Posthomerica, Book 8 — The Death of Eurypylus

Reading Troy — chapter 32 of 74 · Posthomerica, Book 8

Posthomerica, Book 8 — The Death of Eurypylus (Day after Neoptolemus's arrival; the eighth of the post-Iliadic books; the plain before Troy and the walls of the city)

Dawn arms both hosts. Neoptolemus puts on his father's panoply at the lamplight in Achilles's tent; the immortal horses Xanthus and Balius are yoked to his chariot. The Greeks pour out of the gates of the camp-wall, with Neoptolemus at their head. The Trojans and Mysians come out of the city. Eurypylus, beautiful in his Hephaestan inheritance, leads them. The plain narrows to its old confrontation. The lines meet "as fire meets fire upon a hill in summer."

The book is principally a single aristeia. Neoptolemus drives his father's chariot down the Greek line and across the centre. Quintus catalogues kills with grim symmetry to the Iliad's Achillean rampages. He kills Melaneus, Alkidamas, Mynes, two sons of Meges, a Lycian named Sthenelus, and on through a list of named Mysians whose fathers are mentioned in patronymics so the reader can feel the bereavement. The Trojans break for the gates again; Eurypylus rallies them and brings them back. The two champions sight each other across a thinning press of soldiers.

The duel is single-shot. Eurypylus speaks first — the formulaic challenge to a stranger: "Who are you, boy, and from what father?" The answer is the cycle's heaviest formula: "Neoptolemus, son of Achilles." Eurypylus answers without flinching that his father Telephus was once wounded and once healed by Achilles, and that he himself will repay both the wound and the healing today. They throw spears. Eurypylus's misses; Neoptolemus's catches the Mysian under the cheek-piece of the helmet and drives through. Eurypylus reels and falls forward on the spear-shaft "like a tower a storm topples." His armour clatters about him. The Trojans wail; the Mysians turn and run. Neoptolemus strips the armour and stands a moment "like Achilles in the Scamander river-bed," and the comparison is Quintus's, not gratuitous.

The Trojan rout to the city is total. Quintus catalogues secondary Mysian deaths as Neoptolemus pursues. Aeneas, Polydamas, Deiphobus together cover the retreat at the gates. Paris draws bow on Neoptolemus; an arrow grazes his shield; Neoptolemus drives him back. By evening the Greeks are again on the plain, holding the field, and the gates of Troy are shut from inside.

The book's second movement is shorter and crucial. Neoptolemus is given a triumphal welcome at the camp. The Greek captains feast him at Agamemnon's tent. Briseis is mentioned again, very briefly, only as one of the captive women now serving Neoptolemus — Quintus is doing his quiet work of closing her cycle inside the new generation. The boy is grave. He asks to be taken to his father's tomb on the Sigeum headland. The host accompanies him. He pours libations of wine and milk and oil; he cuts a lock of his own hair (the gesture Iliad 23 gave Achilles at Patroclus's pyre) and lays it on the barrow. The immortal horses stand beside him, and Quintus says they "knew his father in him."

Inside the city, the Trojan council is a registration of how few defenders remain. Helenus speaks the prophecy that the city cannot fall without Philoctetes — who has the bow and arrows of Heracles, and who has been abandoned on Lemnos for nine years with a festering snakebite that none can bear to be near. The Greeks somehow learn this prophecy (Quintus is sparing on how — through divinity, through deserters, through Calchas's separate sight). The council resolves: Odysseus must sail for Lemnos. The cycle's second recruitment-mission is set. The book closes with the camp asleep and the boy still beside his father's barrow at midnight, his hand on the shaft of the spear of Chiron.

Analysis

The third Trojan-defender death

Book 8 closes the triadic structure Quintus has been building since the start of the Posthomerica. Penthesilea fell to Achilles in Book 1; Memnon fell to Achilles in Book 2; now Eurypylus falls to Achilles's son in Book 8. The three Trojan defenders who entered the war after Hector's death all die under the same Achillean spear, in a manner of speaking — the spear of Chiron passes from father to son between Books 3 and 7, and it is the same weapon that finishes all three. Quintus is making the cycle's symmetry visible: the Iliad killed Hector; the Posthomerica kills the three replacements; the Iliadic frame is closed.

