Chapter summary
At night, when the other gods and men sleep, Zeus stays awake, turning over in his mind how to honor Achilles and make many Achaeans die by the ships. The best plan that comes to him is to send a baleful Dream to Agamemnon, with the message that he should arm the whole army: now he could take the city of Troy, because the gods of Olympus are no longer divided, since Hera has persuaded them with supplications, and over the Trojans hang disasters sent by Zeus. The Dream takes the figure of Nestor, the old man whom Agamemnon most respects, repeats the message word for word, and leaves. The king wakes convinced that he will take the city that very day, without knowing what Zeus is really preparing: pains and groans for Trojans and Danaans in the harsh battles.
At dawn, Agamemnon dresses, takes the scepter inherited from his father, and orders the heralds to call the assembly. Before that, however, he gathers the council of elders by the ship of Nestor, tells of the dream, and announces his plan: he will test the army by proposing flight, and the chiefs must each, on their own side, stop it with words. Nestor supports the king with an argument about who saw it: if any other Achaean had told the dream, they would have taken it for a lie, but the one who relates it is the man who declares himself the best of them. When the people gather, in uproar, Agamemnon rises with the scepter, whose history the poem tells from Hephaestus to Zeus, to Hermes, to Pelops, to Atreus, to Thyestes, and at last to him. He then speaks as one who has given up: Zeus, who had promised him a return after destroying Ilion, has now deceived him and sends him back without glory after losing so many men; it would be shameful, even for those to come, to wage a useless war against enemies so much fewer in number; the allies from many cities prevent the taking; nine years have passed, the timbers of the ships are rotting, and women and children wait at home. He proposes fleeing, because they will no longer take Troy.
The assembly stirs like the sea under the wind, and all who did not hear the council's plan run for the ships, knock away the props, and shout to launch them. The poem says there would have been a return beyond fate if Hera had not spoken to Athena. Hera does not accept that the Argives flee and leave Priam and the Trojans the glory of Helen, for whom so many Achaeans died far from home, and she sends the daughter of Zeus to stop each man with gentle words. Athena comes down and finds Odysseus standing still, not touching the ship, because grief has taken his heart; he recognizes the goddess's voice, throws his cloak to the herald Eurybates, of Ithaca, goes to meet Agamemnon, and takes from him the ancestral scepter. With it he goes through the ships: to the kings and men of standing he restrains with gentle words, telling them not to show fear like base people, because they do not yet know the intention of the son of Atreus, who now tests them and will soon punish them, and that the anger of kings nurtured by Zeus is great; to the commoner he finds shouting he strikes with the scepter and orders silence, because the rule of many is not good, and one alone should be king, to whom Zeus has given the scepter and the laws.
The crowd sits down again, but Thersites, the ugliest of those who came to Troy, keeps shouting. Hated by Achilles and by Odysseus, whom he used to insult, he now attacks Agamemnon: what more does he lack, when the tents are already full of bronze and of chosen women, whom the Achaeans give him first? He proposes returning home and leaving the king at Troy to digest his prizes, to see whether the soldiers miss him, since he dishonored Achilles, a far better man than he, by taking his prize, and Achilles has no wrath in his chest, he is slack. Odysseus confronts him with a hard look, orders him to be quiet, says that no one yet knows how these things will end, and swears that if he hears him again, he will no longer have his head on his shoulders nor be called the father of Telemachus if he does not strip him and send him weeping to the ships with blows; he strikes him on the back and shoulders with the scepter and leaves a bloody welt. Thersites sits down, frightened and weeping, and the troops laugh at him, though anxiously, and praise Odysseus for having restrained the insolent man.
