# The War That Killed Achilles  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Caroline Alexander]] - Full Title:: The War That Killed Achilles - Category: #books ## Highlights > The dragging of the bodies of U.S. Rangers behind their killers’ jeeps through the streets of Mogadishu evoked the terrible fate of the Trojan hero Hektor. ([Location 58](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=58)) > A young American widow was reported as saying that she had tried to close the door against the soldier who appeared at her home in dress greens, believing that if she could keep him from speaking his news of her husband in Iraq, she could keep his news at bay—a small domestic scene that conjured the heartbreaking words of Hektor’s widow, Andromache: “May what I say come never close to my ear; yet dreadfully I fear . . .” The Iliad ’s evocation of war’s devastation, then, is as resonant today—perhaps especially today—as it was in Homer’s Dark Age. Now, as at any time, Homer’s masterpiece is an epic for our time. ([Location 59](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=59)) > Centuries earlier, tragedians and historians of the classical era had matter-of-factly understood the war at Troy to have been a catastrophe: “For it came about that, on account of the length of the campaign, the Greeks of that time, and the barbarians as well, lost both what they had at home and what they had acquired by the campaign,” wrote Strabo in the early first century B.C., in what can be seen as a summation of the ancient view of the Trojan War, “and so, after the destruction of Troy, not only did the victors turn to piracy because of their poverty, but still more the vanquished who survived the war.”7 ([Location 109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=109)) > The dangerous example of Achilles’ contemptuous defiance of his inept commanding officer was defused by a tired witticism—that shining Achilles had been “sulking in his tent.” ([Location 115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=115)) > This book is about what the Iliad is about; this book is about what the Iliad says of war. ([Location 125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=125)) > The greatest war story ever told commemorates a war that established no boundaries, won no territory, and furthered no cause. ([Location 150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=150)) > The epic’s journey can be traced in the history of two extinct peoples: the Bronze Age Greeks—known to Homer as “Achaeans” and to modern historians as Mycenaeans, after their principal settlement—and the Trojans, a Hittite-related people of western Anatolia. ([Location 187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=187)) > Significantly, early mythological and epic stories refer to two sacks of Troy by Greeks over two successive generations, as well as, intriguingly, a failed campaign to the region led by Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae.26 ([Location 270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=270)) > Is a warrior ever justified in challenging his commander? Must he sacrifice his life for someone else’s cause? How is a catastrophic war ever allowed to start— and why, if all parties wish it over, can it not be ended? Giving his life for his country, does a man betray his family? Do the gods countenance war’s slaughter? Is a warrior’s death compensated by his glory? These are the questions that pervade the Iliad. These are also the questions that pervade actual war. And in life, as in epic, no one has answered them better than Homer. ([Location 380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=380)) > The immediate consequence of Agamemnon’s arrogant dismissal of the priest is that he angers Phoibos Apollo—the god of healing, the archer who shoots from afar, and also, as it turns out, the bringer of plagues: Smintheus, “mouse-slayer,” is the epithet by which the priest Chryses addresses Apollo, from smínthos—“mouse”—the bringer of plagues, in Mysian, one of the languages of the Troad.2 High on Mount Olympos, Apollo hears the prayer of his aggrieved priest and, enraged, strides down from the mountain pinnacles, his arrows clattering in his quiver. Taking aim first at the army’s animals, the mules and dogs, he then lets fly his arrows against the men: The corpse fires burned everywhere and did not stop burning. Nine days up and down the host ranged the god’s arrows, but on the tenth Achilles called the people to assembly. ([Location 410](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=410)) > What interests Homer are issues of authority and leadership on the one hand and duty and individual destiny on the other, issues brought swiftly to the fore by Achilles himself: ([Location 459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=459)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Muhammad Ali’s famous refusal to fight in Vietnam: I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. . . . No Viet Cong ever called me nigger. . . . I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder, kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people. ([Location 467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=467)) > Nestor is the spokesman for the status quo, for the tradition-hallowed belief that institutional power equates with unquestioned authority. ([Location 