Well, Mr. Echepolus can have his body and identity back before that happens.
In Homer’s Iliad, this breaking of the truce occurred just after Aphrodite had spirited Paris away from his one-on-one battle with Menelaus, but here in the reality of this Trojan War, that non-confrontation between Menelaus and Paris had happened years ago. This truce is a more mundane thing—some of King Priam’s representatives meeting with some of the Achaeans’ heralds, both sides working out some abstruse agreement about time off from the fighting for festivals or funerals or somesuch. If you ask me, one of the reasons this siege has dragged out for almost a decade is all this time off from the fighting; the Greeks and Trojans have as many religious celebrations as our Twenty-first Century Hindus had and as many secular holidays as an American postal worker. One wonders how they ever manage to kill each other amidst all this feasting and sacrificing to the gods and ten-day-funeral celebrations.
What fascinates me now, so soon after I vowed to rebel against the gods’ will (only to find myself much more of a pawn to their will than ever before), is the question of how quickly and how sharply real events in this war can swerve from the details of Homer’s tale. Disparities in the past—the sequence of the Gathering of the Armies, for instance, or the timing of Paris’s aborted battle with Menelaus—have all been minor discrepancies, easily explained by Homer’s need to include certain past events in the short span of the poem set in the tenth year of the war. But what if events really take a different course? What if I were to walk up to—say—Agamemnon this morning and stick this spear (poor doomed Echepolus’ spear, to be sure, but still a working spear) through the king’s heart? The gods can do many things, but they can’t return dead mortals to life. (Or dead gods either, as oxymoronic as that sounds.)
Who are you, Hockenberry, to thwart Fate and defy the will of the gods? queries a craven, professorial little pissant voice that I listened to and followed most of my real life.
I am me, Thomas Hockenberry comes the reply from the contemporary me, as fragmented as he is, and right now I’m fed up with these power-addled thugs who call themselves gods.
Now, in my role as spy rather than scholic, I stand close enough to hear the dialogue between Athena—morphed as Laodocus—and that buffoon (but fine archer) Pandarus. Speaking as one Trojan warrior to another, Athena/Laodocus appeals to the idiot’s vanity, tells him that Prince Paris will shower him with gifts if he kills Menelaus, and even compares him to the ultimate archer—Apollo—if he has the skill to bring off this shot.
Pandarus falls for the ruse hook, line, and sinker—“Athena fired the fool’s heart within him” was the way one fine translator described this moment—and has some of his pals hide him from view with their shields while he prepares his long bow and chooses the perfect arrow for this assassination. For centuries, scholics—Iliad scholars—have argued the issue of whether or not the Greeks and Trojans used poison on their arrows. Most scholics, myself included, argued the negative—such behavior simply did not seem to meet these heroes’ high standards of honor in battle. We were wrong. They sometimes do use poison. And a lethal, fast-acting poison it is. This explains why so many of the wounds listed in the Iliad were so quickly fatal.
Pandarus lets fly. It’s a brilliant shot. I track the arrow as it flies hundreds of yards, arcing and then hurtling directly toward Agamemnon’s redheaded brother. The shaft will skewer Menelaus as he stands at the forefront of his fighters watching the heralds jabbering away in no-man’s-land. That is, it will skewer him if no Greek-friendly god intervenes.
One does. With my enhanced vision, I see Athena abandon Laodocus’ body and QT to Menelaus’ side. The goddess is playing a double game here—tricking the Trojans into breaking the truce and then rushing to make sure that one of her favorites, Menelaus, is not actually killed. Cloaked head to toe, invisible to friend and foe but visible to this scholic, she slaps the arrow aside the way a mother flicks a fly from her sleeping son. (I think I stole that imagery, but it’s been so long since I actually read the Iliad, in translation or the original, that I can’t be sure.)
Still, despite her protective and deflective slap, the arrow hits home. Menelaus shouts in pain and goes down, the arrow protruding from his midsection, just above the groin. Has Athena failed?
Confusion ensues. Priam’s heralds flee back behind the Trojan lines and the Achaean negotiators scurry back behind the protection of Greek shields. Agamemnon, who has been using the truce time to inspect his troops lined up row upon row (perhaps the inspection is timed to show his leadership this first morning after Achilles’ mutiny), arrives to find his brother writhing on the ground, captains and lieutenants huddled around him.
I aim a short baton. Although the baton looks like the kind of swagger stick a minor Trojan commander might carry, this is not Captain Echepolus’ property; it is mine, standard issue for us scholics. The baton is actually a taser and a shotgun microphone, picking out and amplifying sound from as much as two miles away, feeding the pickup to the hearplugs I wear whenever I’m on the plains of Ilium.
Agamemnon is giving his dying brother one hell of a eulogy. I see him cradle Menelaus’ head and shoulders in his arms and hear him go on about the terrible vengeance he—Agamemnon—will wreak on the Trojans for the murder of noble Menelaus, after which he laments about how the Achaeans will—despite Agamemnon’s bloody vengeance—lose heart, give up the war, and take their black ships home after Menelaus dies. After all, what’s the use of rescuing Helen if her cuckolded husband is dead? Holding his moaning brother, Agamemnon plays the prophet—“But the plowlands here in Priam will feed your flesh to the worms and rot your bones, O My Brother, as you lie dead before the unbreached walls of Troy, your mission failed.” Cheery stuff. Just the kind of thing a dying man wants to hear.
“Wait, wait, wait,” grunts Menelaus through gritted teeth. “Don’t bury me so fast, big brother. The arrowhead’s not lodged in a mortal spot. See? It penetrated my bronze war-belt and got me in the love handle I’ve been meaning to lose, not in the balls or belly.”
“Ahh, yes,” says Agamemnon, frowning at the wound where the arrow has only lightly penetrated. He almost, not quite, sounds disappointed. The whole eulogy is moot now and it sounded as if he’d worked on it for a while.
“But the arrow is poisoned,” gasps Menelaus as if trying to cheer his brother up. Menelaus’s red hair is matted with sweat and grass, his golden helmet having rolled away when he fell.
Standing, dropping his brother’s shoulders and head so quickly that Menelaus would have crashed back to the ground if his captains had not caught him, Agamemnon shouts for Talthybius, his herald, and orders the man to find Machaon, Asclepius’ son, Agamemnon’s own doctor and a damned good one, too, since Machaon is supposed to have learned his craft from Chiron, the friendly centaur.
Now it looks like any battlefield from any age—a fallen man screaming and cursing and crying as the pain begins to flow through the initial shock of injury, friends on one knee gathered around, helpless, useless, then the medic and his assistants arriving, giving orders, pulling the barbed bronze head out of ripping flesh, sucking out poison, packing clean dressings on the wound even while Menelaus continues to scream like the proverbial stuck pig.