Posthomerica, Book 13 — The Sack of Troy

Reading Troy — chapter 37 of 74 · Posthomerica, Book 13

Posthomerica, Book 13 — The Sack of Troy (The night of the horse's entry into Troy; the thirteenth of the post-Iliadic books; the streets, palaces, temples of the city; the plain before the walls)

Midnight. The Trojans, drunk with the day's feasting, sleep. The horse stands in the great square. Sinon climbs to a high tower and lights the signal-fire. The Greek fleet at Tenedos sees it; the ships return. On the plain the camp-watchmen relight the campfires for cover. In the city the horse opens. The plank in its right flank is drawn from inside; the picked company descends by a knotted rope; Epeius is the last out, then climbs back to draw up the rope after them. The company splits. Some go to the gates and open them silently for the returning host; others fan out into the streets to start the fires. Within the hour the city is alight from a dozen ignitions; within two, the Greek host is inside the walls.

Quintus's account of the sack is the cycle's longest and most terrible single book. He proceeds by household and by figure rather than by panoramic catalogue. He follows Neoptolemus first. The boy goes to the palace. Polites — Priam's youngest son — runs from him through the colonnade; Neoptolemus spears him in his father's sight as he reaches the altar of Zeus Herkeios in the inner court. Priam, old and trembling, takes up a heavy spear (a weapon his arms can barely lift) and casts it; it falls short. Neoptolemus drags the king by the hair to the altar and kills him there — the cycle's most violated sacred space, the king's blood on the household-Zeus's stone. The death is the foundation of Pyrrhus's reputation in everything that follows; Aeneid 2.526-558 will give the Trojan-side version.

Quintus then turns to the women. Hecuba in the palace finds her husband dead and her city burning; she is dragged from the altar and given as captive to Odysseus. Andromache is in the inner chambers with Astyanax; Greek soldiers take the child from her arms; Quintus is laconic — the boy is thrown from a high tower, the standard Iliadic-cycle motive that the son of Hector cannot grow up. Andromache is given as captive to Neoptolemus, who will take her home to Phthia and (in the later tradition) marry her off to Helenus. Cassandra is found in the temple of Athena, clinging to the goddess's image. Ajax the Lesser drags her from the statue by the hair. The Palladium falls and breaks. Athena's anger at this sacrilege will follow the Greek fleet across the sea (Posthomerica 14, Odyssey 1, Odyssey 4). Cassandra will go as concubine to Agamemnon and die in Mycenae.

Menelaus goes to Helen's chamber. Deiphobus, her forced second Trojan husband, is asleep with her; Menelaus comes to the bed; Deiphobus wakes too late and is killed in the room; the Aeneid 6 underworld scene will narrate his mutilation in more detail. Menelaus raises his sword over Helen. Quintus gives him the cycle's most ambivalent line: the sword shall not strike "what was loved." He sheathes it. He takes her by the hand. The cycle's nominal cause is reclaimed alive.

Aeneas has his own movement. He fights through the city defending his own quarter; he is told by his mother Aphrodite (in vision) that Troy cannot be saved and that he must go. He takes his old father Anchises on his shoulder, his small son Ascanius by the hand, his wife Creusa following behind. They leave the city by a back gate. Creusa is lost in the dark — found later as a phantom and given a brief speech of farewell. Aeneas reaches Mount Ida with the household-gods, the Penates, in a clay box on his shoulder beside his father. The Aeneid 2 will tell this full from the inside; Quintus's account is brisk but complete.

The fires burn through the night. By dawn the city's palaces, temples, walls are smoke. Quintus catalogues the dead in a long sequence: priests at altars, infants from the breast, old men in beds, captive women lined for the ships. The Greek captains gather at the harbour at sunrise; they divide the captives by lot. The book closes with the Greek host re-embarking, the city behind them a black smoke on the western sky, the captive women — Hecuba to Odysseus, Cassandra to Agamemnon, Andromache to Neoptolemus, Polyxena (held back) to the gathering of Achilles's tomb at the sailing — going aboard. The walls of Troy are no longer the walls of any city. The Trojan war is over.

Analysis

The cycle's centre of gravity

If the Iliad's centre is Achilles's wrath and the Odyssey's centre is Odysseus's return, the cycle's centre is the night Book 13 narrates. Everything since the Iliad's opening has been moving toward this midnight. Quintus's handling is the only fully extant ancient Greek long version; Virgil's Aeneid 2 is its great Trojan-perspective counterpart; the lost Sack of Ilium of Arctinus is the deeper source both drew from. Quintus's choice is to narrate by household — palace, women's chambers, Athena's temple, Helen's bedroom, Aeneas's quarter — rather than by panoramic catalogue. The decision serves the moral seriousness of the book. A sack is not a battle; it is a many-roomed cruelty, and the right form is room-by-room.