With Athena disguised as a herald imposing silence, Odysseus then speaks to the army. He tells Agamemnon that the Achaeans want to see him covered in shame, because they do not keep the promise to return only after destroying Ilion, and they weep for their return like children and widows. He acknowledges that the desire to return is understandable, since nine years have passed, but reminds them that it is shameful to stay so long and return empty-handed, and asks them to wait until they see whether the seer Calchas prophesies truly. He recounts what all saw at Aulis, when the ships were gathering: a serpent came out of the altar and devoured eight sparrow chicks and the mother, the ninth, and Zeus turned it into stone; Calchas read in the sign that they would fight for as many years as the birds devoured, and in the tenth they would take the city. The Achaeans approve with shouts. Nestor reprimands them: they speak like children who care nothing for the labors of war, and where have their oaths gone? No one should return before lying with a Trojan woman, avenging the efforts and groans of Helen, and whoever wants to flee should touch the ship and be the first to meet death. He advises the king to divide the men by tribes and clans, so as to know who is a bad leader, who is a coward, and whether the city resists by the will of the gods or by the incompetence of men.
Agamemnon answers that Nestor surpasses the Achaeans in eloquence and that he wishes he had ten counselors like him. He attributes the sufferings to Zeus, who casts them into useless quarrels, and admits that he and Achilles fought over a girl and that the wrath began on his side; if they agree one day, Troy will not be slow to fall. He orders the army to eat, sharpen spears, feed the horses, and examine the chariots, for the battle will last the whole day until night, and he threatens to leave whoever is seen far from the fighting by the ships as food for dogs and birds. The army shouts, like a wave against a rock, and each sacrifices to the god he prefers, praying to be spared death. Agamemnon sacrifices a five-year-old ox to Zeus and summons the noblest chiefs: Nestor, Idomeneus, the two Ajaxes, the son of Tydeus, Diomedes, and Odysseus; Menelaus comes uninvited, because he knows his brother's worries. In his prayer, the king asks that the sun not set before he brings down the palace of Priam, burns its gates, and tears with bronze the tunic on the chest of Hector, with many companions fallen face down. Zeus accepts the offerings but does not grant the request: he makes the suffering grow. After the banquet, Nestor proposes that no more time be lost, the heralds gather the army, and the kings order it, with Athena at the head, bearing the aegis of a hundred golden fringes, placing in every heart the will to fight without rest, so that war becomes sweeter than returning home.
The poet then invokes the Muses, the only ones who are present and know everything, while men hear only the fame, so that they may tell him who were the leaders and commanders of the Danaans, for not even with ten tongues and ten mouths could he name the multitude. The Catalog of the Ships begins thus, the inventory of the Greek army, region by region and chief by chief, with the number of ships of each contingent, so as to show the size of the expedition and where each part of it comes from. Among the entries, the poem opens digressions: Protesilaus, the first to leap onto the beach, is dead, and his people mourn him without being left without a guide; Philoctetes lies abandoned on Lemnos with the snake's wound; and Achilles stands beside the sea, with his men throwing discus and spear and the horses grazing, because the chief lies there angry with Agamemnon. The catalog then turns to the Trojans: Iris, messenger of Zeus, in the figure of Polites, the lookout, speaks at the assembly of Priam, says she has never seen so numerous an army, and advises Hector to order the allies of many tongues, each group under its own leader. Hector recognizes the divine counsel, dissolves the assembly, and the Trojans go out in arms through the gates, toward the hill of Batieia, where they take their positions. The book ends with the two armies ready for the first battle, but without a single blow yet struck.
Analysis
Zeus's Dream does not bring an order nor an explicit promise of victory: it says the king could take the city now, and Agamemnon turns this "could" into certainty, while the narrator warns that he ignores what Zeus prepares. The test shows that the king does not control the army he commands: the proposal of flight, made to measure the men's will, is taken as truth by those who had not heard the council, and only Athena's intervention, through Odysseus, prevents the return that the poem calls beyond fate. What keeps the army standing is a mixture of shame, sign, and promise that Odysseus and Nestor know how to handle.
The book has two movements. In the first, Agamemnon's authority is put to the test and is sustained with support from outside: the king's scepter, which Odysseus takes up to speak in his name, Nestor's speech, the omen of Aulis. In the second, the Catalog extends the poem beyond the scene and sets before the reader the size of what is at stake before any blow, and at its center is Achilles' absence: the largest army is measured by a man who does not fight. Here Book I's wrath appears as a gap in the ranks.
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