Posthomerica, Book 6 — Eurypylus Comes to Troy

Reading Troy — chapter 30 of 74 · Posthomerica, Book 6

Posthomerica, Book 6 — Eurypylus Comes to Troy (Days after the burial of Ajax; the sixth of the post-Iliadic books; the plain of Troy, the Trojan citadel, and the Mysian allies' camp)

The Trojans, propped twice over by the deaths of Achilles and Ajax, find their courage and at the same time confront how badly they still need help. Priam takes counsel. He sends to Mysia for Eurypylus, son of Telephus and Astyoche — Astyoche herself a daughter of Priam's brother, so the new champion is a kinsman. The Mysian was withheld from the war by his mother for nine years; Priam now sweetens the call with a great gift, "the golden vine of Zeus," the famous heirloom-bribe given the family generations before. Astyoche accepts the vine and lets her son go. Eurypylus marshals his Mysians and crosses to Troy with a fleet of black ships.

He enters the city in triumph. The Trojans crowd the walls; the women lean from the towers; Helen herself looks down. Eurypylus is "godlike," tall, beautiful, his armour the work of Hephaestus by inheritance — his father Telephus had once been wounded and healed by Achilles, and that backward link makes the new champion's arrival a darker echo. He is welcomed in the palace. Priam feasts him. The men whose mothers were taken at the sack of Lyrnessus and Thebe sit at his table. The book gives Eurypylus the conventional young-champion sequence: bath, banquet, song of welcome, exchange of speeches with Paris and Aeneas, the queen Hecuba serving him personally. Quintus's register here is courtly and slow; he is staging Trojan hope.

The next morning the new champion leads the Trojans out. The host is a great catalogue — Paris with his bowmen, Aeneas with the Dardanian heavies, Deiphobus, Helenus, the Lycian allies under their new captain (Glaucus is long dead, Sarpedon longer), and at their head Eurypylus in his Mysian array. Quintus delivers a battle-piece in the high Iliadic manner. The two armies meet "as wave meets wave at the long sea-mouth." Eurypylus's aristeia begins. He kills Nireus of Syme — the beautiful man the Iliad's catalogue named as the handsomest of the Greeks "after Achilles." He kills Machaon, son of Asclepius, the army's chief surgeon, the man who in the Iliad bound Menelaus's pandarus-wound and was himself rescued from the field by Nestor. The death of Machaon is a particular grief; the army's healer is dead.

Menelaus and the surviving Atridae lead a stand. Teucer, still in the half-mourning of Ajax's pyre, draws his bow from behind the Greek line and kills Mysians by tens, but his arrows do not reach Eurypylus. Diomedes, Agamemnon, Idomeneus form a triple-pillar that holds the Greek centre. Quintus catalogues their kills. The Greeks retreat slowly to the wall and the ditch, fighting at every fold of the ground; many drop in the ditch and are crushed. By evening the Trojans hold the plain. The Greeks are pinned to the ships' palisade for the first time since the death of Patroclus.

The book closes in two registers. In the Greek camp: a war-council where Nestor and Odysseus, recognising they will not stand long without a counter-champion, propose to fetch Neoptolemus from Scyros — Achilles's son, who has reached the age. The decision is taken; Odysseus and Diomedes will go. In the Trojan camp: Eurypylus's victory feast, with the Trojan widows serving wine that tastes of triumph for the first time since Hector lived. The plain between them is full of corpses; the ditch is choked; the Greeks have lost their healer. The next book sails for Scyros.

Analysis

A new Hector for the cycle's last act

Eurypylus's function in the Posthomerica is to delay the inevitable. The Iliad ended with Hector dead; Achilles followed; Ajax followed. The Trojans are out of major champions, and the cycle still has the Wooden Horse and the Sack to deliver — eight more books of narrative. Quintus needs an antagonist who can credibly hold the Greeks for several books and whose death is not anticlimactic. Eurypylus is the answer the older tradition gave him: the Mysian prince, a Priamid by his mother, brought in with the inherited bribe of the golden vine, beautiful enough to be wept for, formidable enough to take Machaon down. He is the third great Trojan defender — Hector, Memnon, Eurypylus — and the symmetry of three matters. The Iliad's Hector died on the plain; the Posthomerica's Memnon died beneath the dawn; Eurypylus will die under Neoptolemus's spear in Book 8. The three deaths are the structural beats by which the Trojan defence is dismantled.

