Chapter summary
On Olympus, the gods sit beside Zeus on the golden floor, and Hebe serves them nectar while they look down on Troy. Zeus decides to provoke Hera with mocking words: he says Menelaus has two protecting goddesses, Hera and Athena, but they only look on from afar and enjoy themselves, while Aphrodite never leaves Paris and has just saved him when he seemed lost. The victory is Menelaus's, he says, and he proposes that the gods decide whether to rouse the baneful war again or to establish friendship between the two sides: if that pleases everyone, the city of Priam remains inhabited and Menelaus takes back Helen. Athena and Hera murmur, seated side by side, and plot evils for the Trojans. Athena keeps silent, furious with her father; Hera cannot contain her wrath and complains: her labor, the sweat, and the horses she wore out gathering the army against Priam and his sons must not be in vain.
Zeus answers, irritated. He asks what great wrong Priam and his sons have done to her that she wants to raze Ilium, and says that only if she could eat Priam raw would her rancor be healed. Even so, he yields: let her do as she wishes, provided the quarrel does not become a great discord between the two of them; and when he wants to destroy a city where people dear to her live, she is not to hold him back. He admits he grants this against his will, because of all the cities under the sun the one he loved most was sacred Ilium, where the portion due to his altar was never lacking. Hera offers in exchange the three cities dearest to her, Argos, Sparta, and Mycenae: Zeus may destroy them whenever they become hateful to him, and she will not oppose him, all the more so because he is much stronger. But her work cannot be left unfinished: she is a goddess like him, of the same lineage, the eldest daughter of Cronus, and she is called the wife of Zeus. She proposes that they yield to each other, and that he send Athena into the dreadful battle, so that the Trojans begin to wound the proud Achaeans, in breach of the oaths. Zeus does not refuse and sends Athena.
Athena descends from Olympus like a star that the son of Cronus hurls as a sign for sailors or for an army, and falls in the midst of the two camps. Those who see her are amazed and ask whether there will be war or friendship, for Zeus is the one who distributes war among men. Athena takes the form of Laodocus, son of Antenor, and seeks out Pandarus, son of Lycaon, the leader of the Trojans from Zeleia, whom she finds surrounded by squires who came from the river Aesepus. She asks whether he would have the courage to loose an arrow at Menelaus: he would win the gratitude and glory of all the Trojans, above all of Prince Alexander, who would give him splendid gifts if he saw Menelaus climb onto the pyre. She also tells him to pray to Apollo and to promise a hecatomb of firstborn lambs when he returns to sacred Zeleia. The poet says she persuaded the mind of the fool. Pandarus takes the bow made from the horns of a wild goat that he himself had killed; his companions cover him with shields so that the Achaeans do not rise before Menelaus is struck; he prays to Apollo and pulls back the string: the arrow leaps.
The gods have not forgotten Menelaus. Athena, first of all, turns the arrow aside as a mother brushes a fly from her sleeping son, but she herself guides it to the point where the golden clasps of the belt meet the double breastplate. The arrow pierces the belt, the breastplate, and the undergarment and only grazes the skin; the dark blood flows, compared to ivory that a woman of Maeonia or Caria stains with purple to adorn a horse's cheek-piece. Agamemnon trembles at the sight of the blood, and Menelaus too, until he sees that the sinew and the barbs are outside the body, and then his spirit returns. Agamemnon, groaning, takes his brother's hand and accuses himself: he sealed the oaths for Menelaus's death when he set him alone before the Achaeans, and the Trojans wounded him and trampled the firm pledge. He says the oath is not in vain and that the Olympian, if he does not fulfill it at once, will fulfill it later: they will pay with their heads, their wives, and their children, and he knows the day will come when Ilium falls. But he would suffer terrible grief if Menelaus died: he would return to Argos covered in shame, the Achaeans would remember their homeland, Helen would be a trophy for Priam, and some Trojan would say over Menelaus's tomb that Agamemnon never carried his wrath to its end. Menelaus reassures him: the arrow did not lodge in a vital place. Agamemnon sends the herald Talthybius to summon Machaon, son of Asclepius, who draws out the arrow, sucks the blood, and applies the gentle drugs that Chiron gave to his father.
While they tend to Menelaus, the Trojan ranks advance and the Achaeans arm themselves again. Agamemnon does not doze or shirk: he leaves his horses with Eurymedon and goes on foot along the ranks. To those who are hurrying he gives encouragement: Zeus will not be an ally of liars; those who first broke the oaths will have their tender skin eaten by vultures, and the Achaeans will carry off wives and children in their ships when they take the city. To those who seem to hesitate he gives harsh rebuke, asking why they stand still like tired fawns. He praises Idomeneus, who promises to be a loyal companion, and asks him to rouse the others, because the Trojans have broken the oath and will meet death and pain. As for the two Ajax, who advance with a cloud of infantry, he has nothing to ask: he only wishes that everyone had their spirit. Nestor arranges the formation, horsemen in front, infantry behind as a bulwark, and the weak in the middle, so that even against their will each man fights out of necessity. Agamemnon wishes that the old man's knees would keep pace with his spirit, and Nestor replies that the gods did not give everything to men at once, but that he will still be among the horsemen, with counsel and words.
