Posthomerica, Book 1 — Penthesilea the Amazon; her Death by Achilles

Reading Troy — chapter 25 of 74 · Posthomerica, Book 1

Posthomerica, Book 1 — Penthesilea the Amazon; her Death by Achilles (Day after Hector's funeral; the first of the post-Iliadic books; the plain of Troy and the Greek camp)

Troy mourns. Hector is burned, his bones gathered; the city cowers behind walls "shrinking from a lion grim." Into this silence rides Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, daughter of Ares, from the river Thermodon. She comes seeking purification — she has accidentally killed her sister Hippolyte while hunting — and she comes also for glory. Twelve Amazon companions ride with her: Clonie, Polemusa, Derinoe, Evandre, Antandre, Bremusa, Hippothoe, Harmothoe, Alcibie, Derimacheia, Antibrote, Thermodosa. The Trojans throng the gates; Penthesilea outshines her companions "as the moon rides over all pre-eminent." Priam receives her as a daughter returned from twenty years abroad, sets the feast, heaps gifts, asks her to save his city. She vows to "lay Achilles low" and burn the ships. Andromache, overhearing, mutters her bitter foreboding: this Amazon will join Hector in the dust.

Night falls. Pallas Athena, working maliciously, sends Penthesilea a dream in the shape of her father Ares: meet Achilles, fear nothing. She rises at dawn and arms — gold greaves close-clipping her limbs, a rainbow-radiant corslet, a moon-rim shield, a helmet streamed over with golden mane, the great two-edged halberd of Eris herself. Her horse, gift of Oreithyia, runs with the Harpies. Priam prays Zeus for victory; the eagle stoops with a dove in its talons. The king's blood chills. He says nothing.

Penthesilea sorties. Her aristeia is the first sustained killing-spree of the Posthomerica: Molion, Persinous, Eilissus, Antitheus, Hippalmus, Elasippus go down before her. The Amazons fight beside her — Clonie kills Menippus, Derinoe kills Laogonus — but the Greek captains rally and the Amazon ranks are cut to pieces: Podarces spears Clonie through the hips; Idomeneus drops Bremusa "as falls a graceful-shafted pine"; Meriones, Diomedes, Sthenelus and Meges clear the field of the queen's companions. Inside Troy, Antimachus's daughter Tisiphone calls the city's women to arms — "Eyes have we like to theirs, and limbs" — but old Theano talks them back to the walls.

Ajax wakes Achilles from his vigil at Patroclus's tomb. The two heroes arm and step into the day "like Aloeus' giant sons." Penthesilea hurls a javelin at Achilles' Hephaestan shield; it shatters. She throws a second. Ajax, laughing, turns aside to slaughter Trojans — she is hawk-to-dove for Achilles, and beneath his notice. Achilles' Chiron-wrought ash-spear takes the queen above the right breast; blood leaps "as a fountain wells"; he drives the same spear through her horse "as a man in haste to sup might pierce / Flesh with the spit." She falls into the dust "in grace and comeliness... for naught of shame / Dishonoured her fair form."

Achilles strips her helmet. Her dying face stops him. His scorn collapses into "sorrowing love, deep, strong as he had known / When that beloved friend Patroclus died." Thersites alone jeers — "Thou sorry-souled Achilles!" — and Achilles' fist smashes his teeth out, kills him on the spot. Diomedes (Thersites's cousin) bristles; the captains pull them apart. The Atreidae grant Priam the body. The Trojans build a pyre, quench it with wine, lay her bones beside old Laomedon on a wall-tower. The book closes on a maxim: "Wrath strikes not at the dead."

