Posthomerica, Book 10 — The Death of Paris by the Arrow of Heracles

Reading Troy — chapter 34 of 74 · Posthomerica, Book 10

Posthomerica, Book 10 — The Death of Paris by the Arrow of Heracles (Day after Philoctetes's healing; the tenth of the post-Iliadic books; the plain before Troy, the Greek camp, the slope of Mount Ida)

The Greeks come out at dawn. Philoctetes walks on his healed foot among the front-rank Greeks, the bow of Heracles strung in his hand, the quiver of envenomed arrows at his hip. Neoptolemus is at his shoulder with the spear of Chiron. The Trojans, weakened by Eurypylus's death, come out reluctantly under Aeneas, Deiphobus, Paris and Polydamas. The battle is general but not heavy; both armies are spent.

Quintus gives Philoctetes a brief aristeia first. He kills four Trojans by the bow before the lines close — a captain named Akamas, a son of Antimachus, two unnamed easterners. The arrows are conspicuous; they fly without falling, and where they hit the wound is black. The Trojans recognise the bow. Word runs along the line: this is the bow of Heracles, and the man with it is the one the gods sent. Paris, who has killed Achilles and stood the cycle's archer-prince for fifteen books, takes his own bow and goes forward. The two archers meet across a thinning press.

The duel is short. Paris fires first; the arrow grazes Philoctetes's shoulder. Philoctetes shoots back; the first arrow misses; the second passes through Paris's wrist; the third hits him in the side beneath the arm. The Hydra-poison begins to work at once. Paris falls back; his attendants carry him out of the line. The Trojan retreat is orderly because the man wounded is not yet known to be dying. The Greeks hold the field.

The book's centre is the dying of Paris. He is carried to the city; he asks not to die in Troy. He is taken across the plain and up the slopes of Ida, the mountain where he was exposed as an infant, where he was raised by shepherds, where he gave the apple of judgement to Aphrodite, where he first met Oenone, his Naiad bride before Helen. He hopes Oenone will heal him. He pleads with her. Quintus gives Oenone a long speech; she refuses. She names the wound he gave her when he left her for Helen; she names the city he ruined for the same; she names the death that is now in him as justice. She turns him away. Paris dies on the slope of Ida at sunset, his head against a stone, alone except for his shepherd-attendants. Oenone, watching from her cave, repents at the moment of his death; she runs out, finds the body cold, and throws herself on it; her grief breaks her; she dies of the same grief — Quintus says she "loosed her own soul" in the dark — and the shepherds, returning at dawn, find them both. They build a single pyre.

The Trojans in the city learn of the death and mourn. Helen weeps the most strangely: not for the man she ran from Sparta with (Quintus does not pretend her love survived the war) but for the cause of the war, the body that linked her to all this slaughter. She walks the walls in her veil. Hecuba laments the third son she has lost — Hector to Achilles, Troilus to Achilles before the Iliad, Paris now to the Heraclean bow. Priam takes the news in silence; he is past speech. The Trojan council that follows is brief and divided: Antenor counsels giving Helen back at once; Deiphobus seizes her instead — he will be her new husband, the third Trojan brother to claim her. Helen accepts the marriage in silence. The book closes on the funeral fires of Paris and Oenone burning together on Ida, visible from the walls of Troy as a single point of light. The Greeks see them too from the plain.

Analysis

The revenge-symmetry closed

Book 10 completes the cycle's tightest revenge-symmetry. Paris's arrow, guided by Apollo, killed Achilles in Book 3; the bow of Heracles, in the hand of Philoctetes whom Paris and his allies abandoned at the war's start, now kills Paris in Book 10. The Iliadic killer of the Iliad's hero is killed by the older weapon that took the older Troy. Quintus is careful not to celebrate this; the deaths in his Posthomerica are paired but they do not balance morally. The book treats Paris's end as pitiable rather than satisfying. The man who began the war by stealing another man's wife dies on the mountain where he started life and was loved truly once, refused healing by the woman he wronged first.

