Achilles' Shield

Chapter summary

While the fight around the body of Patroclus still burns, Antilochus, son of Nestor, runs to Achilles with the news. Achilles is sitting before the ships and already senses the worst: he sees the Achaeans fleeing across the plain to the ships, and recalls what his mother foretold, that the best of the Myrmidons would leave the light of the sun, while he himself still lived, at the hands of the Trojans. He concludes alone that Patroclus is dead and calls him headstrong, because he had ordered him to return to the ships as soon as he put out the fire, without facing Hector. Antilochus arrives in tears and confirms it: Patroclus lies there, the fighting goes on around the naked body, and the armor is with Hector.

A black cloud of grief covers Achilles. He takes ashes in both hands and pours them over his head, soils his cloak, stretches out in the dust and tears at his hair, while the captive women whom he and Patroclus had taken in war run out of the tent and cry aloud. Antilochus holds Achilles' hands, because he fears that he will cut his own throat with the iron. The groan reaches the depths of the sea, where Thetis sits beside her aged father, and the Nereids gather in the grotto, which Homer names one by one. Thetis leads the lament: she bore the best of heroes, reared him like a sapling and sent him to Troy, and now she knows she will not receive him back in the house of Peleus. She decides to go and see him, to learn what pain strikes him, since he is kept away from the battle.

Thetis rises to the shore with the Nereids, embraces her son's head and asks why he weeps, recalling that Zeus has already given him what he asked for: the Achaeans hemmed in at the sterns, longing for him. Achilles answers that Zeus has fulfilled the request, but that this no longer gives him pleasure, because he has lost Patroclus, whom he valued as himself, and Hector has taken the armor the gods had given Peleus on the day of his marriage to Thetis. He goes so far as to wish that his mother had stayed among the sea goddesses and that Peleus had taken a mortal wife, so that she would not now bear this grief. He says his heart does not allow him to live among men unless Hector loses his life by his spear and pays for the spoils of Patroclus. Thetis answers that then his life will be short, for right after Hector his end is ready for him.

Achilles does not draw back: he asks to die now, because he did not help his companion, who perished far from his homeland needing him. He says he remained by the ships as a useless weight upon the earth, a man no Achaean equals in war, though others surpass him in the assembly. He wishes that discord and wrath would vanish from among gods and men, the wrath that is sweeter than honey and grows like smoke in the breast, and that is how Agamemnon angered him. But he will let the past go, mastering his heart out of necessity, and he goes after Hector; he will receive death when Zeus and the other gods will it, for not even Heracles, dearest of Zeus, escaped it. If a like fate has been woven for him, he will lie down when he dies. For now he wants good fame, wants to make the Trojan women groan with their hands on their cheeks and know that he stayed away from war for a long time. He asks that his mother not hold him back, because she will not persuade him.

Thetis agrees that it is right to defend companions in danger, but reminds him that Achilles' armor is with the Trojans: Hector displays it and, she says, will not enjoy it for long, because death is already near him. She asks her son not to enter the battle before she returns, for at sunrise she will bring new armor, made by Hephaestus. She sends the Nereids down to the palace of the old man of the sea to tell their father everything, and she goes up to Olympus.

Meanwhile, the Achaeans flee from the cry of Hector to the Hellespont and the ships. Hector, whom the poem likens to a flame, reaches Patroclus's body and three times seizes it by the feet to drag it off, shouting to the Trojans; three times Ajax and the other Ajax repel him, but he does not withdraw for good, like the lion whom the shepherds cannot drive from its prey. He would have dragged off the body and won immense glory had Iris not come down from Olympus, sent by Hera without Zeus or the other gods knowing. Iris tells Achilles to rise: the Achaeans fight to protect the body, the Trojans to carry it to Ilion, and Hector wants to cut off Patroclus's head and set it on a stake. It will be a shame for Achilles if the dead man becomes a plaything for the Trojan dogs.

Achilles asks which god sent her and how he could fight: the Trojans have his armor, his mother forbade him to arm before seeing her return, and the only armor he knows that would suit him is the shield of Ajax the Telamonian, who surely already fights in the front rank. Iris answers that everyone knows the armor is with the Trojans, and proposes that he go as he is to the trench and show himself: perhaps the Trojans, afraid, will withdraw from the fight, and the exhausted Achaeans may have a breath, which in war is short.

