Posthomerica, Book 7 — Neoptolemus Brought from Scyros

Reading Troy — chapter 31 of 74 · Posthomerica, Book 7

Posthomerica, Book 7 — Neoptolemus Brought from Scyros (Days after the slaughter on the plain in Book 6; the seventh of the post-Iliadic books; the Greek camp, the sea, and the island of Scyros)

The Greeks are penned at the ships' wall. Eurypylus's Mysians and the Trojans hold the plain at sunrise. The Greeks come out only to die at the ditch, and Quintus opens the book with a battle-piece of small reverses — Trojan victories, Greek casualties, Podaleirius the physician (Machaon's brother, just bereaved) treating wounds that yesterday Machaon would have treated. Phoenix, Achilles's old tutor, has fallen ill in his tent and is dying. He speaks the cycle's saddest old-age lament — he raised a boy who outshone all others and is now outliving him, dying in a camp where the son he loved is buried, far from his own Phthia.

Odysseus and Diomedes sail. Quintus gives them a quick voyage: out from the Hellespont, across the Aegean, into the harbour of Scyros where King Lycomedes — Thetis's old conspirator in hiding Achilles among the women — rules. Deidamia, the king's daughter, was Achilles's secret bride during that hiding; the boy Neoptolemus, "born to be a quick-grown thing," is now in his fifteenth year and trained in arms. The two ambassadors are received in the palace. Odysseus speaks; he names the boy's father; he speaks of Achilles's death, of Ajax's death, of the Greek line breaking; he says the gods have prophesied (through Helenus and Calchas both) that Troy will not fall without Achilles's son in the field. The boy stands listening. He answers: he will come.

Deidamia's grief is one of the book's centres. She knows what she is giving up. The Iliad's Briseis-and-Achilles patterning is here inverted: a woman who was a hero's bedmate gives her child to the same war that killed him. Quintus gives her a long lament. She would keep him; she knows she cannot; she binds him with a mother's blessing rather than a mother's curse. Lycomedes adds his own farewell: be like your father in courage, unlike him in temper. They send the boy away with arms of his own forging and with a pair of fresh-broken horses. The ship sails the next morning.

The crossing back is rapid. Athena guides the wind. The ship beaches at the Greek camp at evening. Achilles's old Myrmidons line the shore to receive the son of their dead lord; the immortal horses Xanthus and Balius, weeping by the ships since Book 3, lift their heads. Neoptolemus is brought to his father's tent. Phoenix, dying, sees him and clasps his knees — the moment is the book's most charged. The old tutor speaks his last blessing on the grandchild-by-fosterage and dies in the boy's arms. The Myrmidons wail. The boy is shown his father's armour — the panoply taken by Odysseus from Ajax's contest; Quintus is silent on the legal title; the arms are simply given. He puts them on. They fit.

He is taken to Agamemnon's hall. He embraces the Atridae. Briseis is mentioned only in passing — she has vanished from the cycle. The host gathers around the boy as the host gathered around his father. At dawn he leads them out. The Trojans on the plain see at first only Achilles's armour and break for the city in panic. They steady when they see how young the wearer is. Eurypylus marshals them again. Neoptolemus's first aristeia begins — Quintus catalogues a string of Mysian and Trojan kills, the spear-work conspicuously like his father's, the temper conspicuously hotter. The day ends with the Trojans driven back to the gates again, and Eurypylus held off. Book 8 will close the gap between the new champion and the new antagonist. The cycle now has its inheritor.

Analysis

The cycle's generational pivot

Book 7 is the Posthomerica's structural hinge. Until now the war has been fought by the men who began it. With Neoptolemus's arrival the cycle moves into its successor-generation: the children of the Iliadic heroes finish what their parents started. Quintus signals the move ceremonially. The voyage to Scyros, the welcome-feast in Lycomedes's hall, the prophecy quoted, the mother's lament, the boy's acceptance — these are the formulaic beats of a heroic recruitment, and Quintus stages every one. He is also playing against an older tradition: the Cypria had Odysseus fetching Achilles from Scyros at the war's start; Quintus, with deliberate symmetry, has Odysseus fetching Achilles's son from the same island at the war's end. The bookends of the Trojan War are both Scyran retrievals. The man who hid in girl's dress and was outed by hammered armour is now sent for his son.

