Her name is Helen and, inconveniently, she is already spoken for. She is the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta in southern Greece. Paris pays her a visit and they elope to Troy. It is this offense that sets off the war.
These gods are not models of virtue and do not expect invariable virtue from their worshippers; rather, each of them stands for emotions or principles or skills that reflect and magnify those of human beings.
The Greeks were deeply religious, not so much to learn the rules of morality as to keep on the good side of the gods and to find out what their intentions were. They achieved this by sacrificing animals in their honor and reading their entrails, and by consulting soothsayers, prophecy books, and oracles before any important decision was taken. They held festivals and conducted ceremonies in their honor. They peppered the countryside with temples, shrines, groves, and sacred caves in honor of one deity or another. They did not trouble themselves over theological dogma. Religion was about ritual rather than belief.
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Agamemnon calls a general assembly of the army and his fellow-kings and princes. He agrees to return Chryseis to her father and Apollo stops shooting. The plague ends. The king then makes a bad mistake. To make up his loss, he confiscates Briseis, another attractive female captive, who has been allocated to Achilles. Enraged, the warrior withdraws from the war and sulks in his hut.
He broods over his fate. At his birth destiny gave him the alternatives of a short but glorious life on the field of battle or a long but undistinguished one at home. It is no choice. Since his birth, his mother, a sea goddess called Thetis, has tried every trick to save him from an early death. When he was a boy, she dressed him in girl’s clothes and had him brought up among girls. But the unexpected pregnancy of a fellow-pupil revealed his true gender.
Like most Greeks, the adult Achilles recognizes the brevity of life and, while he believes that death is not the end, has few hopes of happiness in the underworld where the spirits of human beings pass a dim and futile eternity.
On his long return journey home after the war is over, the crafty Odysseus is given the rare privilege of visiting the underworld while still alive. He encounters the ghost of Achilles, who is as angry as he used to be in the light of the sun. He complains about the afterlife:
Put me on earth again, and I would rather be a serf in the house of some landless man, with little enough for himself to live on, than king of all these dead men that have done with life. But enough.
A few years earlier, as the still-living Achilles sits idly on the beach in front of Troy, he is aware of what lies in store for him. He is supremely competitive, a characteristic he shares with future generations of Greeks who will be as contentious as he is. Homer expresses the general attitude concisely, when he puts these words in the mouth of a warrior: “Let your motto be, I lead. Strive to be best.” However, for the time being Achilles is letting his aggression rust.
The Trojans, led by Prince Hector, the king of Troy’s eldest son and their match for Achilles, begin to gain the upper hand in battles on the plain that lies between the city and the sea. The Greeks (or Achaeans, as they were called in the poem) build a great defensive wall to protect their ships and the encampment on the beach. Homer describes the fighting in great, gory detail. He achieves two simultaneous and contradictory effects. War is glorious and, at the same time, a great evil.
A ferocious Greek warrior called Aias runs amok. Homer, who has a wonderful talent for comparing the high deeds of kings and princes to the low experiences of ordinary life, compares Aias to a “donkey who gets the better of the boys in charge of him; he turns into a field they are passing and helps himself to the standing crop.” He adds that the animal pays no attention to the sticks that are broken on his back until he has eaten his fill.
In another telling image, the goddess Athena implants in the breast of King Menelaus “the daring of a fly, which is so fond of human blood that it returns to the attack however often a man may brush it from his face.”
But for every winner in war there is a loser. The poet gives each of the unnumbered fallen a touching epitaph. To select one killing from many, an archer fires an arrow into the chest of a young Trojan. In a moving, pitch-perfect simile, Homer writes: “Weighed down by his helmet, Gorgythion’s head dropped to one side, like the lolling head of a garden poppy, weighed down by its seed and the showers of spring.”
Zeus sits on a nearby mountaintop, thundering balefully and sending down flashes of lightning, as he surveys the scene. He never shifts his “bright eyes” from the fighting.
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Things are looking so bad for the Greeks that Patroclus, who is Achilles’ best friend (and, according to some, older lover), begs him to let him join the fighting and save the day. Achilles reluctantly agrees and lends Patroclus his famous armor.
There is something almost psychopathic in the nature of Achilles. Talking with his friend, he imagines them alone, alive and triumphant over all the world. “How happy I should be if not a single Trojan got away alive, not one, and not a Greek either; and if we two survived the massacre how happy I would be to pull down Troy’s holy diadem of towers single-handed!”
When Patroclus enters the battle everyone mistakes him for Achilles, because of the armor he is wearing. He dispatches many of the enemy, but he does not know when to stop. He comes up against Hector, a better fighter, who kills him and strips him of Achilles’ armor. After a fierce struggle, the Greeks rescue his corpse.
Achilles is devastated. Heroes in Homer express their feelings, and he cannot stop crying. One night he dreams of Patroclus and holds out his arms to embrace him. In vain. The vision
vanished like a wisp of smoke and went gibbering underground. Achilles leapt up in amazement. He beat his hands together and in his desolation cried: “Ah then, it is true that something of us does survive…but with no intellect at all, only the ghost and semblance of a man.”
Determined on revenge, Achilles makes up his quarrel with Agamemnon and goes out once more to fight the Trojans. He chases after Hector, who loses his nerve and runs away. Eventually the breathless Trojan halts and faces his unforgiving foe.
The gods watch in silence. Zeus confesses to a fondness for Hector and asks the others to agree to spare his life. “What are you saying?” Athena bursts out, adding that his doom has long been settled. “But do as you please. Only don’t expect the rest of us to applaud.” Zeus yields the point.
Achilles dispatches Hector. He then maltreats his body, which he intends to throw to his dogs. But a proper burial is an essential passport to the underworld and after military defeats Greeks invariably negotiate burial rights for their fallen.
Zeus insists on dignity for the dead man. He has a message sent to the brutal victor: Hector is to be given his full funeral rites. The old king of Troy, Priam, secretly travels across the windy plain and presents himself to Achilles, to whom he offers rich presents. For once the Greek warrior behaves nobly. He recognizes Priam’s grief for his son as being of the same depth and character as his own father’s love and misery for himself, seeing that he will not return home for burial.
The two mourners share supper. This is important, for it signifies that Achilles has recognized Priam as his guest, a sacrosanct relationship sealed with gifts. In return for those he brought, the king has received Hector’s body. They weep together in shared grief. Achilles says: “We men are wretched things, and the gods, who have no cares themselves, have woven sorrow into the very pattern of our lives.” Alongside their ruthless rivalries, their sociopathically sunny egoism, Greeks understand very well the tragedy of the human condition. Life is ephemeral and filled with pain.