad; ~1184 BCE traditional date for the Trojan War; the Greek camp at the ships, Mount Ida, Olympus, and Troy)

For eleven days Achilles cannot sleep. Each dawn he yokes his horses, ties Hector's body behind the chariot, and drags it three times around Patroclus's tomb; Apollo all the while keeps the body intact, covering it with the golden aegis lest the sun's rays or the rough ground should harm the corpse. The gods on Olympus, watching, are divided: most pity Hector and want the body returned; Hera, Athena, and Poseidon (still the implacable enemies of Troy because of Paris's judgement of beauty long ago) demand the body stay. Apollo finally speaks for the body's return: Achilles has lost all decent feeling; he is no better than a lion who has gone among the sheep. Pity is gone from him.

Zeus settles the dispute. Iris is sent to Thetis under the sea; Thetis comes up to her son's tent and tells him plainly: the gods are angry with you for keeping Hector's body unburied; give it back; let Priam come in person with the ransom. Achilles answers her without resistance: so let it be; he can come. Iris is then sent to Priam in Troy. She finds him sitting in the dust of his own courtyard, his sons and daughters round him weeping, his head fouled with ashes. She tells him to load a wagon with treasure, take only a single old herald (Idaeus), drive in person at night across the plain to Achilles's tent, supplicate at the knees of the killer of his son. Hermes will guide him through the watchposts. Priam hears, rises, agrees.

Hecuba weeps against the plan — he will kill you; he has no shame. Priam answers gently: I shall die in any case if Troy is to fall; let me at least clasp the body of my son and die having mourned him as a father should. He takes from the treasure-room twelve great robes, twelve fine cloaks, twelve embroidered carpets, twelve white tunics, ten talents of gold, two shining tripods, four cauldrons, and the great cup the Thracians had given him in his youth; he keeps for himself only one bowl. He yokes a wagon and a four-mule team; the wagon is loaded; Idaeus drives.

They go out by the Scaean Gate as dusk falls. At a wild fig-tree on the plain a young man comes up to them — beardless, like one of the cycle's loveliest youths, with the wand of Hermes — and introduces himself as a Myrmidon attendant of Achilles. He offers to escort them past the Greek sentries. Priam, trembling and amazed, accepts. Hermes drives them, puts the sentries asleep at their watch, opens the great gate of the Myrmidon stockade, leads them to Achilles's tent, then reveals himself: I am Hermes, sent by your father Zeus. Go in alone, clasp the hero's knees, supplicate by his father Peleus, by his mother Thetis, by his son Neoptolemus. The god vanishes.

Priam enters the tent. Achilles is just finishing supper with two attendants; Patroclus's bier still in the corner. Priam kneels at his feet and kisses the hands that have killed so many of his sons. Achilles stares; he has never seen anything like this. Priam speaks the cycle's most quoted single speech: remember your own father Peleus, who is old like me, and who, when he hears of my dishonour, will weep as I weep; but he can still hope to see you again. I have lost my best son to you. I have done what no man has done before — kissed the hands of my son's killer. He breaks down. Achilles takes the old man's hand and gently pushes him back; both men weep together, Achilles for Peleus and for Patroclus, Priam for Hector. The sound of weeping filled the tent.

Then Achilles lifts the old man to his feet, calls for the maids to wash Hector's body and anoint it with oil out of Priam's sight (lest the father, seeing the disfigured corpse, lose his composure and provoke Achilles back into wrath), wraps it in two of Priam's own fine cloaks, and lays it on the wagon himself, weeping. They eat together — the cycle's only sustained dinner-scene between enemies. Priam admires Achilles's beauty like a god's; Achilles admires Priam's nobility. Achilles asks how many days are needed for the funeral; Priam answers nine for mourning, the tenth for burning, the eleventh for the barrow, the twelfth to fight again if we must. Achilles promises: the war shall hold for those twelve days. Sleep here tonight beside the wagon. At dawn I will see you safe out of the camp.

In the night Hermes wakes Priam and drives him and the wagon back through the sleeping camp before Agamemnon can hear that Priam was there. They cross the river at the ford at dawn. Cassandra sees the wagon first from the city wall — like fair Aphrodite — and raises the cry. The whole city pours out, the women first; Hecuba and Andromache run to the wagon and embrace the body.

The body is brought into the city and laid in the great hall. The nine days of mourning begin. Three set-speeches over the body close the Iliad:

Andromache speaks first. Husband, you have left me a widow with our infant son. He will not grow up to manhood under your protection; he will be sold as a slave or thrown from the wall by some Greek angry that his brother died at your hand. (Her prophecy of Astyanax's fate is exact — Posthomerica 13 will dramatise it.)