Phoenix's death

The death of Phoenix is the cycle's quietest. The Iliad gave him one of its longest and strangest speeches — the embassy in Iliad 9, where the old tutor told Achilles the parable of Meleager and begged him to fight. Quintus has held him in reserve through six books. He dies here, in the tent of his lost pupil, holding the pupil's son. The mechanics matter: he does not die in battle; he dies of old age in a war-camp, the cycle's first non-heroic death of a major figure. Quintus is doing something quite deliberate. The Iliadic generation is now passing not by sword but by time. Nestor, Lycomedes, Phoenix — these are the elders the war has waited out. Phoenix dies before the war ends; Nestor will live to mentor Telemachus in the Odyssey; Lycomedes will outlive both. The post-Iliadic world is the world after the Iliadic fathers are gone.

Deidamia, given a voice

The Cypria and the Little Iliad mentioned Deidamia in passing; Quintus gives her a full scene. Her lament is one of the cycle's important moments for the women's side of the war. She is not a Briseis (taken in war), not a Helen (cause of war), not a Hecuba (queen of the besieged city); she is a woman whose secret husband died at this same war and who is now giving her only son to it. The speech she makes — Way translates with unusual restraint here — is the cycle's most honest reckoning with what the war costs the mothers who never see it. Quintus seems to know that giving her a voice is making a moral judgement on Odysseus's mission, and he allows that judgement to stand. The mission succeeds; the cost is named.

The arms, again

Quintus is silent on the legal status of the armour Neoptolemus puts on. The arms of Achilles were won by Odysseus in the contest of Book 5; here they pass to Neoptolemus without ceremony, without dispute, without Odysseus making a speech of yielding. The silence may be tradition — the Little Iliad probably handled this transfer the same way — or it may be Quintus declining a complication. Either way, the moment matters: the panoply Hephaestus forged returns to the Achillean line and is no longer the object of Greek political contest. The arms go where they belong. Ajax's suicide and Odysseus's victory are not erased, but they recede; the surface of the cycle accepts the dynastic logic over the rhetorical one.

The immortal horses

Xanthus and Balius, the horses Poseidon gave Peleus, have been weeping by the ships since Achilles's pyre in Book 3. Quintus is very deliberate that they raise their heads when Neoptolemus disembarks. The immortal horses are the cycle's quietest marker of dynastic continuity: they wept for Patroclus in Iliad 17.426, mourned Achilles in Posthomerica 3, and now serve the third generation — Peleus, Achilles, Neoptolemus. The detail is small but it is the book's emotional centre. Xanthus's voice spoke once in Iliad 19 prophesying Achilles's death; he is silent here, but the lifting of his head is a benediction. The horses are the cycle's witnesses.

Way at his best

A.S. Way's translation rises to the death-of-Phoenix and the welcome-of-Neoptolemus. His blank verse — slow, archaic, biblical in cadence — was made for these formal beats. The line he gives Phoenix dying, "Bless thee, child of him I loved; my work is done," is the kind of Victorian English that the twentieth century learned to distrust and the twenty-first sometimes mourns. Way is not the translator for the battles; he is the translator for the laments. Quintus's Greek in this book is among his most fluent — the welcome-scene is conventional but well-built, the mother's lament has affective weight, the death of Phoenix is brief and dignified. Way preserves the dignity at the cost of the brevity.

The young Neoptolemus

Quintus gives Neoptolemus more interiority than his later mythography allows. Here he is a boy who accepts a duty, takes leave of his mother, mourns Phoenix, accepts the armour. The Pyrrhus of Aeneid 2 — the man who kills Priam at the altar, who slaughters Polites in front of his father, who founds his kingdom by drinking the blood of an old man on holy ground — is not yet in view. Quintus's Neoptolemus and Virgil's Pyrrhus are the same character at two different moments of his story, and the contrast is one of the cycle's grimmest. The boy who comes in Book 7 still has his innocence. The man who sacks Troy in Book 13 (and the man Aeneas remembers in Aeneid 2) will not.

