Posthomerica, Book 4 — The Funeral Games of Achilles

Reading Troy — chapter 28 of 74 · Posthomerica, Book 4

Posthomerica, Book 4 — The Funeral Games of Achilles (Days after the pyre of Book 3; the fourth of the post-Iliadic books; the Greek camp and the shore of the Hellespont)

Dawn breaks on the smoking pyre. The Greeks gather the bones of Achilles from the ash, sprinkled with wine, and lay them with Patroclus's in the great gold-and-silver casket Dionysus once gave Thetis. A barrow is heaped over them on the Sigeum headland, a sea-mark for sailors yet unborn. The mourning has not ended; it changes register. Thetis rises from the sea with the Nereids, bringing prizes "out of the sounding deep" — the wealth of Olympus that had been her bride-gift — and proclaims the games for her son. The host gathers in a wide ring on the levelled sand below the camp; Nestor presides, his Pylian wisdom bearing the day's order.

The contests follow the Iliad 23 sequence with deliberate fidelity. First the foot-race: Teucer and Ajax the Lesser run; Teucer wins by half a stride. Then the wrestling: Diomedes and Ajax the Greater grapple "like two bulls in a high pasture"; Nestor calls the bout drawn before either is thrown, lest the army's two strongest hurt each other for nothing. Then the boxing: Idomenaeus and the Cretan Epeius (the carpenter who will later build the horse) trade blows until Epeius topples his man with a hammer-blow above the ear. The chariot-race goes to Menelaus by craft — Antilochus is not there to outwit him this time, and the formulaic memory of Iliad 23's race is a deliberate scar. The discus is thrown by Ajax the Greater; it lies "as far beyond the marks of other men / as a long bow-shot oversails a stone-cast."

Quintus then opens space for newer events. The young archer-contest: arrows are loosed at a tethered dove; Teucer cuts the cord, the dove flies, Meriones brings it down on the wing. There is a horse-race ridden bareback. There is an armed combat in full panoply between Diomedes and Ajax the Greater, halted by the kings before either draws blood. There is a spear-throw won by Agapenor; a long-jump won by the Locrian Ajax. Through each contest the prizes Thetis brought up from the sea are dealt out — tripods, cauldrons, bowls of gold, fine-wrought corselets, a silver mixing-bowl Hephaestus made, mantles "the colour of the violet sea."

The catalogue is no mere list. Each prize is a fragment of Achilles. The body is gone; the wealth was his; the games are how a hero is dissolved into the survivors who knew him. Nestor, who spoke wisdom over the pyre, speaks now over the prize-giving — he calls on each victor by name, recalls his father, blesses him in the formula "may you live to bury your own children, not be buried by them," which lands like a wound on Phoenix and on the host's own undone fathers. The Nereids weep and depart back beneath the wave. The day closes with the captive Trojan women keening from the ships' shadows.

In a quieter coda Quintus shifts to Olympus. The gods debate Achilles's fate. Hera repeats her reproach of Apollo from Book 3. Zeus speaks the last word — the soul of his great-grandson has been carried to the Island of Leuke, where he will hunt and feast and rule a Pontic ghost-kingdom. The book closes at sunset on the sand of the games, the prizes carried back to the tents, the great barrow black against the western sky. The contest for his armour — Hephaestus's panoply, deferred from these games as too sacred — is set for tomorrow. The seed of Ajax's death is planted.

Analysis

The Iliad 23 template, knowingly used

Quintus does not pretend originality here. He is rewriting Iliad 23, the funeral games of Patroclus, and he wants the reader to feel it. The sequence of events — foot-race, wrestling, boxing, chariot-race, discus, archery, spear-throw — is the Iliad's sequence, in roughly the Iliad's order, with the same Telamonian Ajax winning the discus, the same Meriones taking a bird out of the air, the same Menelaus driving a victorious chariot. The names are mostly the same names; the body changes. In Iliad 23 the host competes for the dead Patroclus while Achilles, the chief mourner, awards the prizes. In Posthomerica 4 the host competes for the dead Achilles while Nestor, oldest surviving father in the army, awards them. The structural inversion is unobtrusive but total. The grieving hero of the Iliad's last great set-piece has become the man being grieved.

