Posthomerica, Book 11 — The Last Battles before the Walls

Reading Troy — chapter 35 of 74 · Posthomerica, Book 11

Posthomerica, Book 11 — The Last Battles before the Walls (Days after the death of Paris; the eleventh of the post-Iliadic books; the plain before Troy, the Scaean Gate, the Trojan citadel)

The Trojans, broken in numbers and in heart, come out only because they must. The plain is fought over piecemeal for three days. Quintus catalogues these days as a slow attrition rather than a heroic sequence. Aeneas leads the Dardanian centre; Deiphobus the right; Helenus the left, until he is wounded in the shield-arm and carried in. The Greek line is led now by Neoptolemus on the right, Philoctetes covering with the bow from the centre, Diomedes and Odysseus at the captains' positions, the surviving Atridae anchoring the camp. Quintus's battle-pieces are short and grim. The big-name duels of the Iliad are not here available; instead he gives us minor captains killing minor captains, the dwindling armies bleeding out.

Among the day's notable beats: Neoptolemus's second aristeia, briefer than Book 8's — he kills the Trojan Lykon and the Mysian Helicaon, sons of allies the Iliad knew. Aeneas spears the Locrian Antiphos through the throat — the same Antiphos who had been on Odysseus's contingent at Aulis. Philoctetes's bow takes down three Trojan archers from across the line. Quintus gives a brief simile on the bow: it has been a long time silent and is now a chained dog let off the leash. The cycle's most famous Iliadic-style simile-catalogues are notably sparser in this book; Quintus seems to be marking the war's exhaustion in the texture of his verse.

By the third day the Trojans cannot hold the plain. They are pushed back to the ditch. Aeneas covers the retreat. The Scaean Gate closes on the survivors. The Greeks, exhausted themselves, do not press the assault. The Trojan dead are left on the plain; the city's gates remain closed; both armies hold their positions. The night falls and neither side moves.

The book then turns to the city. Inside Troy the council convenes in Priam's hall. Antenor speaks again as he spoke after Paris's death: give Helen back, ransom the city, end the war. Deiphobus refuses; he names Helen his wife now, and a king's wife is not a coin to be paid. The faction holding Helen is too strong for Antenor; the proposal dies. Cassandra speaks for the first time in the cycle in extended verse — Quintus gives her a long prophetic speech foreseeing the city's fall by trick rather than by storm, the wooden beast on the plain, the night-fire, the slaughter, her own end at the altar. The Trojans, as they will always, do not believe her. She is shut up in the temple of Athena.

The book's last movement is the cycle's quietest piece of strategic thinking. The Greek council, in Agamemnon's tent, takes stock. The army cannot take the city by assault — the walls are too high, the defenders too well-positioned even reduced, the Greek losses too heavy to risk a frontal storm. Calchas speaks: the gods will not give the city by force; they will give it by craft. Odysseus listens; he is silent for a long time; he speaks. He has a plan. He will say it in the morning. The book closes on Odysseus pacing alone on the beach at midnight, the bow of Heracles and the spear of Chiron both back in their owners' tents, and the wooden beach-stones rolling under his feet. The next book builds the horse.

Analysis

A book of attrition

Book 11 is the cycle's least dramatic battle-book and that is its point. Quintus is a careful architect, and he is preparing the reader for the structural pivot of Book 12 by deliberately draining the surface texture of his epic poetry. The big-name aristeiai are over: Achilles is dead, Hector is dead, Memnon, Penthesilea, Eurypylus, Paris all dead. The Iliad's grammar of single-combat-as-poetry is no longer available. What Quintus shows instead is something the Iliad almost never showed: the war in its grinding middle hours, captains killed by captains, no decisive shift, both armies leaking blood. The book is short of similes; the catalogues are minor; the verse is steady rather than soaring. He is registering the truth that the war has exhausted itself. Heroic poetry cannot describe an exhausted war except by becoming itself slightly exhausted.