The wound and the healing

Eurypylus's last words to Neoptolemus reach back through three generations. His father Telephus was wounded by Achilles at the war's first false landing (the Mysian expedition before the proper one), and later healed by Achilles in Argos when Greek oracles said the wound could be cured only by what made it. The story is a Cypria episode. Eurypylus invokes it here as his motive: he has come to Troy not only as a Priamid kinsman but as the man who must repay a generational debt to the house of Peleus. Quintus's choice to let Eurypylus die invoking it gives the moment ironic depth — the debt is being paid, but in the wrong direction. Telephus was healed; his son is killed by the healer's son. The cycle's intergenerational arithmetic does not balance.

Neoptolemus as his father

Quintus stages the duel as a textual rhyme with the Iliad's Achilles-Hector duel in Iliad 22. The formulaic challenge — "Who are you, boy?" — is the Iliadic Hector's question pattern with a different speaker. The single fatal cast through the throat is the Iliadic Achilles's killing-blow of Hector beneath the collarbone, displaced upward by a few inches. The comparison Quintus draws explicitly between Neoptolemus standing over Eurypylus's body and Achilles standing over the Scamander dead — "like Achilles in the river-bed" — is the cycle's most direct declaration that the son has become the father. It is also Quintus's quietest reservation. The son is "like" the father; the simile holds. Whether the son is the father is the question the Aeneid will answer in the negative.

The visit to the tomb

The book's emotional centre is the post-victory visit to Achilles's barrow. Neoptolemus cuts a lock of his own hair and lays it on the grave. The gesture is Iliad 23.141, where Achilles cut a lock of his own hair (a hair pledged to the river Spercheius) and laid it on Patroclus's pyre. Quintus's son inherits the rite. The immortal horses standing beside him "knowing his father in him" close the book's quietest movement; it is the small private acknowledgement that doubles the public triumph. Way's translation lifts here as it usually does for the quiet scenes — the night-scene at the tomb is rendered with restraint and weight.

Helenus, prophecy, and the bow of Heracles

The second half of the book pivots on Helenus's prophecy: Troy will not fall without the bow and arrows of Heracles, in the hands of Philoctetes, who has been abandoned on Lemnos for nine years. The Iliad knew Philoctetes (Iliad 2.716-728 names him, "the man with the deadly bow," lying on Lemnos with his foot festering from a snake-wound, and prophesies the Greeks will need him); Sophocles's Philoctetes (409 BCE) is the surviving dramatic treatment; the Cypria and Little Iliad both treated the recruitment. Quintus has Calchas and Helenus speaking the same prophecy from opposite sides — the Trojan seer and the Greek seer in formal agreement, a doubling of authority. The decision to fetch Philoctetes is therefore both military necessity and theological inevitability. Book 9 will deliver the mission.

Aeneas in the rearguard

Aeneas appears again in Book 8 covering the Trojan retreat. Quintus has kept him alive through every Posthomerica book — wounded only lightly in Book 3, holding the line in Book 6, holding it again here. The reason is theological: the Iliad already said in Book 20 that Aeneas was fated to escape Troy and rule the Trojans elsewhere ("for it is fated that he should escape, lest the seed of Dardanus die"). Quintus knows this and the Aeneid takes the prophecy as its premise. Every Posthomerica appearance of Aeneas is therefore a survival-shadow: he cannot die because the next epic has already been written.

Way's catalogue-register

A.S. Way's blank verse in Book 8 carries one of the longest battle-catalogues of the cycle, and it labours under the weight. Way's archaic English makes a list of Mysian deaths read as a small liturgy of bereavement — every patronymic, every father's home village, every line of "smote he down" — and the cumulative effect is slow but cumulatively moving. The Greek beneath is more brisk. Quintus's catalogue is built from formulaic phrases and stock similes; Way slows it into ceremony. This is the part of the Posthomerica's translation history where the late-Victorian register either works or fails for the modern reader; the failure-mode is tedium and the success-mode is a kind of biblical gravity. Both are present in the book's catalogue.

