Posthomerica, Book 3 — The Death of Achilles by Paris's Arrow

Reading Troy — chapter 27 of 74 · Posthomerica, Book 3

Posthomerica, Book 3 — The Death of Achilles by Paris's Arrow (Day after Memnon's death; the third of the post-Iliadic books; the Trojan plain and the Greek camp on the Hellespont)

Dawn lights the camp. The Pylians bury Antilochus by the sea; Nestor does not break — "the wise man's soul endures bravely." Achilles arms in fury for vengeance and goes back into the plain. His last aristeia is brief and total. Simois and Xanthus choke with corpses. He drives the Trojans to the walls and would have torn the gates from their hinges and ended the war in an hour — but Apollo comes down from Olympus in a lion-leap, quiver clashing on his shoulders, eyes blazing. The god orders him to stop: "Back from the Trojans, Peleus' son!" Achilles, ringed by his own Fates, answers in defiance — "Phoebus, why dost thou in mine own despite / stir me to fight with Gods?" — and turns his back on the god. Apollo vanishes into cloud, shoots one mist-cloaked baleful arrow, and it strikes Achilles in the ankle.

He reels and falls "like a tower" that an earthquake throws down. He stares left and right, knows in his heart it was Apollo: his mother told him so, and "her words were not vain words." With his bare hand he pulls the arrow from the wound. Blood gushes. He throws the shaft from him and the wind carries it back to Apollo's threshold on Olympus. Still half-living, he leaps up and kills three more Trojans — Orythaon, Hipponous, Alcathous — then the chill takes his limbs and he sinks on his spear and roars a last threat: even dead, "ye shall not escape my merciless spear." He topples among the corpses. The Trojan ranks stare like sheep at a slain lion.

The fight for the body begins. Paris stirs the Trojans to drag Achilles to Troy for the dogs. Aeneas, Glaucus, Agenor, Aithon-eyed Agenor's company close in. Ajax bestrides the corpse. His spear is hawk and harvest. He kills Agelaus, Thestor, Ocythous, Agestratus, Aganippus, Zorus, Nessus, Erymas of Lycia. Glaucus dies on his spear too, falling forward onto Achilles "as falls a sapling on a sturdy mountain-oak." Aeneas comes to take Achilles's armour and Ajax spears him through the right forearm; he limps from the field to the city's leeches. Odysseus joins Ajax now and kills Maenalus, Atymnius, Proteus; Alcon spears Odysseus in the knee but Odysseus kills him. Paris draws bow on Ajax; Ajax answers with a stone that crashes through the prince's helm and would have done worse but for Hector's chariot-team that bears Paris away in a swoon. Ajax pursues the routed Trojans like an eagle scattering vultures. He treads dead men all the way to the gates and turns back.

The Greek captains lift the body and carry it to the tent. The whole camp comes to wail. Ajax laments his cousin — "thou hast died in Troy, from Phthia's plains afar, / smitten unwares by that accursed shaft." Phoenix the old tutor folds the corpse in his arms and cries for the babe who once called him father. Agamemnon weeps too: Zeus has cheated him. As night falls, Nestor — bearing his own fresh grief — bids them wash the body before mourning more. They lay him on the couch. Athena pours ambrosia on him; the dead face frowns "as when he lay... clasping his slain friend / Patroclus." The captive women wail. Briseis throws herself on him; her breast bloodied by her own hands "as though crimson blood / had dripped on milk." The Nereids rise out of the sea wailing; the Muses come down from Helicon. Thetis kisses her son's lips and curses her own marriage. Calliope counsels her: even her own son Orpheus died. The pyre is built from Ida's pines; horses, bulls, sheep, twelve Trojan captives are heaped on it; the Myrmidons shave their hair; Briseis shears hers and lays it on him. The pyre burns all day and night. Zeus rains ambrosia on it. Hermes brings Boreas and Zephyrus to fan the flames. The bones, larger than a giant's, are gathered into a gold-bound silver casket and buried with Patroclus's in a great barrow on the Sigeum headland. The immortal horses of Achilles weep beside the ships. Poseidon rises from the sea and tells Thetis to stop weeping: her son will become a god on the Island of Leuke, in the Black Sea. The book closes on the sea-shore at sunrise.

Analysis

The death the Iliad knew but did not stage

Achilles dies in many ancient texts before this one. The Iliad knows of his death in detail — Hector's last words in Book 22 promise it ("Paris and Apollo shall destroy you, brave though you are, at the Scaean Gates"); Thetis foretells it to Achilles himself in Book 18; the prophetic horse Xanthus speaks it in Book 19 ("a god and a mortal shall slay you"). The lost Aethiopis of Arctinus had the scene; so did the Little Iliad of Lesches; so did Pindar (Paean 6, Isthmian 8) and the tragedians. Quintus is therefore not telling a story we don't know. He is staging, finally, what the older texts referred to. His Book 3 is the keystone of the post-Iliadic tradition: the moment the audience has been waiting for since the Iliad's first line announces Achilles's menis, the wrath that will be paid for in his own death.