The dwindling Trojan command

The Trojan side's tactical situation by mid-Book 11 is desperate in a quiet way. Aeneas leads the centre; Deiphobus the right; Helenus the left until he is wounded. There is no Hector to rally the line, no Sarpedon for the allies, no Memnon or Eurypylus newly arrived. The defence is being held by the brothers and brothers-in-law of the dead — Aeneas the cousin, Deiphobus and Helenus the surviving sons of Priam. Quintus is careful to keep Aeneas at the centre because the Iliad's prophecy (Iliad 20.302-308) said Aeneas must survive; Aeneas's centre-position is therefore the line's most stable element. The man fated to live is the line's pillar.

Cassandra's speech

Cassandra has been silent in the cycle since the Iliad mentioned her in passing. Quintus gives her a full prophetic speech in this book — one of his important contributions to the tradition. Aeschylus's Agamemnon (the great surviving treatment) used her in a tragic recognition-scene at her death in Argos; Euripides's Trojan Women gave her the demented bride-of-Apollo voice; Lycophron's Alexandra is the great oblique third-century BCE prophetic poem in her voice. Quintus's Cassandra is closer to Euripides's than to Aeschylus's: she speaks clearly about the trick, the horse, the fire, her own death; she is shut up in the temple precisely because she speaks clearly. The cycle's most famously unbelieved character now speaks, in the cycle's last book before the trick, and is unbelieved on schedule. The poignancy is Quintus's deliberate construction: he wants the reader to hold Cassandra's words against Book 12's wooden horse and feel the gap between true seeing and useless seeing.

Antenor's pragmatism

Antenor's repeated proposal — give Helen back, ransom the city — is the cycle's most rational voice from the Trojan side. He has been proposing it since the Iliad (Iliad 7.347-353, "We hold Helen in the teeth of our oath; let us give her back"); the Cypria and Little Iliad tradition has him proposing it again throughout the war. Quintus inherits him as the embodied counterfactual: a Troy that gave Helen back would have survived. Antenor's failure to persuade is the cycle's moral indictment of the faction-politics that drives the war. Quintus, like the Iliad, does not let Antenor win. The Trojan defeat is therefore self-inflicted in part: the city falls because its leadership cannot do the sane thing.

Odysseus's silence

The book's last image — Odysseus pacing alone on the beach at midnight — is one of the cycle's most economical pieces of character-work. Quintus does not tell us what Odysseus is thinking; he shows us the man planning a stratagem he has not yet announced. The detail of the wooden beach-stones rolling under his feet is the only physical detail; everything else is silence. The Posthomerica's Odysseus is not the brassy schemer of later Athenian tragedy (Sophocles's Ajax and Philoctetes both show that figure); nor is he the morally serious confessor of Posthomerica 9. He is here the cycle's quiet engineer, the man who is the only one in either camp capable of designing what comes next. Quintus's economy is its own argument: the cycle's pivot does not need rhetoric, it needs a plan.

Way's flatter register

A.S. Way's translation in Book 11 reads more flatly than in surrounding books — and the flatness suits the original. The Greek's diminished simile-density, its catalogue-of-minor-deaths structure, its short battle-pieces, are all rendered into Victorian blank verse without much added grandeur. Way is sometimes accused of over-archaising; in this book the accusation does not really hold. The translator follows the original's slowing-down and lets it slow. The result is a book that reads as a transition more than a destination, which is what it is.

The seer-pair on both sides

Calchas and Cassandra are the cycle's two great seers — one Greek, one Trojan. Both speak in Book 11. Both speak truly. The structural symmetry is meaningful: the same truths are visible to both sides; only the willingness to act on them differs. Cassandra is shut up; Calchas is heard. The cycle's politics of belief is one of its quietest themes, and Book 11 places the two seers in formal parallel for the only time in the Posthomerica. They will both reappear in the Odyssey's wake: Calchas mentioned briefly, Cassandra carried off by Agamemnon as concubine to be murdered in Mycenae alongside him by Clytemnestra (Odyssey 11.421, 24.199).