509](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=509)) > The articulated awareness that the authority above may be inferior to the individual soldier below is the beginning of a dangerous wisdom. ([Location 712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=712)) > Paris is unheroic, however, not because of his religious belief in divine agency but because of his passive acquiescence to it; as will be seen, heroism is achieved by striving in the face of unconquerable destiny. ([Location 917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=917)) > Fully three times as many Trojans die as Achaeans in this Greek epic, so the Iliad is dense with the descriptions of enemy warriors who die pathetically. This remarkable point is worth emphasizing: subtly, but with unflagging consistency, the Iliad ensures that the enemy is humanized and that the deaths of enemy Trojans are depicted as lamentable. The Iliad is insistent on keeping to the fore the price of glory. ([Location 1184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1184)) > His descendants, so the ancient prophecy runs, will inherit the Troad; it was in deference to this tradition that the Romans claimed Trojan Aineias as their founder—a tradition that has recently received new consideration in view of DNA findings that indicate that the Etruscans, the first rulers of Rome, originated from Anatolia .4 ([Location 1205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1205)) > Death: the Iliad is ever mindful that war is about men killing or men killed. In the entire epic, no warrior, whether hero or obscure man of the ranks, dies happily or well. No reward awaits the soldier’s valor; no heaven will receive him. ([Location 1272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1272)) > This function of genealogical recitations still persists today. In her memoir of coming of age in Somalia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes how “Somali children must memorize their lineage. . . . Whenever a Somali meets a stranger, they ask each other, ‘Who are you?’ They trace back their separate ancestries until they find a common forefather.” ([Location 1335](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1335)) > The eventual fate of Andromache and Astyanax was told in one of the epics of the Trojan Cycle, the Little Iliad, attributed to the poet Lesches, from Lesbos, which related events following the downfall of Troy: “But great-hearted Achilles’ glorious son led Hektor’s wife back to the hollow ships,” one ancient testimonial of the lost epic reads; “her child he took from the bosom of his lovely-haired nurse and, holding him by the foot, flung him from the battlement, and crimson death and stern fate took him at his fall. . . .”21 ([Location 1425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1425)) > Through Achilles, the ancient story of the Trojan War would not culminate as an epic extolling martial glory but as a dark portrayal of the cost of war, even to its greatest and most glorified hero. ([Location 1683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1683)) > / For as I detest the doorways of Death, I detest that man, who / hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another.’ ” With angry authority, Achilles ([Location 1687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1687)) > Life is more precious than glory; this is the unheroic truth disclosed by the greatest warrior at Troy. ([Location 1713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1713)) > name. In the apocryphal Acts of Andrew (dating to the third century A.D.), there is a “city of the cannibals,” which is identified as Myrmidon; it is possible that this account taps into some more ancient, and savage, lost tradition.17 In the Iliad, the Myrmidons ([Location 2288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2288)) > Phílos; hetaros—“comrade,” “buddy,” “mate”—“my own,” “my best,” “my beloved companion.” The terms that define the relationship between Patroklos and Achilles have no true counterparts in the civilian world but belong to the enduring terminology of war. “It’s a closeness you never had before,” as a veteran of the Vietnam War described his friend-in-arms. “It’s closer than your mother and father, closest [sic] than your brother or your sister.”33 Today the “loss of a buddy,” along with “fear of death,” is recognized as one of the standard primary causes of war trauma. At the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a grieving soldier returned from Iraq “walks the hospital campus in the bloodied combat boots of a friend he watched bleed to death.”34 ([Location 2500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2500)) > The creation of Achilles’ alter ego, his sacrificial second self, allowed Homer to unleash the emotions that will always most authentically memorialize war. In the concluding lines of his magisterial account of the Great War, John Keegan offers a summation that is true of all: Men whom the trenches cast into intimacy entered into bonds of mutual dependency and sacrifice of self stronger than any of the friendships made in peace and better times. That is the ultimate mystery of the First World War. If we could understand its loves, as well as its hates, we would be nearer understanding the mystery of human life. ([Location 2508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2508)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The