What Way's blank verse can and cannot do

Quintus's Greek is competent late-imperial Homeric — measured, sometimes inert, occasionally lit by a striking image. A.S. Way's 1913 translation reads as late-Victorian blank verse on the King James model: archaic vocabulary, inverted syntax, "yea" and "nay" and "lo," verbs at line-ends, capitalised abstractions. It works best in the high mourning passages, where its slowness imitates grief; it works worst in the action-driven catalogues, where it makes a foot-race read like a hymn. In Book 4 the register matters because the games sit between the sea-mourning of Book 3 and the courtroom rhetoric of Book 5. Way's slow English gives the games a quality the Greek may not quite have: ceremony rather than sport. That is a translator's gift and a translator's distortion both.

The deferred armour

The conspicuous absence from these games is the armour of Achilles itself. The other prizes are dealt out — Thetis's bride-gifts, the spoils of older raids, the contests of skill — but Hephaestus's panoply is held aside. Quintus is following the Aethiopis and the Little Iliad here, where the contest for the arms is its own narrative unit; he is also building suspense by withholding the most charged object until the next book. The decision matters dramatically because it tells the reader, without saying so, that the arms are not a sporting prize. They will be a question of judgement, and judgement in the post-Iliadic world is a darker thing than racing.

Nestor as the cycle's last father

The Iliad gave us Nestor as the garrulous old counsellor whose stories of the Pylian wars in his youth nobody quite needs. The Posthomerica gives him a different weight. In Books 2 and 3 he buried his own son, Antilochus, and bore it without breaking. In Book 4 he presides over the games of another fallen son — Achilles, his protégé in the council. Quintus repeatedly calls him gerōn, the old man, the elder, and locates wisdom in him almost monastically. The formulaic blessing he offers each victor — long life, your own children to bury you — is the Iliad's anxiety made gentle. Nestor is the figure who lets the Posthomerica say, without sentimentality, that the war's older generation has become its mourners. Phoenix is dying soon (Quintus 7); Nestor will survive to the Odyssey, where Telemachus visits him at Pylos.

The catalogue as currency

The catalogue of prizes is the catalogue of the dead hero's wealth. In a heroic economy, possessions are biography: the armour Achilles took from Asteropaeus, the cauldron he won at Eetion's funeral, the silver krater Patroclus brought back from Lemnos. Each prize-giving in Book 4 is also a small genealogy — Nestor names where the object came from, who gave it to whom, how it ended in Achilles's tent. The book turns the dead man into a distribution. This is one of Quintus's most acute structural moves: the survivors do not memorialise Achilles only with speech and pyre; they memorialise him by becoming the new owners of his things.

The Olympian coda and Leuke

The book's last forty lines lift the camera off the camp and put it on Olympus. Hera and Apollo argue again about whether Achilles should have been killed at all. Zeus closes the question by announcing that his great-grandson has been settled on the Island of Leuke in the Pontus, where he will live as a hero-god with Helen, with Iphigenia, with the daughter of Lycomedes. Quintus is here registering the actual Pontic cult of Achilles, well attested by Pindar, Euripides, Pausanias, and the Periplus of the Black Sea. The diegetic moment of the poem catches up with the cultic present of its audience. Achilles does not stay dead; he becomes a place sailors stop at on the long route to Colchis.