Hecuba speaks second. Of all my sons you were the one the gods loved best, and even in death they have honoured you, for here you lie fresh and undecayed. She kisses the body's mouth.

Helen speaks third — the cycle's most moving piece of female self-knowledge. Hector, dearest by far to me of all the brothers; in the twenty years since I came to Troy I have never heard from you a single hard word; when others mocked me — even Priam's sisters and brothers — you alone restrained them; you treated me always with kindness. I weep for you and for myself, for there is no one left in this city to love me now.

The pyre is built outside the walls; it burns for a day; the bones are gathered into a golden urn wrapped in soft purple cloths; a barrow is heaped over the urn; a funeral feast is held in Priam's hall.

Such was the funeral of Hector, breaker of horses.

The Iliad ends.

Analysis

The cycle's most extraordinary single book

Book 24 is the Iliad's resolution and the cycle's most extraordinary single book. It does what no other ancient war-epic dares to do: it brings the chief mortal enemy of its protagonist into the protagonist's own tent and lets them weep together. The structural risk is enormous. The wrath that has driven the poem for twenty-three books is resolved not by victory and not by reconciliation among the Greek captains but by the visit of an old enemy king to his son's killer. The resolution is purely personal — no army, no council, no formal oath. The Iliad ends in the embrace of two enemies.

The cycle's structural symmetry

The Iliad's ring-composition closes here. Book 1 opens with an old man (Chryses) coming to the Greek camp with ransom to retrieve his daughter from the king; Book 24 closes with an old man (Priam) coming to the Greek camp with ransom to retrieve his son's body from the warrior. The two scenes are deliberately matched. Chryses is refused by Agamemnon; Priam is granted by Achilles. The difference between the two responses is the cycle's deepest single piece of moral architecture. Agamemnon's Book-1 refusal — refusing the ransom of an old priest — is the act that begins the wrath; Achilles's Book-24 acceptance — granting the ransom of an old king — is the act that ends it. The cycle has been built across twenty-three books to make the symmetry visible. The Iliad is the only ancient war-epic that closes the structure it opens with such formal exactness.

Priam's speech

Priam's speech kneeling at Achilles's feet — remember your own father Peleus, who is old like me, and who, when he hears of my dishonour, will weep as I weep; but he can still hope to see you again. I have lost my best son to you. I have done what no man has done before — kissed the hands of my son's killer — is the cycle's most quoted single speech. The rhetorical move is to displace Achilles's grief by reminding him that Peleus is the old man Priam is structurally — both old kings whose only sons are dying soon; both alone in their final years; both about to lose what cannot be replaced. Priam asks Achilles to see in him not Hector's father but Peleus's mirror. Achilles cannot refuse the symmetry. The cycle's principle is that grief is the universal human condition; it dissolves the categories (Greek/Trojan, killer/parent of victim) under which war is fought. Auden in The Shield of Achilles (1952) wrote against the principle, claiming the modern shield-maker would not put this scene on the shield. The reading is dark but historically informed — Book 24's reconciliation is unusual in literature precisely because it is so rare in actual war.

The three female laments

The three female laments that close the Iliad — Andromache, Hecuba, Helen — form a triptych of women's voices that the cycle has been building since Book 6. Andromache speaks the prophetic lament (Astyanax will not survive); Hecuba speaks the maternal lament (her son was the gods' favourite); Helen speaks the self-knowledge lament (the only one in Troy who treated her with kindness). The triptych is the cycle's clearest single piece of female-voice architecture. The Posthomerica's Book 13 (the sack of Troy) is built on the same triptych — the female voices of Andromache, Hecuba, and Cassandra speaking the city's destruction. The Aeneid's Book 2 quotes the form (Hecuba's lament at Priam's death; Andromache's later lament at Buthrotum in Book 3). The Odyssey's domestic books are built on a different but related triptych (Penelope, Eurycleia, the maids). The cycle's three great female speakers — Helen, Andromache, Penelope — all descend from the Iliad's pattern of structured female speech, and Book 24 is the pattern's culmination.

