Book IX: The Embassy to Achilles | The Iliad

Chapter summary

While the Trojans watch their fires, panic seizes the Achaeans and grief strikes the best of them. Agamemnon sends heralds to call each chief quietly to the assembly, and, weeping like a spring, says that Zeus has bound him in a heavy folly: he promised him the fall of Troy and now sends him back to Argos without glory, after losing so many men. He proposes fleeing by ship, because Troy will not fall. All fall silent for a long time. Diomedes breaks the silence and faces him first, with the right of one who speaks in assembly: Agamemnon called him unfit for battle, but Zeus gave him the scepter and honor, not courage. If he wants to go, let him go; the others will stay until Ilium falls, and Diomedes and Sthenelus will fight to the end, because they came with a god. The Achaeans acclaim him. Nestor praises him, but says that he has not reached the end of the matter. He orders guards posted along the ditch and advises Agamemnon to give a banquet for the elders, where the best counsel will be taken, because the Trojans are burning fires beside the ships and the night will decide whether the army is lost or saved.

Seven captains of the guard, with a hundred young men each, take position between the ditch and the wall. At the banquet, Nestor begins to speak: he recalls that he warned Agamemnon when the king took Briseis from Achilles, but the king yielded to his spirit and dishonored a man whom the immortals honored. He proposes to appease him with gifts and gentle words. Agamemnon agrees, says that he erred, and that a man whom Zeus loves is worth many peoples, and lists what he will give: seven tripods, ten talents of gold, twenty cauldrons, twelve prize horses, seven women of Lesbos, and Briseis back, with an oath that he never touched her; after the fall of Troy, a ship filled with gold and bronze and twenty Trojan women; in Argos, the hand of one of his three daughters without bride-price, honor equal to Orestes', and seven cities. He ends by demanding that Achilles submit, because Hades, who does not yield, is the most hated of the gods, and because he is more king and older. Nestor approves and names the embassy: Phoenix at the head, then Ajax and Odysseus, with the heralds Odius and Eurybates. They pour a libation and set off, praying along the shore to Poseidon that Achilles' spirit may yield easily.

Achilles receives them playing the lyre and singing the deeds of men, with Patroclus sitting silently before him. He leaps up, welcomes them as the dearest of the Achaeans, despite his anger, and tells Patroclus to prepare wine and meat; he himself carves the meat. After supper, Ajax signals to Phoenix, and Odysseus speaks: he toasts Achilles and says that the table is not what worries them, but the imminent ruin, because the Trojans have camped by the ships and Hector, confident in Zeus, promises to burn them at dawn. He recalls the counsel of Peleus when he sent him to Agamemnon: to restrain his spirit, for goodwill is worth more. He repeats Agamemnon's list of gifts, without the last request, and adds: if the Atrides is hateful to him, let him pity the other Achaeans, who will honor him as a god, and let him kill Hector, who is about to come near.

Achilles answers Odysseus that he will say plainly what he thinks, because he hates the one who hides one thing and says another. He does not believe that Agamemnon or the others can persuade him, because there is no gratitude in fighting without rest: the same lot falls to the one who stays and to the one who fights, and the same honor to the good and the bad. He tells how he sacked twelve cities by sea and eleven by land and gave it all to Agamemnon, who stayed behind and shared out little, and how the king took his prize alone while the others keep theirs. He asks why they fight, if not for Helen, and says he loved Briseis as a good man loves his own wife, though she was a captive. Agamemnon deceived him and will not deceive him again; the gifts are hateful to him, and ten or twenty times more would not persuade him before the king pays the whole insult. He will not marry the king's daughter: Peleus will find him a wife. For him, life is worth more than all the wealth of Ilium or of Apollo's sanctuary at Pytho: cattle and tripods can be won, but life does not come back. Thetis, his mother, told him there are two possible ends: to stay and have glory that does not fade, or return and have a long life without glory. He would advise the others to set sail; he himself will sail in the morning, if they wish to see it, and in three days will be in Phthia. He invites Phoenix to stay and decide tomorrow whether to go with him, without any constraint.

