Posthomerica, Book 14 — The Greek Departure; the Storm at Sea

Reading Troy — chapter 38 of 74 · Posthomerica, Book 14

Posthomerica, Book 14 — The Greek Departure; the Storm at Sea (Day after the sack; the fourteenth and last of the post-Iliadic books; the Sigeum headland, the open Aegean, the rocks of Caphereus on Euboea)

The sun rises on the smoking city. The Greek host gathers on the beach, the ships drawn down to the surf, the captive women penned. Calchas speaks: the gods will not let the fleet sail before the soul of Achilles has been propitiated; a sacrifice is required on his tomb. The captains assemble at the Sigeum barrow. Polyxena, daughter of Priam, is brought from the captives — she had been promised to Achilles in life by some traditions (the Cypria's marriage-bargain), and the cycle's logic is that she must follow him in death. Quintus stages the sacrifice directly. Neoptolemus, his father's hand, lifts the sword. Polyxena speaks. She offers her own throat without bonds; she asks only that her body be returned to her mother Hecuba unmutilated. She bows her head. The sword falls. Hecuba's lament is the cycle's longest and the longest single speech for a woman in the entire Posthomerica. Euripides's Hecuba will take this scene as its centre.

The captives are divided. Quintus repeats the assignment briefly: Hecuba to Odysseus, Cassandra to Agamemnon, Andromache to Neoptolemus. The ships are launched. The fleet pulls away from the beach at noon. The black smoke of Troy's ruins drifts behind them as a single dark column. The Trojan plain is empty. The cycle's ten-year war is at its end on this side of the sea.

The crossing of the Aegean is at first prosperous. The Greek captains' ships fan out toward their separate homes. Neoptolemus turns north for Phthia with Andromache and the immortal horses Xanthus and Balius. Agamemnon and Menelaus turn south for the Peloponnesos with Cassandra and Helen. Odysseus turns west for Ithaca with Hecuba and what the lots have given him. The other captains scatter. The cycle's last large piece — the nostoi, the homecoming-voyages, of which the Odyssey is the great surviving treatment — is now in motion.

Then the storm. Athena, still angered by Ajax the Lesser's sacrilege at her Palladium, goes to Zeus and to Poseidon and asks for vengeance on the Greek fleet. Zeus consents; Poseidon takes the work in hand. A black squall rises out of the south at sunset off Euboea, where many of the Greek ships are passing the rocks of Caphereus on the route west. The wind hammers them onto the rocks. Quintus's description of the storm is one of the cycle's most sustained pieces of sea-poetry — Way translates it well, the late-Victorian register suiting the slow disasters. Many ships break. Many captains drown.

Ajax the Lesser is conspicuous. He clings to a rock-tip after his ship breaks and boasts that not even the gods could drown him — that he has saved himself by his own strength. Poseidon hears the boast, splits the rock with his trident, and Ajax the Lesser falls into the sea and drowns. The Locrian fleet's destruction is total. Other captains are scattered: Menelaus is blown to Egypt for seven years (Odyssey 4 will narrate this); Odysseus is blown into the long ten-year nostos that is the Odyssey's whole subject; Agamemnon makes it home and is murdered by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus on the threshold of his bath (Aeschylus's Agamemnon, Odyssey 11 and 24); Diomedes makes it home and finds his wife adulterous and is exiled to Italy; Idomeneus makes it home and is exiled for an unholy vow; Neoptolemus, in some versions, makes it to Phthia by an inland march; Aeneas, on his own course, sails for the western Mediterranean and the Aeneid.

The book closes with the storm passing at dawn. The fleet that survives is scattered. The cycle's ending is not a victory but a dispersal. The captains who took the city by craft are now subject to the gods' arithmetic. Quintus's last lines are quiet and grave: the dawn lifts on a wreck-strewn sea, the great barrow of Achilles still visible on the Sigeum headland behind, and the ships of the Greek host scattered to their separate fates — some to Argos, some to Ithaca, some to the bottom. The Posthomerica ends here.

Analysis

The cycle's true ending

Book 14 is the Posthomerica's structural answer to the Iliad's structural opening. The Iliad began with the wrath of Achilles producing Greek dead in the camp; the Posthomerica ends with the wrath of Athena producing Greek dead in the sea. The bookends of the cycle's middle two epics are theological: divine anger costs heroes their lives, and the cost is paid one ship at a time. Quintus's ending is deliberately not triumphant. The Greeks have taken Troy and many of them will not get home; many will get home and wish they had not. The cycle's victory is qualified at the moment of its accomplishment. This is the truest single insight the Posthomerica has, and Quintus reaches it by ending where the Odyssey will begin: with a fleet scattered by divine wrath at sea.