Athena casts the aegis over Achilles' shoulders and crowns his head with a golden cloud, from which she kindles a flame. Achilles goes to the trench, apart from the wall and without mixing with the Achaeans, because he obeys his mother's order, and shouts; Athena, apart, reinforces the cry, which sounds like a trumpet in a besieged city. The Trojans are thrown into confusion, the horses wheel the chariots, and the charioteers are struck with terror when they see above Achilles' head the fire that Athena keeps burning. Achilles shouts three times, the Trojans and their allies stir three times, and twelve of the best die among their own chariots and spears. The Achaeans, relieved, carry Patroclus out of range of the darts and lay him on a bier; Achilles follows them in tears, seeing his friend torn by bronze, the one he had sent into battle with chariot and horses and had not received back. Hera, against the will of the Sun, makes the star plunge into the currents of Oceanus, and the fighting ceases.

The Trojans gather in assembly standing, because fear of Achilles lets no one sit. Polydamas, who sees at once what lies ahead and what has been left behind, and who was born the same night as Hector, proposes returning to the city instead of waiting for dawn on the plain, far from the walls. While Achilles was angry with Agamemnon, he says, it was easier to face the Achaeans, and he himself liked to sleep by the ships, hoping to take them; now he fears Achilles, who will not stay on the plain and will fight for the city and the women. If they meet the Achaeans outside the walls in the morning, many will be food for dogs and vultures. Behind towers, gates and bars, by contrast, Achilles will wear out his horses around the city and return to the ships without entering.

Hector looks down at him and answers in anger: was it not enough that they stayed shut up behind the walls? The city, which men said was rich in gold and bronze, has lost its treasures, sold to Phrygia and Maeonia after Zeus was angered. Now that Zeus gives him glory by the ships and the chance to pen the Achaeans against the sea, Hector will not accept that counsel, and no Trojan will follow it. He orders the army to eat in the open, keep watch, and that whoever worries too much about possessions should give them to the people, which he prefers to see spent by the Trojans rather than held in the hands of the Achaeans; at dawn, armed, they will rouse Ares by the ships. If Achilles has indeed risen, so much the worse for him: Hector will not flee, but will face him head on, for Enyalius is common to all and kills whoever kills. The Trojans applaud him, because Athena has taken away their judgment, and no one heeds Polydamas, who gave the good counsel.

The Achaeans spend the night groaning for Patroclus, and Achilles leads the lament with his murderous hands on the chest of his friend, groaning like a lion whose cubs a hunter has taken in the thicket, and who, on returning, roams the valleys following the man's trail. He tells the Myrmidons that the word he gave to Menoetius, father of Patroclus, promising to bring his son back to Opus with his share of the spoils of Troy, was vain, because Zeus does not fulfill all the designs of men: the fate of the two is to stain the same land of Troy, and neither Peleus nor Thetis will receive him at home. Since he will go under the earth after Patroclus, he will not bury him before bringing the armor and the head of Hector, nor without cutting the throats of twelve Trojan sons before the pyre, enraged at his death. Until then Patroclus will lie by the ships, and the Trojan and Dardanian women, the women they took by sacking cities, will weep for him night and day. He orders a great tripod set over the fire; they wash the body, anoint the wounds with nine-year-old ointment, lay him on the bier and cover him with linen and a white cloak. The Myrmidons groan all night.

On Olympus, Zeus tells Hera that she has at last managed to rouse Achilles, and that the long-haired Achaeans must be her sons. Hera answers that even a mortal can do harm to his neighbor, and that she, the first of goddesses by origin and as wife of Zeus, who reigns over all the immortals, could not refrain from plotting evil against the Trojans, with whom she is angry.

Thetis reaches the bronze house of Hephaestus, imperishable, which shines like the stars and which the god himself built. She finds him sweating, busy among the bellows, making twenty tripods for the wall of the hall, each with golden wheels under its feet, so that they can go by themselves to the assembly of the gods and come back home. Only the handles remain to be attached, which he is forging. Charis, Hephaestus's wife, sees Thetis, takes her hand, leads her inside, seats her on a throne studded with silver nails, and calls her husband. Hephaestus says that the goddess there is the one who saved him when, lame, he was hurled from heaven by the will of his mother, who wanted to hide him; Eurynome and Thetis took him in, and for nine years he forged jewels in a grotto surrounded by the murmur of Oceanus, without anyone else knowing. Therefore he must repay Thetis the life she saved. He orders Charis to serve hospitality, pushes aside the bellows and tools, wipes his face, and goes out limping, leaning on a staff, flanked by golden maidservants who look like living young women and have mind, voice and strength, and know the craft of the gods. He asks Thetis what she wants and promises to grant it if it is possible.