Apollo's two arrivals

Quintus splits Apollo into two appearances, and the doubling matters. First Apollo descends openly, in full epiphany — "Down from Olympus with a lion-leap" — to order Achilles to stop. He stands face to face with the hero. Achilles refuses. Apollo "vanished into cloud" and shoots from concealment. The split is theological: Quintus is asking what kind of death this is. Open combat with a god (the Iliad 5 Diomedes pattern) would have been heroic — but Achilles is killed by an arrow he never sees, "cloaked in deadly darkness." Hera's Olympian rebuke later in the book ("Thou wretch, and doth thy false heart know not this... Ever Achilles showed us reverence — yea, was of our race") names this as scandal: Apollo has killed the godlike against the moral grain of the Greek pantheon's relationship to its half-divine heroes. The Iliad's gods were imperfectly partisan; the Posthomerica's gods are imperfect tout court.

The wrong arrow

Notice what Quintus does not do: he does not name the heel. Way's translation has "ankle" (Greek sphuron), which is what Quintus says, and that detail is older than Quintus — it appears in Statius and Hyginus. But the Iliad never said Achilles's heel was vulnerable, and the Posthomerica still treats this as a single fatal wound by a god-guided shaft, not the lifting of a charm. The well-known infant-dipped-by-the-heel story is a post-Posthomeric crystallisation, mostly canonised in late mythography (Statius Achilleid, then Servius commenting on Virgil). Quintus's Achilles is killed by a divine arrow whose lethality requires no childhood prophylactic. The body's vulnerability is the body's vulnerability. Way's "ankle" is exactly right.

Ajax bestrides the corpse

The fight over Achilles's body is one of the great Greek war-set-pieces. Quintus paints it as the structural mirror of the Iliad's fight over Patroclus in Books 17–18: a fallen Achillean champion, a Telamonian Ajax holding off the Trojan rush with his tower-shield, an Odysseus joining. The parallel is exact and intentional. In Iliad 17 Ajax bestrode Patroclus; in Posthomerica 3 he bestrides Achilles. The Iliad's reader is meant to feel the echo and understand what comes next: Ajax has now twice been the body's defender, twice not its avenger. Book 5's judgement of the arms will turn this stored grievance into suicide.

Briseis on the corpse

The Iliad gave Briseis one extraordinary speech — her lament for Patroclus in Iliad 19, which incidentally mourns the killed warrior who is not her sometime lord but his friend. Quintus answers that speech here. She comes to the body, claws her breast bloody — "as though crimson blood / had dripped on milk" is Way at his finest — and laments not only Achilles but her future as a slave to "fertile Sparta, or to thirsty Argos." Quintus has read the Iliad's Briseis as a survivor speaking past her grief, and he amplifies. Her cut hair laid on the corpse is the first independent female mourning-rite in the Posthomerica.

The catalogue of the pyre

The pyre is Iliad 23's pyre of Patroclus rebuilt and outdone: countless tree-trunks from Ida, horses, bulls, sheep, swine, twelve Trojan captives (Quintus is silent on the number; the Iliad named twelve), jars of oil and honey and wine, perfumes, gold and amber, mantles untold. Zeus rains ambrosia on it; Hermes brings Boreas and Zephyrus to make the flames burn through the night. The bones are gathered into the gold-and-silver casket Dionysus gave Thetis — a detail older than Quintus (Odyssey 24.74 names it) and the only Posthomerica-Odyssey explicit cross-link in this book. Patroclus's bones are inside it. The hero who would not let Patroclus be buried until he could be buried with him gets, at last, the joint barrow on the Sigeum headland that Odyssey 24 will describe.

Achilles becomes a god

Poseidon's closing speech is theologically the Posthomerica's most striking addition to the Achilles tradition. Achilles will not stay dead. He will be made a god on the Island of Leuke ("White Island") in the Black Sea — the Pontic island where his cult was historically attested from at least the sixth century BCE (Pindar Nemean 4, Euripides Iphigenia in Tauris 435, Pausanias 3.19). Quintus is registering, in the poem's diegetic time, the cult Achilles had already accumulated in his readers' world. This is also the Posthomerica's pivot toward Aeneid 6, where Aeneas's father Anchises will explain the doctrine of soul-purification and the elect — Achilles among them — and where Roman epic will, in different theological language, do the same work of giving its heroes their afterlives.