What to watch for

• Book 5 awards the deferred armour and breaks Ajax. Watch how the rhetorical contest replaces the athletic.
• Epeius the boxer is the same Epeius who will build the Wooden Horse in Book 12. Quintus introduces him here to plant him.
• The Nereids' departure under the wave is the last we see of Thetis in the cycle. Her son's afterlife is now Poseidon's news, not hers.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Book 4 is one of the cycle's most consciously palimpsestic books. The whole event-sequence is Iliad 23, the funeral games of Patroclus, played back with a different corpse at the centre. The foot-race that opens it inverts Iliad 23.740: where Ajax the Lesser slipped in dung and lost to Odysseus, here he runs cleanly and still loses, to Teucer; Quintus is correcting the embarrassment, but the memory is loud. The wrestling bout — Diomedes and Ajax the Greater — restages Iliad 23.708, where Odysseus and Ajax wrestled to a draw stopped by Achilles himself; Nestor inherits Achilles's role as halt-caller. The chariot-race answers Iliad 23.262 with a structural absence: Antilochus, the young driver whose reckless cut against Menelaus made that race the Iliad's most morally complicated, is dead and buried. Menelaus wins now because no one will trick him. The grief of Iliad 23 — Achilles weeping while officiating his friend's games — is doubled and inverted here, since the friend is now also the dead man. Briseis's lament from Book 3 is still in the air; Phoenix's silence at these games speaks the Iliad 9 embassy back to us.

Forward echoes

Book 5 is the inevitable next move. The arms of Hephaestus have been deferred from this prize-distribution; they will be contested by speech rather than sport, and Ajax's loss in that contest will close the Telamonian line as the Iliad's death of Hector closed the Priamid one. Epeius, introduced here as a boxer, is the Epeius who will build the Wooden Horse in Book 12 — Quintus quietly seeds his secondary tradition. The catalogue of prizes, fragmenting Achilles's wealth among the survivors, prefigures the much harder distribution of women and gold after the sack in Book 13. The deification on Leuke that Zeus announces in this book's coda is the cycle's first explicit hero-cult moment; Aeneid 6 will systematise it into Anchises's doctrine of the elect, and Odyssey 11 will register its strange opposite — an Achilles who is somehow both a Pontic god and a Homeric shade preferring slavery on earth to kingship among the dead. Nestor's old-age wisdom here is the Nestor Telemachus will meet in Odyssey 3: still talking, still ceremonious, still the cycle's bookkeeper of memory. The blessing-formula he uses for victors — long life, your own children to bury you — is the cycle's most pointed ironic structure: Priam will not have it, Andromache will not have it, Hecuba will not, Dido will not, and Aeneas's son Pallas (Aeneid 11) will not have it either. The games of Book 4 are also the cycle's last athletic celebration. The funeral games of Anchises in Aeneid 5 are the Roman remake, with a similar sequence — boat-race for chariot-race, foot-race, boxing, archery — and the same conscious Iliadic frame; Virgil knows what Quintus knows, that an epic funeral and an epic game are the same kind of memorialisation in two registers.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Thetis — rises from the sea with the Nereids, brings the prizes from Olympus's deep, proclaims the games
• Nestor — presides over the games, awards every prize, blesses each victor by his father's name
• Ajax Greater — wrestles Diomedes to a draw; throws the discus furthest; halted from armed combat
• Diomedes — wrestles Ajax; matched in armed combat
• Odysseus — competes in several contests; the armour-judgement of Book 5 is foreshadowed by his presence here
• Menelaus — wins the chariot-race
• Agamemnon — presides as commander; receives the host's deference
• Zeus — speaks the last word on Achilles's fate; settles his soul on Leuke
• Hera — renews her rebuke of Apollo on Olympus
• Apollo — rebuked again; the killing of Book 3 still unresolved among the gods

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — the dead man whose wealth and absence make the games; settled on Leuke
• Patroclus — bones now joined with Achilles's in the gold-and-silver casket beneath the Sigeum barrow
• Antilochus — absent from this race; Menelaus wins because he is not there to trick him
• Phoenix — silent at the games; Nestor's blessing of fatherhood lands hardest on him
• Hephaestus — maker of the silver krater among the prizes; maker of the armour deferred to Book 5
• Neoptolemus — the missing fourth-generation heir; Book 7 will bring 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.