What to watch for

• Book 12 builds the horse; Book 13 takes the city. The cycle's last three books are the Trojan endgame.
• Cassandra will appear next in the Aeneid 2's account of the sack (Pyrrhus dragging her from the temple by the hair) and in the Odyssey's offstage narrative of her murder in Mycenae.
• Antenor will survive the sack and (in the post-Posthomeric tradition) found Patavium in Italy — a quiet parallel founder to Aeneas, mentioned in passing in Aeneid 1.
• Helenus, wounded here, will be captured shortly by the Greeks and his prophecies will help complete the stratagem; in Aeneid 3 Aeneas will meet him as king of a small Trojan-refugee Epirus.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The book reads as the Iliad's grammar of battle running down. The Iliadic aristeia, the catalogue, the great simile-pair, the dueling-prince formula — Quintus uses none of these at their full strength here, and the diminishment is the point. The Iliad's Trojan command-structure (Hector centre, Sarpedon allies, Aeneas Dardanians) has shrunk to its surviving fragments — Aeneas centre, Deiphobus and Helenus the flanks. Aeneas's continuing centrality is the Iliad's prophecy (Iliad 20.302-308, Poseidon protecting him because "it is fated that he should escape") working itself out in tactical reality. Cassandra's prophetic speech reaches back to the Iliad's brief mentions of her (Iliad 13.365, 24.699) and to the lost Cypria and Little Iliad where she had a fuller voice; Quintus is collecting her into the cycle for the major speech the older epics never gave her. Antenor's renewed proposal to give Helen back reaches all the way to Iliad 7.347-353, where he made the same proposal at the council after the failed duel. The Trojan rejection of him in both books is the cycle's most pointed indictment of its losing side. The cycle's two seers, Calchas and Cassandra, speaking the same truth in formal parallel, are the Posthomerica's only set-piece of prophetic doubling; it answers Iliad 1 (Calchas's first prophecy that sparked the wrath of Achilles) and Iliad 2 (Calchas's old prophecy at Aulis of the war's nine-year wait).

Forward echoes

The book is structurally a runway for the next two. Book 12 will deliver the Wooden Horse Odysseus is pacing the beach designing here. Book 13 will deliver the sack Cassandra is foreseeing. The cycle's last big shifts of register all start in this book's quiet attrition. Cassandra's prophecy looks forward to her own role in the sack (dragged from the temple by Ajax the Lesser in Aeneid 2 and Posthomerica 13) and to the Odyssey's offstage account of her death in Mycenae (Odyssey 11.421, 24.199, Clytemnestra killing her alongside Agamemnon). Aeschylus's Agamemnon will give us the great surviving treatment of that murder. Antenor's failure to persuade and survival of the sack will produce, in post-Posthomeric tradition, his foundation of Patavium in Italy — Aeneid 1.242-249 names him in passing as the Trojan refugee whose ships reached the Adriatic before Aeneas's. Aeneas's centre-position in the Trojan line is preparation for the Aeneid's portrait of him as the survivor: every battle-book of the Posthomerica gives him a small confirming appearance, and every appearance is a forecast that he will be the one Trojan to come out of the cycle into a new epic. The Greek captains' council resolving on craft over force prefigures the Iliad's wider cycle-position: the Iliad ends with no resolution; the Odyssey will end with Odysseus winning by a stratagem (the bow contest, the slaughter of the suitors); the Aeneid 2 will narrate the same stratagem this council is designing. Odysseus's silent pacing on the beach is the cycle's most quietly determinative single image — the man who will design the horse is here designing the horse, and the cycle's last act is hidden inside one man's head.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Aeneas — leads the Trojan centre; the line's most stable pillar; the man fated to survive
• Neoptolemus — leads the Greek right; second aristeia
• Philoctetes — covers from the centre with Heracles's bow
• Odysseus — silent at the captains' council; pacing alone on the beach at midnight; the plan-maker
• Diomedes — captain's position; supports the council
• Agamemnon — presides over the captains' council; consents to Odysseus's hint
• Menelaus — anchors the Greek camp
• Calchas — speaks the prophetic conclusion: not by force but by craft
• Cassandra — the cycle's first full prophetic speech from her; foresees the horse, the fire, her own death; shut up in the temple
• Priam — presides over the Trojan council; assents to Deiphobus's refusal of Antenor's proposal

Mentioned / off-stage

• Helen — newly Deiphobus's wife; the council's argument is over her body
• Hecuba — mourning in the palace; her sons all but spent
• Andromache — Hector's widow; in the palace with Astyanax; her grief is the cycle's longest
• Astyanax — Hector's son; still alive in the city; killed at the sack
• Hector — long dead; his absence is the line's
• Achilles — long dead; the Greek camp still organised around his son

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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.