god himself is at his forge, working on twenty tripods, each set on golden wheels “so that of their own motion they could wheel into the immortal gathering.” Wheeled tripods from Cyprus are known from the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.; ([Location 2565](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2565)) > Thetis’ tearful plea represents the enduring prayer of all terrified mothers whose sons must go to war. Whether holding bake sales to raise money for ceramic-plated body armor for their sons in Iraq10 or pleading directly with the smith of the gods, the objective is the same—magic armor that will protect my son. ([Location 2598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2598)) > “ ‘I wish that I could hide him away from death’ ”—Hephaistos knows as well as Thetis does that this cannot be done. The smith of the gods can make tripods with magic wheels, a brazen house for every Olympian, gates of the sky “moving of themselves,” even golden attendants “in appearance like living young women,” capable of speech and intelligence—all such wonders he can work, but he cannot hide the son of Thetis from his fated death. ([Location 2616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2616)) > The first piece of armament he turns to is Achilles’ shield. “Huge and heavy,” it is composed of five overlapping folds of metal and has a “triple rim” for additional strength: ... and upon it he elaborated many things in his skill and craftsmanship. He made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea’s water, and the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness, and on it all the constellations that festoon the heavens. . . . On it he wrought in all their beauty two cities of mortal men. And there were marriages in one, and festivals. They were leading the brides along the city from their maiden chambers under the flaring torches, and the loud bride song was arising. . . . But around the other city were lying two forces of armed men shining in their war gear. For one side counsel was divided whether to storm and sack, or share between both sides the property and all the possessions the lovely citadel held hard within it. . . . He made upon it a soft field, the pride of the tilled land, wide and triple-ploughed, with many ploughmen upon it who wheeled their teams at the turn and drove them in either direction. . . . The earth darkened behind them and looked like earth that has been ploughed though it was gold. Such was the wonder of the shield’s forging. ([Location 2621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2621)) > Hesiod’s Shield of Heracles, dating to around 600 B.C.,14 is a lengthy epic fragment dominated by the depiction of that hero’s shield: “In the middle was Fear, made of adamant, unspeakable, glaring backwards with eyes shining like fire . . . upon it burned Tumult and Murder and Slaughter . . . upon it deadly Fate was dragging men by the feet through the battle, holding one who was alive but freshly wounded, another who was unwounded, another who had died.”15 Monsters, gods, terrors personified are the predominant motifs, along with themes manifestly borrowed from Homer—a “servile dependence upon Homeric models,” according to one indignant editor of the work.16 The Homeric model in this case was not the shield of Achilles but the shield of Agamemnon, which, it will be recalled, was emblazoned with Fear and Terror and the “blank-eyed face of the Gorgon.”17 ([Location 2639](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2639)) > This is the last and most magnificent of the Iliad’s four, thematically similar but psychologically distinct arming scenes; “Paris arms for shame, Agamemnon for security, Patroclus for loyalty and friendship, but Achilles arms in anger and grief,” as one commentator observed:26 ([Location 2748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2748)) > Hera puts a voice in Xanthos, so that the horse can speak, and once again the divine gifts of Peleus to his son serve as a haunting reminder of the cost to him of this war: ([Location 2765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2765)) > In his study of combat trauma on American veterans of the Vietnam War, Dr. Jonathan Shay was struck by how vividly and realistically the descriptions of Achilles’ actions and state of mind after the death of Patroklos resembled those of the veterans under his psychiatric care. This was particularly striking of the phenomenon, triggered by some incident—injustice, betrayal, loss of a friend—of the so-called berserk state. As one veteran recalled: I just went crazy. I pulled him out into the paddy and carved him up with my knife. When I was done with him, he looked like a rag doll that a dog had been playing with. . . . I lost all my mercy. I felt a drastic change after that. . . . I couldn’t do enough damage. . . . For every one that I killed I felt better. Made some of the hurt went [sic] away. EVERY TIME YOU LOST A FRIEND IT SEEMED LIKE A PART OF YOU WAS GONE. Get one of them to compensate what they had done to me. I got very hard, cold, merciless. I lost all my mercy.31 ([Location 2840](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2840)) > “Courage is a moral quality,” wrote Lord Moran in 1945, in his classic examination of the same, drawing upon his memory of behavior he had witnessed—and medically treated—in the trenches of an earlier war; “it