What to watch for

• Book 8 finishes Eurypylus. The young champion completes the cycle's third Trojan-defender death.
• Book 9 fetches Philoctetes from Lemnos — another recruitment, parallel to this one.
• The Pyrrhus of Aeneid 2 is the older twin of this boy. Hold the boy's portrait against the man's the cycle will become.
• The Odyssey's Neoptolemus (mentioned by Odysseus to Achilles's shade in Odyssey 11) is praised for his fighting and his counsel — a glimpse of who he became.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The Scyros voyage is the cycle's tightest structural rhyme. The Cypria — the lost epic that opened the war's narrative — had Odysseus fetching the young Achilles from Scyros at the war's beginning; here in Book 7 Odysseus fetches Achilles's son from the same island at the war's end. Quintus is deliberately closing the cycle's outermost frame. Phoenix's death in the camp answers Iliad 9.434, where Phoenix made his great speech to Achilles in the embassy and told the story of how Peleus made him Achilles's foster-father; the long speech of Iliad 9 is here finished by silent death. Deidamia's lament for her son answers — without erasing — Thetis's lament for hers in Iliad 18 and Posthomerica 3; the cycle's mothers form a small chorus. The immortal horses lifting their heads recall Iliad 17.426-440 (the horses weeping for Patroclus while Zeus pities them) and Posthomerica 3 (the horses weeping by the ships at Achilles's pyre). The arms of Achilles, last seen on Odysseus after the Book 5 contest, return to the Achillean line without ceremony; the silence about this is one of the cycle's most knowing erasures of Book 5's wound. The Trojan defenders' first response to seeing the armour — running for the gates in panic — replays the Trojans' first response to seeing Achilles return from his tent in Iliad 19-20.

Forward echoes

Book 8 will give Neoptolemus his confirming kill: Eurypylus, by the spear, exactly as Achilles killed Hector. Book 9 will fetch Philoctetes from Lemnos — the parallel recruitment, with Odysseus again the ambassador and a wounded man instead of a boy as the object. Book 12's stratagem of the Wooden Horse will require Neoptolemus among its picked warriors. Book 13's sack will be his hour, and here the cycle bends sharply: Aeneid 2.469-558, Aeneas's account of the sack to Dido, gives a Pyrrhus who slaughters Polites in front of Priam and then kills Priam himself at the altar — a savagery the boy of Posthomerica 7 has not yet shown. The cycle is therefore deliberately presenting the same character in two phases, the second much darker. Posthomerica 14 will have him sacrifice Polyxena at Achilles's tomb; Aeneid 3.330-336 says he was killed in turn by Orestes at Delphi. Odyssey 11.505-540, the Nekyia, has Odysseus report to Achilles's shade that Neoptolemus fought wisely in the council and bravely in the horse — the Odyssey's quiet good word for the man Virgil will damn. Deidamia's grief for the son sent to war is echoed by Andromache's recurring grief for Astyanax across all four epics, and most directly by Hecuba's lament for the sons she has watched go out to die. The death of Phoenix in this book is also the cycle's first explicit old-age death of a major figure; it sets the pattern for the gentler closures (Anchises in Aeneid 3, Laertes still alive in Odyssey 24) and contrasts the violent ones the next books deliver.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Neoptolemus — fetched from Scyros in his fifteenth year; takes up his father's arms; leads his first aristeia
• Odysseus — sails with Diomedes to Scyros; speaks the recruitment to the boy in Lycomedes's hall
• Diomedes — co-ambassador; supports Odysseus's pitch
• Phoenix — old tutor of Achilles; dies in the boy's arms speaking the blessing of three generations
• Agamemnon — receives Neoptolemus in the captains' hall
• Menelaus — embraces the boy as the army's renewed hope
• Nestor — speaks the formula of welcome to the new champion
• Eurypylus — marshals the Trojans against Neoptolemus's first day in the field; held off

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — the dead father; his name is invoked at every step; his armour is taken up by the son
• Thetis — once hid Achilles on Scyros; her grandson is now drawn from the same hiding-place
• Briseis — mentioned only in passing; the cycle's silence on her closes here
• Patroclus — buried with Achilles; the immortal horses that wept for him weep no more when the son arrives
• Hector — long dead; the cycle's first defender now answered by the cycle's last attacker
• Astyanax — Hector's son, still alive in Troy; will be killed by this same Neoptolemus at the sack
• Polyxena — daughter of Priam; will be sacrificed at Achilles's tomb by this son's hand in Book 14

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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.