Oenone, the first wife

Oenone is one of the cycle's deepest minor figures. The Iliad does not name her, though Iliad 11.105 alludes to nymphs on Ida who loved Trojan princes; the Cypria and the Little Iliad gave her the role Quintus inherits. Apollodorus (3.12.6) and Parthenius (Erotica Pathemata 4) preserve fuller versions. Quintus's handling is one of the cycle's finest pieces of psychological work. The speech he gives Oenone refusing Paris is just — she names what he did to her — and her grief at his death is no less just. She is the woman who knew Paris before the war made him into a public figure, who lived with him as a shepherd's wife before he became a prince again, who watched him leave for Sparta and never come back. Her death of grief after his death of poison is the cycle's most concentrated study of erotic memory: she could not save him, and she cannot live without having saved him. The double pyre is the book's emblem.

Mount Ida as biographical site

Quintus's choice to have Paris die on Ida rather than in the city is the book's deepest structural move. Ida is Paris's biography: exposed there as an infant because of Hecuba's dream-omen, raised there by Agelaus the shepherd, judged the goddesses there (the apple given to Aphrodite for the bribe of Helen), met Oenone there, lived as a Naiad's husband there for years before being recognised by his family. The mountain is the whole life he turned away from to become a Trojan prince. He dies on it, alone, refused by the woman who knew him before the prince. Quintus is asking the cycle's quietest question: who is Paris when he is not the man who took Helen? The answer the mountain gives is: the same man, only earlier, and not redeemable backward.

Hydra-poison and slow death

The arrows of Heracles are dipped in the blood of the Lernaean Hydra. The Iliad and Cypria both know this; Sophocles's Trachiniae (the death of Heracles himself by his own poisoned shirt) is the great surviving treatment of what Hydra-poison does. Quintus is precise. Paris does not die of the wound itself but of the venom working through him over hours. The slow death gives Quintus the narrative room he needs: the carriage to Ida, the appeal to Oenone, the final sunset. The same poison that the older Heracles died of (his shirt soaked by Deianeira in the centaur Nessus's blood, which itself contained Hydra-poison from Heracles's arrow) now kills Paris. The mythological loop is closed: the venom that killed Heracles indirectly returns to kill the man whose theft of Helen began the war the bow finishes.

Way's mountain-elegy

A.S. Way's translation is at its best in the Ida-scenes. The slow blank verse, biblical in cadence, suits a death-in-pastoral setting; Way's archaic English makes the shepherd's hut, the Naiad's cave, the sunset on the slope all feel ceremonial. Oenone's speech of refusal is given a Browningesque dramatic weight in the English; her speech of repentance is given the cadence of liturgy. This is one of the rare places where Way's Victorian register adds something the original Greek (compact, formulaic) does not quite have on its own. Quintus's Oenone is moving; Way's Oenone is moving in a different register — closer to the great Victorian dramatic monologues than to anything classical.

Helen's strange grief

Quintus gives Helen one of his most acute small moments. She mourns Paris, and the mourning is not erotic. The cycle's Helen has long passed the moment of loving the man she ran with; she walks the walls in her veil and weeps for what the dead man stood for — the slaughter linked to her, the war her face launched. Quintus refuses the easy reading either way: Helen is neither cynically free of Paris nor still in love with him. She is a woman who has lived inside a public catastrophe she partly caused and partly didn't, and the death of the man who took her is the moment she most fully feels the catastrophe. The walking on the walls in the veil is the cycle's most charged Iliad-echo — Iliad 3's teichoskopia, with the woman now mourning not naming.

Deiphobus takes Helen

The remarriage to Deiphobus is the cycle's coldest piece of dynastic logistics. Helen is property; the city's surviving princes contest her as one would contest a treaty-bride. Antenor's counsel — give her back to Menelaus and end the war — is rejected by the faction holding her. Quintus is brief but unambiguous: the marriage is forced. The Aeneid 6.494-547 will give us Deiphobus's afterlife, mutilated by Menelaus at the sack and met by Aeneas in the underworld; the cruelty of his death at the sack is shadowed here by the cruelty of this marriage. Helen's silence at the wedding is the cycle's loudest non-speech.