Analysis

The book the Iliad refused to write

Homer ends Book 24 with Hector's funeral, and the cycle's older epic tradition — the lost Aethiopis of Arctinus of Miletus — picked up the very next morning with Penthesilea's arrival. Quintus Smyrnaeus, writing in Greek hexameters in the late third or fourth century CE, knew he was filling a famous silence. His Book 1 is the Aethiopis recovered, but recovered through eight centuries of intervening Greek poetry: the Hellenistic taste for catalogues and erotic pathos, the Imperial taste for ekphrastic display, and above all a saturated, sometimes anxious knowledge of Homer himself. Every gesture here is calibrated against the Iliad: Priam's welcome of Penthesilea answers his ransom of Hector; her arming scene rhymes with Patroclus's, Achilles's, and Agamemnon's; her single combat with Achilles answers Hector's. Quintus is writing in Homer's shadow on purpose, and he wants you to feel the shadow.

Penthesilea as Achilles's mirror

She is not the Iliad's Hector. She is something stranger — a female Achilles, daughter of a god, doomed to glory, choosing battle over safe withdrawal. She comes seeking purification for killing her own sister (Hippolyte), which mirrors Achilles's blood-guilt for Patroclus; her aristeia mirrors his; her death-by-Achilles mirrors his coming death-by-Paris (two books from now). The poem keeps doubling her with her killer. When Achilles stoops to lift her helmet, the doubling becomes erotic. It is one of the strangest moments in surviving Greek epic: a warrior falls in love with his enemy at the instant of killing her. Quintus's word for what overcomes Achilles is the same grief he felt for Patroclus — a deliberate equivalence that has launched two thousand years of commentary, from late-antique allegorical readers (Achilles "weds" the soul he has slain) to Heinrich von Kleist's 1808 Penthesilea (he reverses the gender of the slayer; she kills him).

Thersites returns and is killed

Thersites is the Iliad's ugliest figure — bandy-legged, hump-shouldered, the only commoner allowed to speak in the assembly of Book 2, where Odysseus beats him bloody for railing on Agamemnon. Quintus brings him back and kills him. The choice is theologically loaded. In Homer, Thersites's mockery of his betters is contained, ridiculed, but never fatal: the Iliad lets the railer live because the Iliad understands that aristocratic violence needs its critic. Quintus's Achilles, by contrast, will not tolerate the gaze that names his desire. The first blow he strikes after killing Penthesilea is on the one Greek who saw the killing for what it was. Diomedes (Thersites's kinsman through Agrius and Oeneus) almost draws on Achilles. The captains pull them apart. The episode marks the moral pitch of the Posthomerica: the heroes are smaller than they were, more compromised, less in command of themselves. Homer's wrath has cooled to brittleness.

Way's late-Victorian blank verse

A. S. Way (1847–1930) was a classicist trained on the Loeb model — facing-page Greek, English that aspires to dignity. His Posthomerica is unmetred blank verse in deliberate imitation of the King James Bible and of Milton. It is slow, archaic ("quotha," "niddering"), and at its best biblically grave: "In grace and comeliness fell, for naught of shame / Dishonoured her fair form." At its worst it is fustian — clogged with inversion and elevated synonyms where Quintus is plain. But the register choice is intelligent. Way reads Quintus as a late poet, post-Homeric in tone as well as in chronology, and he produces an English that sounds late in the same way: a poet writing inside a tradition that has already happened. Compare with how Dryden, who is coming in fourteen chapters, will handle the Augustan-Roman Virgil in Augustan English heroic couplets. Both translators match register to imperial belatedness.

The catalogue and the simile

Quintus loves the Homeric catalogue and Quintus loves the Homeric simile, and Book 1 piles them on. The twelve Amazon companions are named in catalogue (we will remember none); the killings are catalogued (Molion, Persinous, Eilissus, Antitheus...); the similes come thick — the moon outshining stars, the leopard from forest-coverts, the lioness on the kine, the pine snapped by Boreas, the eagle and the dove. Notice how the pine simile is recycled from Iliad Book 4 (where it described Simoeisius); Quintus is quoting. The whole book is a quotation. The question for the reader is whether quotation is enough to be poetry, and Quintus's answer is usually yes — but only because his subject is itself a poem about belatedness, about coming after the great deaths.

