Delahoyde
Orpheus

HOMER'S ILIAD:
BOOK VI

Questions for Book VI:

The war continues. We read names not worth mention, since they all die quickly. One Trojan asks for mercy from Menelaus, but Agamemnon intervenes. "So soft, dear brother, why?
Why such concern for enemies? I suppose you got
such tender loving care at home from the Trojans.
Ah would to god not one of them could escape
his sudden plunging death beneath our hands!
No baby boy still in his mother's belly,
not even he escape -- all Ilium blotted out,
no tears for their lives, no markers for their graves!" (6.63-70) "What Agamemnon has done is to cut the connections between men and their fathers, men and their brothers, men and their wives, even men and their horses" (Nicholson 112). It's a particular kind of inhumanity, evidenced in his having killed -- uh, sacrificed -- his own daughter before the war in order to get some wind for their sails. He will pay: family is not his strong suit.

Nestor recommends slaughter over plunder: "Now's the time for killing! Later, at leisure, / strip the corpses up and down the plain!" (6.82-83). Good advice and a nice way to unwind this afternoon.

A Trojan recommendation is that they promise sacrifice to Athena to stop Diomedes, who seems a veritable Achilles today. Meanwhile, Diomedes encounters "Glaucus, whose name means 'the gleaming one,' a word used by Homer to describe both the sea and the eyes of the wisdom goddess Athene." "It is a traditional conversation, important for a hero, as his own self-esteem is bound up with the knowledge that his victims are themselves of good lineage" (Nicholson 100). The report and scene end in mutual respect.

"when Hector reached the Scaean Gates and the greak oak
the wives and daughters of Troy came rushing up around him,
asking about their sons, brothers, friends and husbands" (6.283-285). After all the battlefield encounters, we turn to Hector in a portion of the epic often anthologized. In his brief encounter with his mother, he turns down wine and, perhaps even more shockingly, expresses his wish that Paris his brother were dead (6.331-337). The advised prayer to Athena is carried out, but fultilely. Hector encounters his brother Paris in the bedroom "polishing, fondling his splendid battle-gear" (6.378). "What on earth are you doing? Oh how wrong it is,
this anger you keep smoldering in your heart!" (6.384-385). Paris, like Achilles, seems actually to be sulking rather than angry when Hector greets him with insults. Is this a form of rage too? Hector has a moment with Helen, who is really odd. "My dear brother,
dear to me, bitch that I am, vicious, scheming --
horror to freeze the heart!" (6.407-409). Helen wishes she had never been born, and somewhat habitually self-lacerates: "slut that I am" (6.422). How does one explain this attitude on her part? But she gets this right: "Oh the two of us! / Zeus planted a killing doom within us both, / so even for generations still unborn / we will live in song" (6.423-426).

Hector excuses himself from this scene of wallowing, and the encounter between Hector and Andromache is effective. Andromache expresses her fears, and Hector himself does not respond with any sugar-coated optimism. He's in his war-gear, so his kid, Scamandrius (named after the river Skamander), a.k.a. Astyanax, is afraid of him (6.557ff) and the parents have a laugh. (After it's all over, this kid will be thrown to his death from the wall of Troy.) Hector listens to more pleas for him to forgo battle, but he says something interesting....

"All this weighs on my mind too, dear woman.
But I would die of shame to face the men of Troy
and the Trojan women trailing their long robes
if I would shrink from battle now, a coward"
(6.522-525).

And then the key line: "Nor does the spirit urge me on that way" (6.526).
In other words, aside from all the heroic code material involved in one's rep in a warrior culture, and aside from some more platitudes about all of us dying sooner or later, Hector in this one line acknowledges being in touch with whatever force it is that assures him that it's the right thing to do at this time. He is in touch with and trusts his own inclination. And there's more, even better....

"Andromache,
dear one, why so desperate? Why so much grief for me?
No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate.
And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it,
neither brave man nor coward, I tell you--
it's born with us the day that we are born"
(6.579-584). The ancient Greek notion of Fate can come across as very oppressive, but Hector's attitude here shows the rarely expressed flip side. Some days you just are at the top of your game and you know you're not going to die, that you're not fated to croak today. You just know this. What a paradoxically freeing notion!

Iliad: Book VII
Iliad Index
Orpheus: Greek Mythology