What to watch for

• Book 11 is the last day of conventional fighting; Book 12 builds the Wooden Horse; Book 13 sacks the city. The war's plot is now decided.
• Aeneid 6.494-547 will give us Deiphobus in the underworld telling Aeneas how Helen betrayed him at the sack — a future this marriage already foreshadows.
• The double pyre on Ida — Paris and Oenone — is the cycle's small lyric: two lovers who could not save each other, burned together by shepherds.
• Helenus, Paris's seer-brother, will be captured shortly by the Greeks; his prophecy will give them the Palladium-and-Horse plan.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The book is built on Iliad and lost-cycle material. The duel between Paris and Philoctetes structurally answers the failed Iliad 3 duel between Paris and Menelaus, where Paris was rescued by Aphrodite from the killing-blow and spirited back to Helen's bed; here no goddess rescues, and the wound is mortal. Paris's death by the bow of Heracles closes the cycle's deepest backward arc: Heracles sacked the older Troy, the bow descended to Philoctetes, Paris began the new war by stealing Helen, and Paris dies by the same bow at the city's end — three generations of weapon-history finished in one arrow. The mountain Ida is the site of Paris's whole pre-war biography: his exposure as an infant (Iliad 24.27-30 alludes to the judgement), his shepherd-childhood, the judgement of the goddesses (the Cypria's opening episode), his marriage to Oenone (Cypria, Apollodorus 3.12.6, Parthenius 4). Quintus brings every part of that biography onto the page in the deathbed scenes — the cave is Oenone's, the slope is the shepherd's, the stone where Paris's head rests is the same stone we are meant to imagine him born by. Helen's veiled mourning on the walls answers Iliad 3's teichoskopia: the same woman, the same walls, the same act of looking — but the men below are no longer being named to Priam; they are being mourned to no one. The remarriage to Deiphobus reaches back across the cycle to the original act: Helen given by Aphrodite to Paris (the cycle's first marriage that started the war), now given again to a brother who will not survive the sack. Andromache's marriage history is the dark mirror: Hector's wife will become Pyrrhus's bedfellow in Aeneid 3, then Helenus's wife in Buthrotum.

Forward echoes

Book 11 will be the last conventional fighting day; Book 12 the Wooden Horse; Book 13 the sack. The death of Paris removes the last princely defender of Troy other than Aeneas, Deiphobus and Helenus. Aeneid 6.494-547 will give us Deiphobus in the underworld telling Aeneas how Helen — newly married to him as Posthomerica 10 closes — betrayed him at the sack: she signalled the Greeks with a torch, opened the chamber door, and let Menelaus in to mutilate him. The forced marriage of Posthomerica 10 thus directly seeds the Aeneid 6 scene. The double pyre of Paris and Oenone on Ida is one of the cycle's small lyric moments and is taken up in Tennyson's Oenone and The Death of Oenone, in Robert Bridges, in Walter Pater's prose — Quintus's quiet handling of the episode is one of the parts of his work the modern reception most loved. The bow of Heracles will continue to work: it will be in Philoctetes's hand at the sack (Posthomerica 13), and the cycle's last archer will end the war the cycle's first archer began. Aeneid 2 will show us Pyrrhus killing Polites and Priam at the altar; the dynastic cleansing of the Priamid house, of which Paris's death here is the major prefatory step, will be completed in the next epic. Helen's silent acceptance of the Deiphobus-marriage prefigures her Odyssey 4 self-presentation in Sparta: an ironist who has lived through too much to be a moralist, who shows Telemachus her embroideries depicting the war and tells stories that put her in different lights as she chooses. The cycle's most ambiguous woman is being readied here for the Odyssey's version of her.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Paris — leads the Trojan archers; wounded by Philoctetes's poisoned arrows; refused healing by Oenone; dies on Mount Ida at sunset
• Philoctetes — first aristeia at Troy; the killing arrows of Heracles take Paris
• Neoptolemus — at Philoctetes's shoulder in the front rank; the spear-and-bow paired together
• Helen — mourns Paris on the walls in her veil; is given by force to Deiphobus
• Hecuba — mourns her third dead son; her sorrow is now total
• Priam — takes the news in silence; past speech
• Aeneas — leads the Trojan front; covers the retreat after Paris falls

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — Paris's victim in Book 3; today's death is his revenge by proxy
• Hector — long dead; the eldest of Hecuba's lost sons
• Andromache — Hector's widow, still in the city; her dead husband's brother now joins him
• Oenone — Paris's first wife on Mount Ida; refuses to heal him, repents, dies of grief on his pyre (no cast slot — handled in the Paris dossier)
• Zeus — silent presider; the prophecy of the bow is his
• Agamemnon — at the Greek line; receives the day's news of Paris's wounding
• Menelaus — at the Greek line; will reclaim Helen at the sack three books hence
• Calchas — Greek seer; the prophecy of the bow is his too

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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.