What to watch for

• The pattern of doomed allies arriving at Troy will repeat in Book 2 (Memnon) and Book 6 (Eurypylus): late aid, brief glory, killed by Achilles or the Achillean lineage.
• The motif of Achilles's grief — for Patroclus, for Penthesilea, soon for himself — will be inverted in Book 3 when he is the one mourned.
• Andromache's foreboding here is the Posthomerica's first reactivation of the Iliad's most painful voice; she will be back as captive in Book 13 and as Pyrrhus's prize in Aeneid 3.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The whole book is an echo. Penthesilea's arrival mirrors the foreign allies of Iliad 2's catalogue who are now dead or scattered; her arming scene rhymes with the four great Iliadic arming scenes (Paris 3, Agamemnon 11, Patroclus 16, Achilles 19), and pointedly with Achilles's own — both warriors arm with shield, corslet, helmet, and a great two-edged weapon forged by a god (Achilles's spear from Chiron, her halberd from Eris). Priam's welcome of her as a returning daughter inverts Iliad 24, where he begged Achilles for the body of a son he could no longer welcome; the king who reached into the killer's lap now hosts the woman who will be killed by the same hand. Andromache's muttered foreboding is the direct continuation of her Iliadic voice — she who lamented Hector at the Scaean Gate in Iliad 6 and over his corpse in Iliad 24 lives on here as a chorus of grief that the men do not heed. Thersites's reappearance reactivates Iliad 2; Quintus has read Homer's beating of the railer and chosen to finish the job. Achilles's grief for Penthesilea is named, in Way's translation, with the same intensity as his grief for Patroclus in Iliad 18 — Quintus's most audacious intertextual move.

Forward echoes

Penthesilea is the first of three doomed late-arriving allies. Memnon, son of Eos and king of the Ethiopians, will arrive in Book 2 and kill Antilochus before Achilles kills him; Eurypylus, son of Telephus, will arrive in Book 6 and kill Machaon before Neoptolemus (Achilles's son) kills him. The pattern is structural: Troy keeps reaching outward for help, and each ally falls. Achilles's killing of Thersites looks forward two books to Paris's killing of Achilles — both are killings of mockers by the better-born or better-favoured, and the Posthomerica will run its own ironic line between them: the man who silenced the railer is himself silenced by an arrow from a man Greeks consider a coward. The eroticised killing of Penthesilea looks ahead to Aeneid 11, where Camilla — the Italian warrior-maiden, explicitly modelled on Penthesilea — will be killed by the Etruscan Arruns, and where Virgil will give the moment its most political weight. It also looks ahead to Aeneid 1 where Aeneas, seeing Penthesilea's image on Dido's temple in Carthage, weeps at the picture — the first surviving ekphrastic reception of this scene inside Latin poetry. Andromache's foreboding looks ahead to Aeneid 3, where she is found as Pyrrhus's captive bride, lamenting beside an empty cenotaph of Hector. And Achilles's grief here primes the Odyssey: when Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld in Odyssey 11, he meets the man for whom every killing was also a private wound.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Penthesilea — Amazon queen, daughter of Ares; arrives to save Troy, kills many Greeks, falls to Achilles
• Achilles — kills Penthesilea, falls into grief over her dying beauty, kills Thersites with a single blow
• Priam — welcomes Penthesilea as a daughter; receives her body for burial
• Andromache — overhears Penthesilea's boast and mutters her foreboding lament for Hector
• Ajax Greater — wakes Achilles from his vigil at Patroclus's tomb; refuses to fight Penthesilea, judging her beneath his notice
• Diomedes — kills two Amazons (Alcibie, Derimacheia); kinsman of Thersites, nearly fights Achilles over his death
• Athena — sends the deceitful dream that lures Penthesilea to battle
• Zeus — sends the eagle-and-dove omen in answer to Priam's prayer

Mentioned / off-stage

• Hector — newly buried; the absence Penthesilea is summoned to fill
• Patroclus — Achilles is keeping vigil at his tomb when the Amazon attacks
• Thetis — Achilles's mother, whose fate-warning will arrive in Book 3
• Paris — silent in this book; his bow waits for Book 3
• Hecuba — present in the city but unspeaking; her own laments come later

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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.