The shared meal

Watch the small but extraordinary detail of Achilles and Priam eating together in the tent. This is the cycle's only sustained dinner-scene between enemies. The cycle's many shared meals (Achilles feeding the embassy in Book 9, the army feasting after the Patroclus-pyre in Book 23) are all between allies. Book 24's meal is between the killer and the father of the killed. The cycle treats the meal as a piece of ritual that re-establishes shared humanity: both men admire the other's beauty (Priam admires Achilles like a god's; Achilles admires Priam's nobility); both men eat the meat the maids serve. The scene is the cycle's most concentrated single image of the principle that food and shared eating are the deep human binding. The Odyssey will make this principle its central operational rule (the suitors' violation of the dining-rule justifies the slaughter; Odysseus's reunion with his household is staged through restored dining). The Aeneid's Book 1 (Aeneas eating with Dido at her palace) is structurally modelled on Book 24's shared meal — with the difference that Dido and Aeneas's dinner becomes a love-affair and a tragedy, while Priam and Achilles's becomes a parting.

The body's preservation

Watch the detail that Apollo has preserved Hector's body for eleven days, covering it with the golden aegis lest the sun's rays or the rough ground should harm the corpse. The cycle's principle is that even the gods on the losing side will not let the body of their favourite be utterly desecrated; the body is a sacred object until the rites are performed. The same principle governs Sarpedon's body in Book 16 (carried home to Lycia by Sleep and Death) and will govern the bodies in Posthomerica 4 (Achilles's funeral), Aeneid 11 (Pallas's funeral), and Odyssey 24 (the suitors' bodies, finally washed and returned to their families). The cycle's most consistent through-line is that no death is complete until the body has been ritually treated by survivors; the unburied body is the cycle's permanent open wound, and Book 24 closes the wound of Hector.

Butler's prose and the cycle's last book

Butler's plain English is at its most consequential in Book 24. The Priam-Achilles dialogue is the cycle's most ritualised single piece of speech-action; Butler keeps the speeches in clean direct English without ornament. The triptych of female laments is handled with the same plainness — three speeches in succession, each clearly differentiated by speaker (Andromache prophetic, Hecuba maternal, Helen self-knowing). The cycle's last line — such was the funeral of Hector, breaker of horses — is in Butler the same five-word formality the Greek closes on. The reader who wants the Iliad to end exactly where Homer ends it — at a city in mourning, not at a Greek victory — should read Book 24 in Butler.

What to watch for

Watch Cassandra. She has been silent through the entire Iliad (named only once, in passing, in Book 13's Othryoneus episode). She speaks here for the first time, raising the cry of Hector's return from the wall. The detail is the cycle's first glimpse of her voice — the voice that will become the cycle's most prophetic in the Aeschylean Agamemnon (where she speaks her great vision of the past and future of the Atreidae) and that will return briefly in the Posthomerica's sack (where she is raped at Athena's altar by the lesser Ajax). Book 24's brief Cassandra is the seed of the cycle's most haunted female figure. Watch the twelve days of truce. The Iliad ends on a war that is still going on; the twelve days will pass, the war will resume, Achilles will die at the Scaean Gate (Posthomerica 3), Troy will fall (Posthomerica 13), and the survivors will scatter into the post-war world the Aeneid and the Odyssey inhabit. Watch Helen's lament. The cycle's most-quoted woman speaks her quietest line — she has been mocked even by Priam's own sisters in twenty years at Troy; Hector alone treated her well. The detail is the cycle's deepest single piece of Helen-portrait, and her grief at the close of the Iliad will be the seed of her Odyssey-4 portrait (the grave queen of Sparta, whose long endurance has made her wisdom heavy). And watch the cycle's ending — at a funeral, in a city, with women weeping. The Iliad does not end with a battle won. It does not end with a city fallen. It ends with a body returned and a father mourning, and the cycle is built on the principle that this is what war ends like, however it appears to end.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 24 closes the cycle's ring-composition that opened with Book 1. Chryses came to the Greek camp with ransom for his daughter; Priam comes with ransom for his son's body. Agamemnon refused; Achilles grants. The structural symmetry is exact, and the moral architecture is the cycle's deepest piece of teaching: the same act (the ransom of a beloved) demands the same response (acceptance), and the failure to give it (Agamemnon in Book 1) is what set the cycle's catastrophe in motion. The triptych of female laments at the close (Andromache, Hecuba, Helen) is the long-form payoff of every female voice the Iliad has given us — Helen's self-condemnations in Books 3, 6, and her brief here; Hecuba's intercession at Athena's temple in Book 6 and her supplication at the wall in Book 22; Andromache's farewell at the Scaean Gate in Book 6 and her lament at the wall in Book 22. The cycle has been preparing for this triptych across twenty-three books. Apollo's preservation of Hector's body pays off his protection of Hector through Books 7, 17, 20, 21, and 22 — the same god who could not save the man preserves the corpse.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. The poem ends; there is no further "inside." But the twelve-day truce sets up the resumption of the war that the Posthomerica and the Aeneid pick up.