The sacrifice of Polyxena

Polyxena's sacrifice is the cycle's most morally unstable single event and Quintus knows it. The mythological background — that Achilles had loved Polyxena, that her brother Paris had killed Achilles by ambush at their secret tryst (a Cypria detail), that her marriage to Achilles had been promised in some pre-war negotiation — is older than the Iliad but not in the Iliad. Quintus inherits the story and stages it directly. He gives Polyxena a speech of acceptance that is one of the cycle's most striking moments: she chooses her own death's terms. The Hecuba-lament that follows is the cycle's longest piece of female mourning. Euripides's Hecuba (424 BCE) is the great surviving dramatic treatment; Ovid's Metamorphoses 13 has the longest Latin version. Quintus's version is less rhetorical than Euripides's and more direct; it does not adjudicate the morality of the sacrifice, but it does not hide it either. The cycle's first death (Chryseis returned in Iliad 1) was a woman handed back; the cycle's last death is a woman killed at a man's tomb. The symmetry is not consoling.

Athena's wrath and the storm

The storm at Caphereus is the cycle's most directly theological set-piece. Athena's wrath at Ajax the Lesser for the Palladium-sacrilege in Book 13 is consummated here by Poseidon's hand — Quintus is careful that the goddess and the god collaborate, the rare moment of Olympian unanimity. The storm is the divine balance-sheet for the sack: a city's altars were violated, and the gods' tally is the Greek fleet at the rocks. Quintus's theology is older than the Iliad's in one sense — the Iliad's gods take sides, the Posthomerica's gods take vengeance. The detail of Ajax's boast and Poseidon splitting the rock he stands on is from the Cypria and Nostoi traditions; Odyssey 4.499-511 will have Menelaus tell the same story to Telemachus in Sparta.

The cycle's dispersal

Quintus's last movement is a catalogue of nostoi. He sketches each captain's fate in a sentence or two — Menelaus to Egypt, Odysseus to ten years of wandering, Agamemnon home to murder, Diomedes home to adultery and exile, Idomeneus to the unholy vow, Neoptolemus to Phthia, Aeneas to the west — and lets the catalogue do the structural work. The cycle's ending is therefore the catalogue of openings of other epics and lost epics. The Odyssey opens with Odysseus on Calypso's island; the Aeneid opens with the storm against Aeneas's fleet; the Nostoi of Agias of Troezen (lost) was the great epic treatment of the other captains' returns; Aeschylus's Oresteia dramatises Agamemnon's fate. The Posthomerica's last book is a directory of subsequent literature. Quintus is signposting his cycle's exits.

Way's storm

A.S. Way's translation of the storm-passage is among the best things in his Posthomerica. The slow blank verse, biblical in cadence, suits a sustained sea-disaster; Way's archaic English makes a wreck read like a psalm. The detail of Ajax's boast is rendered briefly and with weight; Poseidon's intervention is given the impersonal grandeur of a force of nature acting through the will of a god. Quintus's Greek beneath is dense and image-rich; Way's English carries the weight. This is one of the parts of the Posthomerica that most clearly justifies the late-Victorian translation; Loeb's facing-page prose is crisper but it loses the cadence.

The cycle's quiet last image

Quintus closes the Posthomerica with the dawn lifting on the wreck-strewn sea and the great barrow of Achilles still visible on the Sigeum headland behind the surviving ships. The image is precisely chosen. The hero whose wrath opened the Iliad, whose death the Posthomerica narrated in Book 3, whose tomb has been visited and revisited through Books 4, 7, 8, 13, and now 14, is the cycle's final visible structure on the abandoned shore. The dead Achilles is the cycle's last mark on the world. The Greeks who killed him by taking the city he died defending against can now barely keep their own ships off the rocks of his ancestral sea. The Posthomerica's last image is therefore its truest moral image: the hero is in his tomb, the city is in its ash, the victors are in their wrecks. The cycle's middle epic has refused to be a victory poem.