is not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives.”44 ([Location 2923](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2923)) > behind both feet he pierced the tendon between heel and ankle and fastened there ox-hide straps, and bound him to his chariot and let the head drag along. ([Location 3100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=3100)) > “Since about tea time yesterday I don’t think there’s been a shot fired on either side up to now,” wrote an anonymous British soldier on Christmas Day 1914, recording the almost surreal suspension of all action early in the Great War that came to be known as the Christmas Truce. Across the trench lines, British and German soldiers spontaneously sang carols, lit candles, and played impromptu soccer games in No-Man’s-Land. “We can hardly believe that we’ve been firing at them for the last week or two—it all seems so strange.”35 “ ‘I for my part did not come here for the sake of the Trojan / spearmen to fight against them, since to me they have done nothing,’ ” Achilles declared passionately in the very opening of the Iliad. ([Location 3508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=3508)) # The War That Killed Achilles  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Caroline Alexander]] - Full Title:: The War That Killed Achilles - Category: #books ## Highlights > The dragging of the bodies of U.S. Rangers behind their killers’ jeeps through the streets of Mogadishu evoked the terrible fate of the Trojan hero Hektor. ([Location 58](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=58)) > A young American widow was reported as saying that she had tried to close the door against the soldier who appeared at her home in dress greens, believing that if she could keep him from speaking his news of her husband in Iraq, she could keep his news at bay—a small domestic scene that conjured the heartbreaking words of Hektor’s widow, Andromache: “May what I say come never close to my ear; yet dreadfully I fear . . .” The Iliad ’s evocation of war’s devastation, then, is as resonant today—perhaps especially today—as it was in Homer’s Dark Age. Now, as at any time, Homer’s masterpiece is an epic for our time. ([Location 59](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=59)) > Centuries earlier, tragedians and historians of the classical era had matter-of-factly understood the war at Troy to have been a catastrophe: “For it came about that, on account of the length of the campaign, the Greeks of that time, and the barbarians as well, lost both what they had at home and what they had acquired by the campaign,” wrote Strabo in the early first century B.C., in what can be seen as a summation of the ancient view of the Trojan War, “and so, after the destruction of Troy, not only did the victors turn to piracy because of their poverty, but still more the vanquished who survived the war.”7 ([Location 109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=109)) > The dangerous example of Achilles’ contemptuous defiance of his inept commanding officer was defused by a tired witticism—that shining Achilles had been “sulking in his tent.” ([Location 115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=115)) > This book is about what the Iliad is about; this book is about what the Iliad says of war. ([Location 125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=125)) > The greatest war story ever told commemorates a war that established no boundaries, won no territory, and furthered no cause. ([Location 150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=150)) > The epic’s journey can be traced in the history of two extinct peoples: the Bronze Age Greeks—known to Homer as “Achaeans” and to modern historians as Mycenaeans, after their principal settlement—and the Trojans, a Hittite-related people of western Anatolia. ([Location 187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=187)) > Significantly, early mythological and epic stories refer to two sacks of Troy by Greeks over two successive generations, as well as, intriguingly, a failed campaign to the region led by Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae.26 ([Location 270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=270)) > Is a warrior ever justified in challenging his commander? Must he sacrifice his life for someone else’s cause? How is a catastrophic war ever allowed to start— and why, if all parties wish it over, can it not be ended? Giving his life for his country, does a man betray his family? Do the gods countenance war’s slaughter? Is a warrior’s death compensated by his glory? These are the questions that pervade the Iliad. These are also the questions that pervade actual war. And in life, as in epic, no one has answered them better than Homer. ([Location 380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=380)) > The immediate consequence of Agamemnon’s arrogant dismissal of the priest is that he angers Phoibos Apollo—the god of healing, the archer who shoots from afar, and also, as it turns out, the bringer of plagues: Smintheus, “mouse-slayer,” is the epithet by which the priest Chryses addresses Apollo, from smínthos—“mouse”—the bringer of plagues, in Mysian, one of the languages of the Troad.2 High on Mount Olympos, Apollo hears the prayer of his aggrieved priest and, enraged, strides down from the mountain pinnacles, his arrows clattering in his quiver. Taking