Pyrrhus at the altar

The killing of Priam at the altar of Zeus Herkeios is the cycle's most often-cited single image. Quintus handles it directly. The detail of Polites running and being speared in his father's sight is from the Sack of Ilium tradition; Virgil's Aeneid 2.526-558 will canonise it as the central horror of the night. Quintus's Pyrrhus is the same boy who in Book 7 mourned his father and visited his tomb at midnight; the cycle's juxtaposition is deliberate and pitiless. The Iliad's Achilles spared Priam in Iliad 24; the Posthomerica's Pyrrhus kills him at his own altar. The cycle's two great king-and-killer encounters are placed in deliberate moral opposition. The son does not inherit the father's mercy.

Andromache and Astyanax

The killing of Astyanax is the cycle's most predicted death. Iliad 22.482-507 had Andromache foresee it in her lament for Hector; Iliad 24.725-745 had her foresee it again. The death itself happens off the page in most ancient versions; Quintus is laconic about the mechanics (the child is thrown from a tower, by Neoptolemus in some traditions, by Odysseus in others — Quintus is unspecific). Andromache's enslavement to Neoptolemus is the cycle's most cruel structural rhyme: the wife of Hector becomes the bedfellow of the son of Hector's killer. Euripides's Andromache and Trojan Women are the great surviving dramatic treatments; Aeneid 3.294-355 will give us the post-Pyrrhus Andromache, married to Helenus in Buthrotum, the cycle's deepest survivor's monologue.

Cassandra at the statue

Ajax the Lesser dragging Cassandra from the Palladium is the cycle's most theologically charged single act. The Palladium — the small archaic image of Athena said to have fallen from heaven into Troy and to be the city's protection — was, in the lost cycle, partly stolen by Diomedes and Odysseus in the days before the sack (one of the conditions for taking the city); Quintus omits that pre-history and shows us the consequence-image directly. Cassandra clinging to the goddess; Ajax dragging her by the hair; the statue falling; the goddess's anger turning on the Greek fleet. The whole of the Greek nostos (the return-voyages, particularly Odysseus's) is set up by this sacrilege. Athena's protection becomes her wrath. The Posthomerica's last book and the Odyssey's first are both built on what Ajax the Lesser does in this scene.

Helen, the survivor

Menelaus's reclamation of Helen is the cycle's quietest reversal. Every version of the cycle handles it slightly differently. The Iliad knows Helen as the war's cause; the Little Iliad and Stesichorus's Sack of Ilium give Menelaus the raised-sword-lowered moment (the famous gesture in Greek vase-painting); Euripides's Helen gives us the alternative tradition that Helen never went to Troy at all (an eidolon, a phantom, went in her place); Odyssey 4 will give us Helen at home in Sparta as a sophisticated hostess. Quintus's handling — "the sword shall not strike what was loved" — is among the cycle's most economical. Erotic memory survives the war; Helen survives the war; the cause survives the war's effects. The cycle's most ambivalent woman walks out of the burning city by her old husband's hand and resumes her queenship of Sparta.

Aeneas's exit

Aeneas's movement is Virgil's territory, and Quintus knows it. The Posthomerica gives Aeneas his exit briskly but completely: Aphrodite's vision, Anchises on the shoulder, Ascanius by the hand, Creusa lost behind, the Penates carried out, the escape to Ida. The Aeneid 2 will give us the same sequence in long-form, with Creusa's phantom speech expanded into one of Western literature's great farewell-scenes. Quintus's brevity is itself a kind of deference; he is making space for Virgil. The Iliad 20.302-308 prophecy ("for it is fated that he should escape") is finally cashed in. Aeneas leaves Troy; the Aeneid begins.

Way's slowest book

A.S. Way's translation of Book 13 is among his most successful. The slow blank verse suits a slow horror. Way does not rush the deaths; each killing is given its small space; the catalogue of the dead at the book's close is rendered with biblical cadence that does not feel exploitative. This is the part of the Posthomerica where Way's Victorian register most clearly earns itself: an evening of structural cruelty translated into English with the gravity of liturgy rather than the relish of melodrama. Modern translations (the Loeb prose, James Lombardo's verse) are brisker; some readers prefer the brisk; for the ceremonial weight of the night Quintus is rendering, Way's slow English may still be the best English version.

The captive lots

The book ends with the captives divided. The lottery is the cycle's coldest piece of social machinery. Hecuba goes to Odysseus (and will be the subject of Euripides's Hecuba); Cassandra to Agamemnon (and will be murdered with him in Mycenae, as Odyssey 11 and Aeschylus's Agamemnon will tell); Andromache to Neoptolemus (as Euripides's Andromache and Virgil's Aeneid 3 will tell); Polyxena is held back for sacrifice on Achilles's tomb (as Book 14 will narrate and Euripides's Hecuba will dramatise). The cycle's surviving women are dispersed across the Greek world as the spoils of the war; the cycle's tragedians will spend two centuries dramatising what happens to them next.