The golden vine

The golden vine Priam sends to Astyoche is one of the cycle's most concentrated objects. It is a Zeus-given heirloom: Zeus gave it to Tros in compensation for taking Ganymede, Tros gave it down through Ilus and Laomedon to Priam; Priam now spends it on his sister-in-law to buy her son. Quintus tells the genealogy directly — Way's translation slows on it appropriately. The detail is important because it tells us, with one bibelot, that the Trojan defence has reached the point of paying out the family's deepest treasure. The Mysian alliance is bought, not given. The contrast with the Iliad's allies — Sarpedon's Lycians came for honour, Memnon for kinship — is unsparing. Help now has a price.

Machaon's death and the army without a doctor

The killing of Machaon is the small structural surprise of the book. Machaon is a minor Iliadic figure but a structurally vital one: in Iliad 4 he bound Menelaus's Pandarus-wound; in Iliad 11 he was wounded and Nestor carried him from the field, a moment Achilles watched from the ships and which set off the chain of decisions that ends in Patroclus's death. Quintus kills him here, and the army loses its primary surgeon — Podaleirius his brother survives but is mourning. The detail is realistic in a way the Iliad rarely allows itself to be: an ancient army was its medical corps, and to break that corps is to break the army. The Greek retreat to the ships is partly the retreat of men who can no longer be patched up to fight tomorrow.

Nireus, "the most beautiful"

The death of Nireus is one of the cycle's saddest and most quoted couplets. The Iliad's catalogue of ships (Iliad 2.671) gives him three lines: he came from Syme with three ships, "the handsomest man of all the Greeks who came to Troy / next after the blameless son of Peleus; but he was weak, / and a small troop attended him." The Iliad named him, gave him no battle, dropped him. Quintus picks up that loose end and brings him on stage only to kill him. The death lands because it is the Iliad's epitaph completed — the beautiful man without strength who came to Troy and who, twelve books into the Posthomerica, finally has to die on screen because there is no one else for Eurypylus to start with. Quintus is closing the Iliad's open file.

Way's banquet-register

A.S. Way's English is at its most Victorian in the welcome-feast of Eurypylus. The translator gives Priam a Tennysonian gravitas; Hecuba pours wine "with sweet majesty"; the bath is "the warm bath of the gods"; Eurypylus speaks with "well-girt words." This is the part of Way's translation that ages worst, the register that makes modern readers reach for Loeb's prose facing-page. Quintus's Greek here is less stately than Way makes it — it is conventional, fluent, formulaic — and the welcome-scene has the same architecture as the Iliad 9 welcome of the embassy in Achilles's tent or the Odyssey 4 welcome of Telemachus by Menelaus. Way's archaism is doing what archaism does: making a familiar scene feel ceremonial. It works for the welcome; it slows the battle that follows.

The decision to fetch Neoptolemus

The book's final movement — the council where Nestor and Odysseus propose Scyros — is one of the cycle's quietest pivots. Quintus signposts it briefly, but its weight is enormous. The Greeks are now down to fetching Achilles's son to replace Achilles, and that son is a child. The whole register of the war is shifting; the heroes who began this war are dying, and the next generation is being summoned because the older one is gone. The Posthomerica's final phase is therefore a generational succession: the men who came in their twenties will end the war in their forties, and the boys who were toddlers when it started will arrive in time for the sack. Pyrrhus-Neoptolemus, Aeneas's later companion against Italian Aeneadae, Astyanax thrown from the walls — the war ends with the children.