Coming upon Menestheus and Odysseus with the Cephallenians standing still, Agamemnon rebukes them: why do they stand aside waiting for others to begin, they who are the first invited to the king's banquets? Now he would gladly see ten Achaean towers fighting in front of them. Odysseus glares at him: what word has escaped the fence of his teeth? If the king wants to see, he will see the father of Telemachus mixed in among the front-rankers. The poet had recorded that the Cephallenians had not yet heard the battle cry and were waiting for another tower to attack. Agamemnon smiles, seeing that Odysseus has grown angry, and takes back his words: he knows that Odysseus's heart thinks what he himself thinks, and offenses can be repaired later. He then finds Diomedes standing beside the chariot, with Sthenelus, and rebukes him for cowering and keeping watch over the bridges of war: Tydeus was not like that. He recounts, from hearsay, Tydeus's mission to Thebes: he went to Mycenae as a guest, with Polyneices, to ask for allies, but Zeus turned the omens; on the way the Achaeans sent him as envoy to Thebes, where, alone among the Cadmeans at a banquet, he challenged them to contests and won them all with Athena's help; on the return he fell into an ambush of fifty young men and killed them all, except Maeon, whom he spared out of obedience to the signs of the gods. He ends by saying that Tydeus begot a son who is worse in battle and better in assembly. Diomedes does not answer, out of respect for the king's rebuke. Sthenelus answers for him that the men of today boast of being far better than their fathers: they took Thebes with fewer men and a stronger wall, obeying the signs of the gods and with Zeus's help, while their fathers perished through their own recklessness. Diomedes tells his friend to be quiet: he is not indignant at Agamemnon, because the king's glory comes if the Achaeans win, and his grief if they are destroyed. He leaps from the chariot, and the bronze rings terribly on his chest.
The armies advance. The Danaans march in silence, fearing their chiefs, each man taking orders from his own commander; the Trojans shout like sheep in a pen, with mixed tongues, because the allies come from many places. Ares urges on the Trojans and Athena the Achaeans, and with them go Terror, Panic, and Eris, sister and companion of Ares, who starts small and grows until she puts her head in the sky while she walks on the earth, and who casts among the armies a strife equal for all. When the lines collide, shield strikes shield, cries of lament and of triumph mingle, and the earth runs with blood.
The first to kill is Antilochus, son of Nestor, who strikes down the Trojan Echepolus. Elephenor, leader of the Abantes, tries to drag the body away to strip it and is wounded in the flank by Agenor, who kills him. Telamonian Ajax kills the young Simoisius, whom his mother bore on the banks of the Simois and so named for it; he did not repay his parents the price of his upbringing, and he fell like a poplar felled. Antiphus, son of Priam, throws at Ajax, misses, and hits Leucus, a companion of Odysseus who was dragging a corpse. Odysseus, enraged at the death of his friend, advances among the front-rankers and kills Democoon, Priam's bastard son. The Trojans fall back, and Hector too; the Argives shout, drag away the dead, and press forward. Apollo, indignant, calls out to the Trojans from the height of Pergamus to hold firm: the flesh of the Achaeans is not stone or iron, and Achilles is not fighting, but broods over his wrath beside the ships. Athena urges on the Achaeans wherever she sees them hesitate. Diores, leader of the Epeians, falls struck by a stone from Pyrrhus, leader of the Thracians, who kills him; the Aetolian Thoas kills Pyrrhus, and the Thracians surround the body and keep him from stripping it. The two chiefs lie stretched in the dust, and many others die around them. The poet closes by saying that no one would find fault with the account if a man, still unhurt, were led through the midst of the battle by Athena holding his hand, for many Trojans and Achaeans lay that day face down in the dust, side by side.
Analysis
The book shows the war starting again through a chain in which each agent has his own reason and no one controls the whole. Zeus wants to provoke and then to avoid a quarrel with his wife; Hera wants the ruin of Troy and pays with Argos, Sparta, and Mycenae; Athena carries out the plan; Pandarus acts for glory and gifts, without knowing who speaks to him; Agamemnon sees in the wound the proof of Trojan treachery. The two facts the text places side by side, that the oath was indeed broken by a Trojan and that a goddess is the one who led him to it, do not cancel each other, and Agamemnon sees only the first.
The review of the troops shows Agamemnon's command at work: he praises those who move, rebukes those who seem idle, and uses shame as an instrument. In the two cases where he is wrong, the men he targets react in opposite ways: Odysseus answers and the king takes back his words; Diomedes keeps silent out of respect, Sthenelus answers for him, and only afterward does Diomedes explain why he takes no offense. The book ends with the battle already begun and without the hero the poem's first line announced: Apollo reminds us that Achilles broods over his wrath beside the ships.
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