All fall silent. Phoenix, weeping, fears for the ships and says he would not stay behind without him: Peleus sent him to teach him to speak and to act. He recounts that he fled his father's house, who cursed him because of a concubine, and that Peleus took him in and made him king of the Dolopians. He raised Achilles as a son, and when Achilles was small he would wet Phoenix's tunic with wine, because the gods had not given him a son. He asks Achilles to master his spirit: the gods themselves are swayed by sacrifices and prayers, and the Supplications, daughters of Zeus, follow Ate to heal her; whoever refuses them attracts Ate. If Agamemnon only promised and threatened, he would not advise giving up anger; but the king now offers gifts and sends the best men. He tells of Meleager, who, angry with his mother, stayed home and let the Aetolians lose to the Curetes, despite the pleas of his father, the priests, his brothers and his friends, until his wife described what a captured city suffers, and he went out, but without the gifts. He advises Achilles to accept them and to be honored like a god; if he enters the war without them, he will not have the same honor.

Achilles tells Phoenix that he does not need that honor, because he regards himself as honored by Zeus's decision, which will keep him by the ships as long as he has breath. He asks him not to upset him by weeping to please the Atrides, offers to reign with him and have half the honor, tells him to stay and sleep, and promises that they will decide in the morning whether to leave or stay. He signals Patroclus to prepare Phoenix's bed. Ajax tells Odysseus that the mission will not succeed this way and that they must take back an answer. To Achilles he recalls that men accept ransom for a brother or a son who has died, and that the gods gave him an implacable spirit for a single girl, when they now offer him seven; he asks him to respect the roof under which they stand. Achilles says that everything seems spoken according to his own spirit, but that his heart swells with anger at recalling how Agamemnon treated him like a dishonored migrant. Let them take the answer: he will think of war only when Hector comes to the tents and the ships of the Myrmidons, killing Argives and burning the ships; he believes that Hector will be stopped near his own tent.

The three return with a libation, Odysseus in front. Patroclus makes Phoenix's bed; Achilles sleeps at the back of the tent with Diomede, daughter of Phorbas, brought from Lesbos, and Patroclus, on the other side, with Iphis, whom Achilles gave him when he took Scyros. In Agamemnon's tent, the chiefs receive the envoys with golden cups, and the king asks first: does Achilles want to defend the ships, or has he refused? Odysseus answers that he does not want to quench his anger, refuses the king and the gifts, tells the king himself to think how to save the ships and the army, and threatens to launch the ships into the sea at dawn, saying he would advise the others to go home, because Ilium will not fall. Phoenix stayed behind to sail home, if he wishes, but not by force. Ajax and the heralds can confirm this. All fall silent. Diomedes breaks the silence: the king should not have begged the son of Peleus with so many gifts, for he is already proud and now even more so. Let them leave him to go or stay, and he will fight when his spirit and a god lead him. Let everyone eat and sleep, and in the morning Agamemnon should set the troops in order and fight among the first. The kings approve, and each goes to sleep.

Analysis

The embassy tries four paths: reparation in goods (Agamemnon, in Odysseus's voice), glory and compassion (Odysseus's final appeal), relationship and example (Phoenix), and custom and hospitality (Ajax). Achilles answers each with something different, and his refusal shifts over the night: to Odysseus, "I sail tomorrow"; to Phoenix, "we will decide in the morning"; to Ajax, "only when Hector reaches my ships". The book does not show Achilles deciding; it shows the refusal narrowing.

What Agamemnon offers is reparation in objects, and what Achilles says he has lost is of another order: the prize, a life at risk with no return, the treatment he received. Hence the mismatch: each offer enlarges the list and does not touch the grievance. The book also makes Agamemnon say two things about the origin of the defeat: that Zeus deceived him, and that he was deluded; the second appears only when Nestor confronts him with the facts. Diomedes, who opens and closes the night, is the one who says that courage does not come from the scepter or from gifts: it comes from the spirit and from a god (9.39, 9.697-703).