What to watch for

Book 14 is the storm at sea and the sacrifice of Polyxena: the cycle's last book.
The Aeneid begins where this book ends; the Odyssey will spend ten years working out the consequences of the Greek victory at sea.
Athena's wrath at Ajax's sacrilege drives the Greek fleet's disasters in Book 14, Aeneid 1's storm at sea, and Odyssey 1's reference to the difficult returns.
Helen will be at Sparta in Odyssey 4 telling Telemachus two contradictory stories about her time in Troy; her survival is one of the cycle's most peculiar and most generative facts.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The whole Iliad is echoed in this book. Hector's last words in Iliad 22 promised his city's fall and his son's death; both are paid here. Andromache's lament for Hector in Iliad 22.477-514 foresaw the enslavement and the loss of Astyanax; both arrive. Hecuba's lament for Hector in Iliad 22.430-436 and 24.748-759 prepared the queen for the dragging-from-the-altar this book delivers. The killing of Polites in his father's sight echoes Iliad 16's deaths of younger sons in front of older heroes, multiplied. The killing of Priam at the altar of Zeus Herkeios inverts Iliad 24's great suppliant-and-killer scene: Priam came to Achilles's tent and was spared and given his dead son's body; Pyrrhus comes to Priam's altar and spares nothing. The two scenes are placed in deliberate moral opposition across the cycle. Cassandra at the Palladium echoes her speeches in Book 11 and Book 12: the seer who saw is the seer who is dragged. Helen's reclamation echoes the failed Iliad 3 duel and the Iliad 6 teichoskopia; she who watched men die for her now walks out alive. Aeneas's exit echoes Iliad 20.302-308 (the prophecy of his survival, Poseidon protecting him on the field) and every Posthomerica book in which Quintus has kept him alive — Book 3 (wounded but escaping), Book 8 (covering the retreat), Books 10-11 (still in command). The cycle's most-prophesied survival happens on cue.

Forward echoes

Book 14 will give us the storm at sea and the sacrifice of Polyxena: the cycle's last book. Aeneid 1 will begin with the storm raised by Juno against Aeneas's fleet — a storm that is theologically continuous with Athena's wrath at Ajax's sacrilege here, though Virgil reframes it under Juno's older grudge against Troy. Aeneid 2.13-558 will give us this same night narrated by Aeneas to Dido at Carthage, the cycle's single longest first-person account of any event; Aeneas tells the story of the horse, the serpents-and-Laocoön, the city ablaze, the killing of Priam, the loss of Creusa, the carrying-out of Anchises. Aeneid 3.294-355 will give us the post-sack Andromache at Buthrotum, married to Helenus, mourning Astyanax and Pyrrhus and Hector in one long elegy. Aeneid 6.494-547 will give us Deiphobus mutilated in the underworld telling Aeneas how Helen betrayed him at the sack — the dark counter-narrative to Helen's reclamation as Menelaus's wife. Aeneid 6.853-887 will give us Anchises showing Aeneas the parade of future Romans descended from him; the Roman foundation rests on what happens to Aeneas at the end of this book. Odyssey 1.325-359 will mention the nostos difficulties of the Greek fleet (Athena's wrath); Odyssey 3.130-200 will have Nestor describe the fleet's break-up after Athena's anger at Ajax; Odyssey 4.499-511 will have Menelaus tell of Ajax the Lesser's death by Poseidon at sea, the punishment of the sacrilege. Odyssey 11.420-460 will have Agamemnon's ghost tell Odysseus of his and Cassandra's murder in Mycenae. The whole post-Trojan world of all three remaining epics — Aeneas's wandering, the Greek captains' nostoi, the suitor-plot at Ithaca — is theologically continuous with what Ajax the Lesser does at the Palladium in this book and with the human cruelty Pyrrhus does at the altar.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

Neoptolemus — kills Polites in his father's sight; kills Priam at the altar; takes Andromache as captive
Priam — killed at the altar of Zeus Herkeios by Neoptolemus
Hecuba — finds her husband dead; given as captive to Odysseus
Andromache — Astyanax torn from her arms; given as captive to Neoptolemus
Astyanax — Hector's son; thrown from a high tower
Cassandra — dragged by Ajax the Lesser from the Palladium of Athena; given as captive to Agamemnon
Ajax Lesser — commits the sacrilege at Athena's temple; the wrath that will sink the Greek fleet begins here
Menelaus — kills Deiphobus in the bed-chamber; raises the sword over Helen and lowers it; reclaims her
Helen — reclaimed by Menelaus; leaves the burning city alive
Odysseus — takes Hecuba as captive; commands the captive distribution
Agamemnon — takes Cassandra as captive; will be killed with her in Mycenae
Aeneas — fights, then escapes; carries Anchises out of the burning city
Anchises — carried out of Troy on his son's shoulder
Ascanius — led out of Troy by his father's hand
Creusa — Aeneas's wife; lost in the dark of the burning city; her phantom speaks the farewell
Aphrodite — appears in vision to her son Aeneas to send him out of the city
Athena — silently presides; her Palladium falls when Ajax the Lesser drags Cassandra
Polyxena — daughter of Priam; held back for sacrifice on Achilles's tomb in Book 14

Mentioned / off-stage

Achilles — long dead; the tomb on the headland is the next book's altar
Hector — long dead; his wife and son are this book's victims
Paris — long dead; his bedroom is now Menelaus's reclamation-site

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.