Posthomerica, Book 2 — Memnon the Ethiopian; the Death of Antilochus

Reading Troy — chapter 26 of 74 · Posthomerica, Book 2

Posthomerica, Book 2 — Memnon the Ethiopian; the Death of Antilochus (Day after Penthesilea's funeral; Troy and the plain; the second doomed ally arrives)

Troy is still in mourning. Priam rises in council and asks the Trojans not to despair — Memnon, son of the Dawn and of Tithonus, king of the Ethiopians, is coming. Polydamas the prudent suggests returning Helen and her wealth and ending the war; Paris flatly refuses. The next morning the Ethiopian host arrives, "like darkly lowering clouds," and "like harvest-ravaging locusts." Memnon himself is grave and modest — strikingly so after Penthesilea's vaunting. At the feast, when Priam piles up promises, Memnon answers that it does not become a man "with great swelling words to vaunt / Amidst the feast"; battle, not boasting, will prove what he is. He refuses long drinking — wine and sleeplessness dull the war-spirit. Quintus is building a moral contrast: the Amazon was glory-mad, the Ethiopian is grave. Both will die.

Olympus convenes. Zeus forbids any god to intervene; no goddess is to clasp his knees for a son. The Fates are absolute today. At dawn the armies arm. Achilles steps forth "like a giant Titan" with the sun-simile of Way's translation around him; Memnon stands "even such to see / As Ares furious-hearted." The lines crash together "as when surges meet / On the wild sea." Memnon's aristeia begins — he kills Pheron, Ereuthus, and many others, his Ethiopians Alcyoneus and Nychius fighting at his side; the Greeks flee before him like deer driven into the hunter's nets.

Antilochus, son of Nestor, sees his old father exposed and charges Memnon to draw him off. He hurls a stone; it strikes Memnon's helmet but does not wound. Memnon, "like seething cauldron boiled," spears Antilochus above the breast and the bronze drives through to the heart, "the spot of speediest death." Nestor sees his son fall. He calls his other son Thrasymedes; he means to fight Memnon himself, old as he is, but Memnon will not lift a spear against him — "Ancient, it were my shame to fight / With one so much mine elder." Nestor, weeping, withdraws "like an old lion whom / A cur may boldly drive back from the fold."

Achilles, hearing of Antilochus's death, leaves off slaughtering Trojans and runs at Memnon. They face each other — the two demigod-sons of goddesses, Thetis and Eos watching from heaven. Memnon taunts: his mother brings light to gods and men; Thetis sits in "barren crypts of brine," "deedless, unseen." Achilles answers with Thetis's deeds — she received Hephaestus when he fell from Olympus, she released Zeus from bonds. The duel is sustained and matched. Then the Fates step beside them: one dark, falling across Memnon; one bright, haloing Achilles. The Chiron spear or sword (Way alternates) drives "Clear through" Memnon's breastbone; "suddenly snapped the silver cord of life." The Ethiopians break; the Trojans run for the walls.

Eos comes down. She commands her sister-Winds to lift her son and carry him home, and they bear him in a long stream of sighing wind to the Aesepus's plain. His blood becomes a river that turns crimson each year on the anniversary of his death; his Ethiopian companions are transformed by a god into the Memnonides — birds that wheel and wail forever at his tomb. The book ends in lamentation: a mother's grief that threatens the day itself, and a metamorphosis that gives Memnon what Penthesilea did not get — a cult.

Analysis

Memnon as the second of three

Book 2 is the middle panel of the Posthomerica's opening triptych — Amazon, Ethiopian, son-of-Telephus — three doomed allies who arrive late to save Troy and are killed by the Achillean lineage. Penthesilea was killed by Achilles; Memnon is killed by Achilles; Eurypylus (Book 8) will be killed by Achilles's son Neoptolemus. The structure is the Posthomerica's most lucid borrowing from the lost Aethiopis of Arctinus, which preserved the same sequence in the same order. Quintus knows the pattern is repetitive and works the contrasts: Penthesilea boasts, Memnon refuses to boast; Penthesilea is killed quickly, Memnon's duel is long; Penthesilea's body is given to Priam, Memnon's is taken by his mother's Winds. The repetition is the point. Troy can summon as many champions as its wealth and alliances command, and the answer keeps being Achilles.

Antilochus's death

Antilochus, Nestor's son, is one of the great minor griefs of the Greek epic tradition. In the Iliad he is a young warrior — the one who brings Achilles news of Patroclus's death in Book 18 (Iliad 18.2), restraining Achilles's hands "lest he should cut his throat with the iron." In the Odyssey, Achilles names him in the underworld as a friend killed at Troy (Odyssey 11.467, 24.16). The actual moment of his death was never told in the Iliad — Homer pointed forward to it without staging it. Quintus stages it. Antilochus dies covering his old father, which is the most Iliadic of motives, and his death triggers Achilles's last great burst of rage. Note that Achilles's coming to avenge Antilochus is the same plot move as his coming to avenge Patroclus: a friend's body, a fury, a duel. Quintus is rhyming his Book 2 with the Iliad's Book 18 deliberately.

The mothers in heaven

The duel of Achilles and Memnon is structurally the Posthomerica's clearest borrowing of the Iliad's golden-scales motif. In Iliad 22, Zeus weighs Hector's fate against Achilles's; Hector's sinks. Quintus is less explicit — he gives us the two Fates rather than the scales — but the move is the same: the duel is decided by the gods before the bronze finishes the work. The presence of the two divine mothers, watching, gives the duel its tragic register. Thetis will weep for Achilles in Book 3; Eos weeps for Memnon now. The Posthomerica is, more than the Iliad, a poem of mothers' grief. (Hecuba, Andromache, Eos, Thetis: Troy is a city built on the lamentation of women, and Quintus knows it.) The detail of dew being born from Eos's tears is older than Quintus — it appears already in fragments of Hesiod and in the Aethiopis tradition — but Way's English makes it visible: dawn comes wet every morning because a mother has been crying all night.

