Read Online The War That Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander - Free Book Online Page A

homeward.
But if the fair-haired Menelaos kills Alexandros,
then let the Trojans give back Helen and all her possessions,
and pay also a price to the Argives which will be fitting,
which among people yet to come shall be as a standard.
Then if Priam and the sons of Priam are yet unwilling
after Alexandros has fallen to pay me the penalty,
I myself shall fight hereafter for the sake of the ransom,
here remaining, until I have won to the end of my quarrel.” 33
    The oaths cut, Priam hastily remounts his chariot and heads back to Troy, because, as he says, he “ ‘cannot look with these eyes on the sight of my dear son / fighting.’ ” As the leaders and princes make the last preparations for the duel, the rank and file murmur a startling, ambiguous prayer of their own:
    â€œFather Zeus, watching over us from Ida, most high, most
honoured,
whichever man has made what has happened happen to both sides,
grant that he be killed and go down to the house of Hades.
Let the friendship and the sworn faith be true for the rest of us.”
    Strikingly, no man at Troy prays for his own side to win. Achaean and Trojan are indifferent to the outcome—so long as it brings the war to an end.
    The duel itself comes and goes in a relative flash of a mere forty lines. Paris hurls a spear and strikes Menelaos’ shield; Menelaos strikes the shield of Paris. Menelaos then strikes at Paris’ helmet with his silver nail-studded sword, causing it to shatter into pieces and drop from his hand. In desperation, he also drops his warrior’s posture and starts to brawl, grabbing Paris’ helmet and dragging him toward the Achaeans, causing the chinstrap to throttle Paris’ soft throat. Here Menelaos would have “won glory forever” had Aphrodite, Paris’ patron goddess, not intervened. Invisible to the mortal onlookers, she breaks his chinstrap to free him, then whisks Paris away, shrouded in thick mist, and drops him in his own bedchamber. 34 Next setting out to look for Helen, she finds her on the tower with other women. Disguising herself as an old wool dresser whom Helen had known in Sparta, the goddess tugs at her robe and addresses her:
    â€œCome with me: Alexandros sends for you to come home to him.
He is in his chamber now, in the bed with its circled pattern,
shining in his raiment and his own beauty; you would not think
that he came from fighting against a man; you would think he was
going
rather to a dance, or rested and had been dancing lately.”
    Looking closely at her, Helen recognizes “the round, sweet throat of the goddess” and in a flash of anger offers the goddess an astonishing challenge:
    â€œGo yourself and sit beside him, abandon the gods’ way,
turn your feet back never again to the path of Olympos
but stay with him forever, and suffer for him, and look after him
until he makes you his wedded wife, or makes you his slave girl.
Not I. I am not going to him. It would be too shameful.
I will not serve his bed, since the Trojan women hereafter
would laugh at me, all, and my heart even now is confused with
sorrows.”
    No other of the Iliad ’s characters so directly confronts any of the deities who toy with their lives. With her woman’s instinct, Helen sees through everything, not only Aphrodite’s feeble disguise but her most secret motives. The goddess’s description of Paris, with its jarring emphasis on his beauty and his bed, is transparent to Helen: the goddess of desire herself desires Paris and is pimping Helen to him as her surrogate.
    In Greek mythology, Helen’s origins are bizarre. The best-known story tells of the rape of her mother, Leda, by Zeus in the guise of a swan, the fruit of this coupling being an egg, from which was hatched Helen; in other versions her mother, suggestively, is Nemesis, also united with Zeus “under harsh compulsion.” 35 The Iliad frequently acknowledges Helen as being “descended from