What to watch for

• The funeral games of Book 4 will distribute Achilles's possessions; the judgement of his armour in Book 5 will destroy Ajax. Both depend on the body laid out here.
• Briseis vanishes from the Posthomerica after this scene; her speech here is the last word the cycle gives her.
• The immortal horses of Achilles weeping by the ships are waiting for Neoptolemus, who arrives in Book 7. The Fates have already assigned them a fourth and final master.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

This book is the Iliad's deferred ending. Every Iliadic prophecy of Achilles's death lands here: Thetis's warning in Iliad 18 ("you yourself are doomed to die soon after Hector"); Hector's last words in Iliad 22 ("Paris and Apollo shall destroy you... at the Scaean Gates"); the prophetic horse Xanthus in Iliad 19 ("a god and a mortal shall slay you"). Quintus stages exactly that pairing — Apollo guides, Paris draws. The fight over the corpse is built directly on Iliad 17 (the fight over Patroclus); Ajax's tower-shield stance over the dead Achilles literally restages his stance over the dead Patroclus, and the parallel is sealed by Odysseus's arrival as the second defender — the same Odysseus who in Iliad 17 helped fight the Trojans off Patroclus. Briseis's lament closes a circle that opened in Iliad 1: the woman taken from Achilles in the quarrel, mourned by him at his absence in Iliad 9, weeping for Patroclus in Iliad 19, is now weeping for Achilles himself. Phoenix's old-tutor speech is the cycle's most painful Iliadic reactivation — he lamented his own exile in Iliad 9's embassy and is now an old man who has outlived the child he raised. The gold-and-silver casket Dionysus once gave Thetis recurs from Iliad 23.92, where Patroclus's ghost asks Achilles that their bones be joined; the request is now fulfilled.

Forward echoes

Book 4's funeral games depend on the corpse laid out at the end of Book 3 — the prizes there are the things Thetis brought up out of the sea, the things friends loved Achilles too much to take from him in life. Book 5's judgement of the arms — the contest between Ajax and Odysseus — exists because Achilles is no longer wearing them. Ajax's suicide in Book 5 grows directly from this book: he was the body's defender; he is denied the body's armour. The horses weeping by the ships at the close of Book 3 are waiting for Book 7's Neoptolemus, who will be their fourth and final master. Achilles's deification on Leuke (Poseidon's speech here) is the theological precedent for Aeneid 6's pageant of post-mortem destinies, where Anchises explains how some heroic souls are purified and elevated; and it stands behind Odyssey 11's strange middle-position Achilles — a shade in the Underworld but also somehow a king of the dead, full of ambivalent regret ("I'd rather be a slave on earth than king among the dead"), as if Quintus's elevation and Homer's diminishment are two voices in the same long tradition debating what it means for a hero to outlive his own death. Briseis's foreboding of her future ("me shall some new Achaean master bear / to fertile Sparta, or to thirsty Argos") looks forward to the captive distribution after the sack (Posthomerica 13) and to Andromache's fate as Pyrrhus's bride in Aeneid 3. Aeneas's wound to the forearm here is also notable: when he reappears in Book 11 of the Posthomerica and in Aeneid 2, he will be the man fated to survive Troy because the Iliad's twentieth book already said so — Poseidon protected him; Quintus's wound is mild because the survival is already written.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Achilles — last aristeia, killed by Apollo's arrow guided through Paris; the body laid out and burned
• Apollo — descends to warn Achilles off; then shoots from concealment
• Paris — bowman whose hand draws the arrow Apollo guides; stirs Trojans to drag the corpse to the city; stunned by Ajax's stone
• Ajax Greater — bestrides the corpse, drives the Trojans off, scatters the rout to the gates; first to lament Achilles
• Aeneas — fights for the corpse; wounded in the forearm by Ajax
• Odysseus — joins Ajax in defending the body; wounded in the knee, kills his attacker
• Briseis — claws her breast in lament; shears her hair onto the corpse
• Thetis — rises from the sea with the Nereids; kisses her son's lips; curses her marriage
• Athena — pours ambrosia on the corpse to keep it incorrupt
• Nestor — bearing his own fresh grief, calls the host to wash and lay out the body
• Agamemnon — weeps, accuses Zeus of cheating him
• Phoenix — laments the babe he nursed
• Hera — rebukes Apollo on Olympus
• Poseidon — rises from the sea to tell Thetis her son will become a god on Leuke
• Zeus — rains ambrosia on the pyre; orders Hermes to send the winds

Mentioned / off-stage

• Patroclus — his bones are in the gold-and-silver casket Achilles's are now joined to
• Hector — Paris drives Hector's old chariot-horses; the body of Achilles is meant to be hauled with them
• Antilochus — buried by his Pylians at dawn before the fighting
• Neoptolemus — named already by Hera; the immortal horses wait for him

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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.