Memnon's modesty

Memnon's refusal to boast at Priam's feast is the most ethically loaded speech in the Posthomerica's opening books. The contrast with Penthesilea is exact: she promised to burn the ships; he says "Whether I / Be brave and strong, or whether I be not, / Battle... shall prove to thee." This is not a stock Homeric move. The Iliadic warrior boasts — boasting is a structural feature of the genre, vaunting over the killed is named (epeuchesthai). Memnon's refusal to vaunt marks him as a different kind of hero, and arguably as the Posthomerica's most attractive figure. His refusal to fight old Nestor is the second half of the same characterisation: "it were my shame to fight / With one so much mine elder." Quintus is constructing a hero who shows up the brittleness Achilles displayed in killing Thersites. Memnon is the man Achilles is not.

Way's locust simile

The Ethiopians' arrival "Like harvest-ravaging locusts" is Quintus reaching for the same Eastern register Aeschylus used in Persae — vast non-Greek armies as natural plague. Way's translation amplifies the colour ("darkly lowering clouds," "an irresistible host") because Way is reading Quintus through Tennyson and the King James prophets. The locust simile is also the Posthomerica's signal that Memnon belongs to a different geographic imagination than Hector. Hector defended a city. Memnon comes from the edge of the world — the Ocean-river, the Ethiopians, the Hesperid Maids — and his blood, when shed, becomes a river that runs in Asia Minor on the anniversary of his death. Quintus is writing a poem in which Troy is the centre of a cosmos, and every late ally pulls in cult-traffic from a further-flung province.

What to watch for

• Memnon's apotheosis (the Memnonides, the river) is Quintus's most ekphrastic moment so far; he will not give Achilles, three books from now, this much metamorphosis.
• The golden scales pattern will recur visibly in Aeneid 12 when Jupiter weighs Aeneas's fate against Turnus's. Virgil has read this book.
• Antilochus's death sets up Achilles's grief in Book 3; the chain of mourners (Achilles for Antilochus, Thetis for Achilles, Eos for Memnon) is the structural ligament holding the Posthomerica's early books together.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Memnon's arrival rhymes precisely with Penthesilea's in Book 1: a foreign monarch reaches Troy from a far country, is welcomed by Priam, feasts, fights, and is killed by Achilles. Quintus is repeating his own opening on purpose. The duel of Achilles and Memnon answers the Iliad's most famous duel — Achilles and Hector in Iliad 22 — with the same divine machinery (Zeus weighing fates, the doomed warrior's death visibly decided before the spear reaches it). Antilochus's death answers Patroclus's death in Iliad 16: a friend killed in Achilles's stead while Achilles is elsewhere, the news of which sends Achilles back into the slaughter. The pattern of news-bearing here is itself an Iliadic memory: in Iliad 18, Antilochus was the one who brought Achilles news of Patroclus's death, restraining his hands from suicide; now Antilochus is the dead one and someone else bears the news. Quintus has read the Iliad's Antilochus episodes as a long preparation for this killing. Nestor's wish to fight despite his age recalls his frequent Iliadic invocations of vanished youth ("I am not what I was when I fought the Centaurs"); now the wish is granted and turns him pitiable. Memnon's refusal to fight an old man is the Posthomerica's quietest correction of Achilles, who in Iliad 24 received an old man (Priam) into his tent but in Iliad 22 had dragged that old man's son through the dust.

Forward echoes

The Memnon duel is the immediate setup for Book 3's death of Achilles. Achilles fighting at the peak of his last rage — avenging Antilochus, killing the second great foreign champion — is the very state Apollo and Paris will catch him in tomorrow morning. Antilochus's death is also the death Odysseus will hear about, with Patroclus's and Achilles's own, in the underworld scene of Odyssey 11 and again in Odyssey 24; the three together are the Greek epic's permanent triplet of mourned young men. The golden-scales motif here will be picked up directly by Virgil at Aeneid 12.725, where Jupiter "lifts the balance, places in it the diverse fates of the two warriors" Aeneas and Turnus, and one sinks. The mother's lament for the warrior-son will be amplified by Thetis in Posthomerica 3 (her own son next) and most painfully by the Trojan women in Posthomerica 13 (the sack). Eos's grief here also looks forward to Aeneid 6, where Aeneas in the underworld will see the unburied dead drifting on the further shore — Memnon and his Ethiopians are, in older versions of the Memnon legend, among Aeneid 1's ekphrastic figures painted on Dido's temple, where Aeneas weeps to see "black Memnon's arms" (nigri Memnonis arma). Quintus's poem has been read by Virgil, and Virgil's poem will be read by everyone after.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Memnon — king of the Ethiopians, son of Eos and Tithonus; kills Antilochus, killed by Achilles
• Achilles — kills Memnon in single combat to avenge Antilochus
• Antilochus — son of Nestor; charges Memnon to defend his old father and is killed
• Nestor — watches his son fall; would fight Memnon, but Memnon refuses out of respect for his age
• Priam — receives Memnon, hosts the feast, presses gifts and pleas
• Paris — at the council, rejects Polydamas's proposal to return Helen
• Zeus — forbids divine intervention; the Fates decide

Mentioned / off-stage

• Thetis — watches from heaven; Memnon's taunt scorns her sea-dwelling
• Patroclus — the earlier death whose pattern Antilochus's now repeats
• Penthesilea — buried the day before; her vaunt is the foil for Memnon's modesty
• Helen — Polydamas urges her return; Paris refuses
• Hector — invoked by Priam as the loss that everything since attempts to redeem

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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.