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus's Book 1 opens directly after Iliad 24's funeral — Penthesilea arrives at the eleventh day after Hector's funeral to take up the war Priam still has to fight. The cycle's continuity is exact. Andromache's prophetic lament (Astyanax thrown from the wall) is fulfilled in Posthomerica 13's sack-of-Troy scene. Hecuba's grief is fulfilled in Posthomerica 13 (the killing of Polyxena over Achilles's tomb; the killing of Astyanax; Hecuba's enslavement). Helen's brief speech here is the cycle's seed of her post-Iliadic portrait — she is returned to Menelaus, lives the rest of her life at Sparta, and is the grave hostess of Odyssey 4. Cassandra's brief voice here is the cycle's seed of her later prophetic role — in Posthomerica 5 (the lament for Ajax), in Posthomerica 12 (the warning against the Wooden Horse, which the Trojans refuse), in Posthomerica 13 (the rape by the lesser Ajax at Athena's altar). The whole Posthomerica works in the spaces Iliad 24 has left open.

Into the Aeneid. The fall of Troy that the Aeneid narrates in Book 2 is the structural consequence of the war that Iliad 24 leaves still going on. The twelve-day truce will end; Achilles will die (Posthomerica 3); the Wooden Horse will be built (Posthomerica 12); Troy will fall (Posthomerica 13 / Aeneid 2). The Aeneid's central principle — that some Trojans must escape Troy to found Rome — is set up by Iliad 20's rescue of Aeneas and confirmed by Iliad 24's portrait of the city in mourning (the city that will fall; the survivors who will scatter). Priam's death at the altar of his own palace, narrated in Aeneid 2, is the structural completion of the old king's portrait Iliad 24 establishes — the dignified mourner who in Aeneid 2 will be butchered by Pyrrhus (Neoptolemus, Achilles's son, named here by Hermes). The cycle is exact: Achilles's son will kill the man Achilles spared. The Aeneid is the long-form payoff of the asymmetry.

Into the Odyssey. Iliad 24 is the cycle's structural source for the Odyssey's preoccupation with reconciliation as the final resolution of vendetta. Odysseus's slaughter of the suitors in Book 22 leaves the same problem the Iliad left — the survivors of the dead demand vengeance. Odyssey 24 (the cycle's last book) ends with Athena and Zeus stopping the cycle of revenge by direct intervention; the structural quote of Iliad 24's reconciliation is exact, but with the difference that the Odyssey requires divine intervention to enforce what the Iliad achieves through mortal generosity. Achilles's reception of Priam in his tent is the cycle's pattern for Odysseus's reception of strangers (Telemachus at Nestor's in Book 3, at Menelaus's in Book 4; Odysseus at Alcinous's in Book 7; the disguised Odysseus at Eumaeus's in Book 14). The cycle's principle of xenia — guest-friendship — runs from the Iliad's resolution to the Odyssey's structural ethics. Helen's brief, quiet speech here is the seed of her Odyssey-4 portrait (the grave wife of Menelaus, whose long endurance has made her the cycle's most knowing female voice). Andromache's lament here is the model for Penelope's laments in Odyssey 19. The cycle's final female voices are the cycle's connection across all four epics.

The Iliad is over. The cycle continues for fifty more books.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Achilles — receives Priam in his tent; weeps with him; agrees to the twelve-day truce; returns Hector's body
• Priam — drives across the plain at night with the ransom; kneels at the killer's feet; speaks the cycle's most-quoted speech
• Hermes — guides Priam through the Greek lines as a beardless youth; reveals himself at the tent
• Thetis — comes up from the sea to tell Achilles the gods want Hector's body returned
• Iris — sent twice by Zeus: first to Thetis, then to Priam
• Zeus — settles the divine dispute; orders the body returned; sends Hermes as escort
• Apollo — preserves Hector's body for eleven days with the golden aegis; speaks for the body's return
• Hecuba — weeps against Priam's plan; speaks the second of three laments at the bier
• Andromache — speaks the first lament; prophesies Astyanax's fate
• Helen — speaks the third and most piercing lament; remembers Hector's twenty years of kindness
• Cassandra — sees the wagon first from the wall; raises the cry of return; the cycle's first glimpse of her voice
• Idaeus — the old herald who drives the wagon

Mentioned / off-stage

• Patroclus — the bier still in the corner of the tent
• Hector — the body; the picture's silent centre
• Astyanax — named through Andromache's prophetic lament
• Peleus — Achilles's father, named as the structural mirror Priam invokes
• Neoptolemus — Achilles's son on Scyros, named by Hermes
• Paris — the judgement of beauty long ago, named as the gods' grudge against Troy

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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.