Perfidy and Passion: Reintroducing the Iliad

5. Couples: The Iliad on Intimacy

114 Couples The Iliad on Intimacy T he Iliad creates a crescendo of couples. Agamemnon and Chryseis , Achilles and Briseis, Helen and Paris, Hector and Andromache , Achilles and Patroclus—all move in and out of narrative focus, bringing with them their dif ferent versions of love. So when Hector and Achilles duel to the death in Book 22 in their long-awaited brief encounter, it is not surprising that it takes an er otic turn. Rather than fight, Hector imagines a way out. What if they could talk to each other as a boy and girl, speaking the language of love? Hector r ejects the idea as utopian, and asks for something more manageable. He suggests that they return to the civilized r ules of warfare, the mutual respect for either corpse after one of them dies. ButAchilles brutally rules this out. ‘Hektor, argue me no agreements. I cannot forgive you. As there are no trustworthy oaths between men and lions, nor wolves and lambs have spirit that can be brought to agreement but forever these hold feelings of hate for each other, so there can be no love between you and me, nor shall there be oaths between us, but one or the other must fall before then to glut with his blood Ares the god who fights under the shield’s guard.[’] (Il. 22.261–67) If the Iliad is a story about the defeat of intimacy , about the replacement of social bonds with an inhuman disdain for them, this is its cr owning moment. Achilles lauds the victory of the logic of her oism and war, the zero-sum brutality of “‘kill or be killed,’” over everyday, domestic 5 Couples 115 peace. As Hector put it earlier, this is the er otic language, the “‘sweet invitation’” in Lattimore’s translation, the aoristus, of war. Therefore a man must now turn his face straight forward, and perish or survive. This is the sweet invitation of battle. (Il. 17.227–28) τώ τις νῦν ἰθὺς τετραµµένος ἢ ἀπολέσθω ἠὲ σαωθήτω· ἣ γὰρ πολέµου ὀαριστύς. But though the romantic solution is ruled out, the language of eros suffuses Homer’s description of their duel. Hector and Achilles will meet “‘apart from the others’” (οἶος ἄνευθ’ ἄλλων, as Priam fears at Il. 22.39) in an isolated togetherness that mirrors the intimacy of lovers. Such intimate separation from all others is rare in the poem. When Hector and Andromache meet on the walls of Troy, for example, they are not alone but accompanied by a servant, and this sur ely removes much of the eros from their encounter. By way of contrast, when Aphrodite escorts Helen to Paris’s bedroom and leaves them alone, the implications ar e clear. Some of the danger ous, erotically charged connotations of two alone together are glimpsed in Glaucus’s “‘Potiphar ’s wife’s tale’” of his grandfather Bellerophon’s encounter with his guest-friend’s wife, Anteia (Il. 6.160–96). Their momentary intimacy, alone apart from others , lasts long enough forAnteia to make her advances and Beller ophon to refuse, but the doubt spawned by the secr ecy of the encounter will soon have fatal consequences. As with Achilles and Thetis, there is an atmosphere of secrecy and possible betrayal as these couples spend time “‘alone together,’” but now erotic desire becomes part of the mix. Achilles also looks Hector up and down for a point of weakness in his own armor, now worn by his foe ( Il. 22.321–23), conceptually undressing his most intimate enemy . When the Greeks will later take turns stabbing his corpse, we are given a martial allegory of the violent sexual acts that Homer elsewher e spares us. When Paris sees Helen, for example , he feels desire, and then the narrator rushes to the euphemism of their going to bed together (3.447–48). The killing of Hector transfers the language of sex onto the battlefield. Hector in Love This prevalence of the erotic should encourage us to look in mor e detail at Hector’s utopian thought experiment ( Il. 17.227–28). Exactly what 116 Couples kind of romantic scenario does he imagine, and why is it so impossible ? For though Hector ’s intuition is sur ely right, the r easons for it are complex. [‘]Or if again I set down my shield massive in the middle and my ponderous helm, and lean my spear up against the rampart and go out as I am to meet Achilleus the...