Thetis, weeping, says that no goddess has endured as many sorrows as she: among the Nereids, only she was compelled by Zeus to marry a mortal, Peleus, who now lies aged in the palace; and besides, the son she reared like a sapling and sent to Troy will not return. She tells how Agamemnon took the girl the Achaeans had given Achilles as a prize; how her son was consumed by grief while the Trojans penned the Achaeans at the sterns and the Argive elders begged him with many gifts; how he refused to drive away their ruin, but clothed Patroclus in his own armor and sent him to battle with many men. They fought all day by the Scaean Gates and would have taken the city that day had Apollo not killed Patroclus in the front rank and given glory to Hector. Therefore she comes to the knees of Hephaestus: she asks for a shield, helmet, greaves and breastplate for her short-lived son, who lies on the ground with a grieving heart.

Hephaestus reassures her: he would wish he could hide him from death when the dreadful fate reached him, as certain as the beautiful armor he will make, at which many men will marvel. He leaves her and goes to the bellows, twenty in all, which blow into the furnaces, now stronger, now weaker, as he wills and as the work requires. He casts bronze, tin, gold and silver into the fire, sets the anvil, takes up the hammer and the tongs. He makes first a large, strong shield of five layers, with a triple shining rim and a silver strap, and on it he engraves works with skill.

On the shield he first places earth, sky and sea, the tireless sun, the full moon and the constellations: the Pleiades, the Hyades, the might of Orion and the Bear, the only one that does not bathe in the Ocean.

Then he engraves two cities of men. In the first there are weddings and feasts: brides led through the city by torchlight, to the sound of the wedding hymn, young men dancing to the sound of flutes and lyres, women watching from their doors. In the square, two men dispute the price for the blood of a dead man; one says he has paid everything and declares it to the people, the other denies having received anything, and both want the judgment of an arbiter. The people are divided in their support, the heralds hold them back, and the elders, seated on smooth stones in a sacred circle, with the heralds' scepters in their hands, pronounce judgment one after another; two talents of gold lie in the middle, for whoever gives the most upright verdict.

Around the other city two armies encamp, gleaming with arms, divided between plundering everything and sharing in half the goods the city holds. The besieged do not accept and set an ambush: the wall keeps the wives, children and old men, and the men go out led by Ares and Athena, both of gold, large and visible like gods, while the people are fewer. Arriving at a river where all the cattle drink, they hide under bronze, with two lookouts apart, waiting for sheep and oxen. These come with two shepherds who play the flute and suspect no trap; the ambushers rush out, carry off the herds and kill the shepherds. The besiegers, who were in assembly, hear the uproar by the cattle, mount and come quickly, and the fight is joined on the riverbank, with bronze spears. Among the men act Strife, Tumult and deadly Ker, Ker holding a wounded man alive, a man unhurt, and dragging a dead man by the feet, her cloak red with blood; these powers mingle with the fighters like living mortals and drag the dead away from one another.

Then comes a soft, rich, broad field, plowed three times: many plowmen drive their teams back and forth, and when they reach the end of the furrow, a man puts a cup of sweet wine in their hands; they turn back, eager to reach the end of the deep field. The earth behind them darkens like plowed soil, though it is of gold: a wonder. Next is a royal estate, where reapers work with sickles, sheaves fall along the furrow, three binders tie them, and boys carry them in armfuls, while the king, silent, scepter in hand, watches with joy; under an oak, the heralds prepare a great ox, and the women mix white flour for the reapers' supper.

Then there is a vineyard of gold, laden, with black clusters and silver stakes, surrounded by a dark-blue trench and a tin fence, with a single path along which the grape-pickers pass. Youths and maidens carry the sweet fruit in woven baskets, and among them a boy plays the lyre and sings the song of Linus in a thin voice, while the others accompany him, dancing and shouting. Next comes a herd of cattle with straight horns, made of gold and tin, which go out lowing from the byre to pasture by a noisy river, with four golden herdsmen and nine dogs. Two terrible lions seize a bull at the front of the herd and drag it bellowing; the youths and dogs pursue them, but the lions tear the bull's hide and drink its black blood and entrails, and the dogs shy away and only bark from close by. The smith also makes a large pasture of white sheep in a fair valley, with huts, shelters and pens.

Hephaestus then makes a dance, like the one Daedalus made at Knossos for Ariadne: youths and maidens with hands holding each other's wrists, the maidens in fine linen, the youths in tunics shining with oil, the girls with garlands, the young men with gold daggers on silver straps. They turn on nimble feet, like a wheel that the potter, seated, tries with his hands, or they run in rows. A crowd watches the dance with delight; a divine bard plays the lyre, and two acrobats tumble in the middle, leading the song. At the outermost rim of the shield, the smith sets the great strength of the river Oceanus.

With the shield finished, Hephaestus makes the breastplate, brighter than fire, the heavy helmet with a gold crest, and greaves of pliable tin. When all the armor is ready, he lifts it and sets it before the mother of Achilles. Thetis descends from snowy Olympus like a hawk, carrying the gleaming armor.