What to watch for next

• The Aeneid starts now: Aeneas's small fleet, separated from this larger Greek dispersal, will be carried west by another storm (Juno's, in Aeneid 1) toward Carthage.
• The Odyssey starts now: Odysseus's ten-year nostos is the cycle's largest remaining narrative.
• Euripides's Hecuba and Trojan Women are the great dramatic treatments of the captive-women's transit.
• Aeschylus's Oresteia is the great dramatic treatment of Agamemnon's homecoming.
• The lost Nostoi of Agias of Troezen was the cycle's epic of the other captains' returns; some of it survives only in Proclus's summary.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The book reaches back across the entire cycle. Polyxena's sacrifice on Achilles's tomb closes the cycle's tomb-sequence: the barrow has been raised in Book 3, the funeral games held in Book 4, the lock of hair laid by Neoptolemus in Book 8, the Greek captives' lament heard in Book 13, and now this last ritual on its stone. The cycle has spent eleven books returning to one mound on the Sigeum headland; the last visit is the most disquieting. The storm at Caphereus directly continues Ajax the Lesser's Palladium-sacrilege in Book 13 — Athena's wrath there becomes Poseidon's storm here, the same goddess and god whose alternation through the cycle (Athena protecting Greeks, Poseidon protecting Trojans then turning) is now joined into one act of vengeance. The captives' division reaches back to Book 13 and back through every captive women's scene in the cycle. Hecuba's lament reaches all the way back to Iliad 22 and 24, where she mourned Hector; her cycle of mourning closes here at the death of her last daughter on the killer's tomb. The catalogue of nostoi in the book's last movement reaches back across the cycle's whole roster of Greek captains: every man who was named in the Iliad's catalogue of ships is now sailing, and Quintus catalogues his survival or not.

Forward echoes

The book is structurally the doorway into the cycle's two remaining surviving epics — Aeneid and Odyssey — and into the lost Nostoi of Agias of Troezen. The storm at Caphereus is the theological precedent for the Aeneid's opening storm (Aeneid 1.50-156), where Juno asks Aeolus to wreck Aeneas's fleet; both storms are divine vengeance for human deeds, and Virgil's reader is meant to feel the continuity. Odysseus's departure into the ten-year wandering is the Odyssey's whole premise; Odyssey 1.1-21 will mention the wrath of Poseidon (here begun, for a different reason — the blinding of Polyphemus in Odyssey 9) as the cause of his delay. Menelaus's blowing to Egypt is the back-story of Odyssey 4, where Telemachus visits him at Sparta and hears the tale. Agamemnon's homecoming-murder is the back-story of Odyssey 11.420-460 (his ghost telling the story to Odysseus in the underworld), of Odyssey 24, and of the whole Oresteia of Aeschylus. Diomedes's exile is the back-story of Aeneid 8.9-17 and 11.243-295 (his Italian foundation Argyripa). Idomeneus's exile for the unholy vow (he vowed the first thing he met on landing to Poseidon; it was his son) is the back-story of his Cretan exile and Italian re-foundation. Neoptolemus's marriage to Andromache and the post-war life in Phthia is the back-story of Aeneid 3.294-355 (where Aeneas finds the widowed Andromache at Buthrotum, after Neoptolemus's own murder at Delphi by Orestes). Polyxena's sacrifice will be dramatised in Euripides's Hecuba and narrated in Ovid's Metamorphoses 13; the cycle's last named Trojan death becomes one of European literature's most-rewritten scenes. The closing image — the wreck-strewn sea at dawn, the great barrow of Achilles still visible on the abandoned shore — is the cycle's structural pivot into the nostos-and-foundation literature that fills the next millennium.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Polyxena — daughter of Priam; sacrificed on Achilles's tomb at her own terms; the cycle's last named Trojan dead
• Neoptolemus — performs the sacrifice; takes Andromache aboard for Phthia
• Hecuba — speaks the cycle's longest female lament over Polyxena's body; goes aboard with Odysseus
• Calchas — speaks the prophecy that requires the sacrifice
• Agamemnon — takes Cassandra aboard; sails for Mycenae and his death
• Menelaus — takes Helen aboard; will be blown to Egypt for seven years
• Odysseus — takes Hecuba aboard; sails into the ten-year nostos
• Diomedes — sails for Argos; will be exiled to Italy in the post-Posthomeric tradition
• Ajax Lesser — boasts to the gods on the rocks of Caphereus; drowned by Poseidon's trident
• Athena — petitions Zeus and Poseidon; the storm is her vengeance for the Palladium-sacrilege
• Poseidon — raises the storm; splits the rock beneath Ajax the Lesser
• Zeus — consents to the storm; the cycle's last Olympian decision

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — the tomb on the headland; Polyxena's sacrifice is to him
• Helen — aboard Menelaus's ship; the cycle's nominal cause sails home alive
• Cassandra — aboard Agamemnon's ship; will be murdered with him in Mycenae
• Andromache — aboard Neoptolemus's ship; will reach Phthia and the long post-war life
• Aeneas — already gone, on his own western course; the Aeneid begins where the Posthomerica ends
• Anchises — on Aeneas's ship; will die in Sicily before the Aeneid 4
• Ascanius — on Aeneas's ship; the Roman line's seed

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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.