What to watch for

• Book 7 sails for Scyros and fetches Neoptolemus.
• Book 8 kills Eurypylus by Neoptolemus's hand — the symmetry of the new generation finishing the new antagonist.
• The death of Machaon will be remembered in Odyssey 3, where Nestor mourns "the good physician" among the war's losses.
• Helen's appearance on the wall watching Eurypylus's entry will be re-staged in Book 13 watching the sack; she stands above the war from beginning to end.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The book sits in dense intertextual conversation with the Iliad and with the lost epic cycle. Eurypylus's arrival completes a sequence the Iliad pointed at obliquely: in Iliad 11.575, the Iliad's Eurypylus (Euaemon's son) is wounded by Paris and limps off the field — same name, different man, the Iliadic Eurypylus is Thessalian, not Mysian. The doubling is in the Iliad's own catalogue, not Quintus's invention. The golden vine is a Trojan-genealogy reference reaching back to the rape of Ganymede; the Iliad knows it (Iliad 5.265-272, where Diomedes gives the back-story to explain Aeneas's horses) and the Iliad's reader recognises its weight here. The death of Nireus closes the Iliad's smallest open file — the beautiful man named in the catalogue of ships (Iliad 2.671) and never reappearing. The death of Machaon closes a thread that runs from Iliad 4.193 (Machaon binding Menelaus's wound) through Iliad 11.504 (Machaon himself wounded and rescued by Nestor) and which causes, indirectly, the chain that ends in Patroclus's death; Quintus brings the Iliad's surgeon to his end. Helen on the wall watching Eurypylus enter Troy explicitly recalls the teichoskopia of Iliad 3.121, where she identified Greek heroes for Priam — the visual frame is the same, the city is now welcoming, not naming the enemy.

Forward echoes

The book is structurally a runway for the next two. Book 7 will sail to Scyros and bring back Neoptolemus, the boy summoned in this book's closing council. Book 8 will kill Eurypylus by that boy's hand — the only ancient text to dramatise this killing in extant verse; Sophocles's lost Eurypylus and the Cypria fragments tell the story Quintus stages. Eurypylus's death will balance Hector's: as Achilles killed Hector and was killed for it, so Neoptolemus kills Eurypylus and inherits both his father's prowess and a darker share of his savagery. The Trojan widow-economy that begins in this book — captured women serving the new champion at his feast — looks forward to the brutal redistribution after the sack (Posthomerica 13), to Andromache's fate as Pyrrhus's bride and then Helenus's wife (Aeneid 3.294-355), and to Hecuba's enslavement to Odysseus. The Greek retreat to the ships re-stages Iliad 15's similar retreat and looks forward to the cycle's culminating reversal: the Greeks who could not hold the plain will take the city by trick rather than by battle. The decision to fetch a boy from Scyros — Achilles's hidden son, raised among women by his mother — also echoes back across the cycle: Achilles himself was once hidden on Scyros in girl's dress to keep him from this war; the Cypria tells how Odysseus fetched him out. The son is now being fetched the way the father was. The cycle's last act is being assembled out of the children of its first.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Eurypylus — Mysian prince summoned by Priam with the golden vine; led to Troy; kills Nireus and Machaon in his first aristeia
• Priam — sends the golden vine to Astyoche to buy her son's coming; welcomes Eurypylus in the palace
• Hecuba — pours wine for Eurypylus at the welcome-feast; gives the new champion the queen's blessing
• Helen — watches Eurypylus enter Troy from the wall, as she watched the Greeks in the Iliad's teichoskopia
• Paris — second to Eurypylus in the Trojan host; commands the bowmen
• Aeneas — leads the Dardanian heavy infantry; will be the only major Trojan to survive the cycle
• Agamemnon — holds the Greek centre with the other Atridae; consents to the council to fetch Neoptolemus
• Menelaus — fights in the rearguard of the Greek retreat to the ships
• Nestor — proposes in council that Achilles's son be brought from Scyros
• Odysseus — co-proposer of the Scyros mission; will sail with Diomedes in Book 7
• Diomedes — chosen with Odysseus to fetch Neoptolemus
• Ajax Lesser — among the Locrian rearguard covering the Greek retreat

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — once wounded and healed Eurypylus's father Telephus; the buried hero's son is now being summoned to fill his absence
• Neoptolemus — on Scyros with his mother Deidamia; the council resolves to bring him; arrives in Book 7
• Ajax Greater — newly buried; his absence is felt in every Greek line
• Hector — the war's first great defender; Eurypylus stands in the long shadow of his death
• Memnon — the war's second great defender; Eurypylus is the third

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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.