What to watch for

Book 9 fetches Philoctetes from Lemnos. Sophocles's surviving play is the great alternative version; compare Quintus's brisker handling.
Book 10 will be Paris's death by the arrow of Heracles — the bow brought back from Lemnos kills the archer who killed Achilles.
The lock of hair laid on Achilles's tomb here echoes forward to Polyxena sacrificed on the same tomb in Book 14 — the same site, two very different rites.
Aeneas's survival shadow continues to lengthen.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The duel is staged as a deliberate echo of Iliad 22.249-330, the killing of Hector by Achilles. The challenge-and-answer formula, the throw of the spear, the spear-cast through the neck/cheek, the stripping of the armour, the comparison of the victor to a returning storm — every beat is Iliadic. Quintus marks the rhyme explicitly with the simile "like Achilles in the river-bed," reaching back to Iliad 21's slaughter at the Scamander. The lock of hair Neoptolemus lays on his father's tomb is the same gesture Iliad 23.141 gave Achilles at Patroclus's pyre — the son inheriting the father's mourning-rite. The challenge between Neoptolemus and Eurypylus reaches further back across the cycle: Eurypylus's father Telephus was wounded and healed by Achilles in the Cypria's pre-war Mysian campaign, and Eurypylus invokes that history as he dies. The bow of Heracles that Helenus prophesies as necessary to take Troy reaches all the way back to the Heraclean sack of an earlier Troy (the sack of Laomedon's city, a generation before Priam's), which the Iliad already knows (Iliad 5.638-651, Tlepolemus on his father Heracles's sack of Troy). The cycle's two Trojan falls are linked by one bow: the bow that took the older Troy will take the younger. The immortal horses that "know the father in the son" are the cycle's quietest backward link — they have wept through the death-and-pyre of Patroclus (Iliad 17, 19, 23) and Achilles (Posthomerica 3) and now serve the third heir.

Forward echoes

Book 9 will deliver the Philoctetes mission set up by Helenus's prophecy here; Book 10 will kill Paris with the very bow of Heracles that mission retrieves — completing the cycle of revenges that began with Paris's arrow killing Achilles in Book 3. The arrow that killed the killer of Hector is killed by the bow that brings down the killer of Achilles; the symmetry is total. Book 13's sack will rest on the prophetic accumulation of Book 8: bow of Heracles plus son of Achilles plus stratagem (still to come in Book 12). Neoptolemus's piety at his father's tomb here will be inverted in Book 14, where the same son will sacrifice Polyxena, daughter of Priam, on the same barrow — the cycle's most disquieting use of a single site for two opposite rites. Aeneid 2.469-558, Aeneas's account of Pyrrhus at the sack, will give us this same Neoptolemus at his savagery's height; the Posthomerica's reverent boy at the midnight tomb will become Virgil's killer of an old king at an altar. Odyssey 11.505-540, the Nekyia, has Odysseus report to Achilles's shade in the underworld that Neoptolemus fought wisely in council and bravely in the horse — the Odyssey's good word for the man Aeneid 2 damns. Aeneas's continued survival here is the longest forward shadow in the cycle: he will leave Troy in Aeneid 2, wander the Mediterranean for Aeneid 3-5, descend to the underworld in 6, and found the war-with-Latium in 7-12; his every appearance in the Posthomerica is a small earnest of the next epic. Briseis's farewell-glimpse here closes the cycle's most quietly traced female arc: from Iliad 1 (taken from Achilles) to Iliad 19 (lament for Patroclus) to Posthomerica 3 (lament for Achilles) to here (a serving captive in the son's tent). The cycle does not narrate her death; her vanishing is the silence.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

Neoptolemus — leads his first full aristeia; kills Eurypylus; visits his father's tomb at midnight
Eurypylus — leads the Trojan line; killed by Neoptolemus's single spear-cast through the cheek-piece
Agamemnon — feasts Neoptolemus at the captains' tent; presides over the council that resolves the Philoctetes mission
Menelaus — fights in the Greek line; embraces Neoptolemus after the kill
Odysseus — chosen to fetch Philoctetes from Lemnos; the cycle's second recruitment-mission falls to him
Aeneas — covers the Trojan retreat at the gates; survives, as the Iliadic prophecy requires
Paris — looses an arrow at Neoptolemus; grazes the shield; driven back
Briseis — appears once at the feast as a serving captive; the cycle's silent farewell to her

Mentioned / off-stage

Achilles — the buried father in whose name the son fights; the tomb visited at midnight
Patroclus — bones with Achilles's beneath the Sigeum barrow
Philoctetes — abandoned on Lemnos nine years; named in Helenus's and Calchas's prophecies; will be fetched in Book 9
Calchas — Greek seer; speaks the prophecy of Philoctetes from the Greek side
Hector — long dead; the cycle's first defender now answered by the cycle's last son
Memnon — Eurypylus's predecessor as Trojan champion; killed in Posthomerica 2
Penthesilea — Eurypylus's earlier predecessor; killed in Posthomerica 1
Helen — present in the city throughout; the war's nominal cause as the defenders dwindle
Cassandra — her brother Helenus speaks the prophecy of Philoctetes from the Trojan side; she herself watches the war pass into its last act

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.