aim first at the army’s animals, the mules and dogs, he then lets fly his arrows against the men: The corpse fires burned everywhere and did not stop burning. Nine days up and down the host ranged the god’s arrows, but on the tenth Achilles called the people to assembly. ([Location 410](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=410)) > What interests Homer are issues of authority and leadership on the one hand and duty and individual destiny on the other, issues brought swiftly to the fore by Achilles himself: ([Location 459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=459)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Muhammad Ali’s famous refusal to fight in Vietnam: I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. . . . No Viet Cong ever called me nigger. . . . I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder, kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people. ([Location 467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=467)) > Nestor is the spokesman for the status quo, for the tradition-hallowed belief that institutional power equates with unquestioned authority. ([Location 509](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=509)) > The articulated awareness that the authority above may be inferior to the individual soldier below is the beginning of a dangerous wisdom. ([Location 712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=712)) > Paris is unheroic, however, not because of his religious belief in divine agency but because of his passive acquiescence to it; as will be seen, heroism is achieved by striving in the face of unconquerable destiny. ([Location 917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=917)) > Fully three times as many Trojans die as Achaeans in this Greek epic, so the Iliad is dense with the descriptions of enemy warriors who die pathetically. This remarkable point is worth emphasizing: subtly, but with unflagging consistency, the Iliad ensures that the enemy is humanized and that the deaths of enemy Trojans are depicted as lamentable. The Iliad is insistent on keeping to the fore the price of glory. ([Location 1184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1184)) > His descendants, so the ancient prophecy runs, will inherit the Troad; it was in deference to this tradition that the Romans claimed Trojan Aineias as their founder—a tradition that has recently received new consideration in view of DNA findings that indicate that the Etruscans, the first rulers of Rome, originated from Anatolia .4 ([Location 1205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1205)) > Death: the Iliad is ever mindful that war is about men killing or men killed. In the entire epic, no warrior, whether hero or obscure man of the ranks, dies happily or well. No reward awaits the soldier’s valor; no heaven will receive him. ([Location 1272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1272)) > This function of genealogical recitations still persists today. In her memoir of coming of age in Somalia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes how “Somali children must memorize their lineage. . . . Whenever a Somali meets a stranger, they ask each other, ‘Who are you?’ They trace back their separate ancestries until they find a common forefather.” ([Location 1335](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1335)) > The eventual fate of Andromache and Astyanax was told in one of the epics of the Trojan Cycle, the Little Iliad, attributed to the poet Lesches, from Lesbos, which related events following the downfall of Troy: “But great-hearted Achilles’ glorious son led Hektor’s wife back to the hollow ships,” one ancient testimonial of the lost epic reads; “her child he took from the bosom of his lovely-haired nurse and, holding him by the foot, flung him from the battlement, and crimson death and stern fate took him at his fall. . . .”21 ([Location 1425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1425)) > Through Achilles, the ancient story of the Trojan War would not culminate as an epic extolling martial glory but as a dark portrayal of the cost of war, even to its greatest and most glorified hero. ([Location 1683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1683)) > / For as I detest the doorways of Death, I detest that man, who / hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another.’ ” With angry authority, Achilles ([Location 1687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1687)) > Life is more precious than glory; this is the unheroic truth disclosed by the greatest warrior at Troy. ([Location 1713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=1713)) > name. In the apocryphal Acts of Andrew (dating to the third century A.D.), there is a “city of the cannibals,” which is identified as Myrmidon; it is possible that this account taps into some more ancient, and savage, lost tradition.17 In the Iliad, the Myrmidons ([Location 2288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2288)) > Phílos; hetaros—“comrade,” “buddy,” “mate”—“my own,” “my best,” “my beloved companion.” The terms that define the relationship between Patroklos and Achilles have no true counterparts in the civilian world but belong to the enduring terminology of war. “It’s a closeness you never had before,” as a veteran of the Vietnam War described his friend-in-arms. “It’s closer than your mother and father, closest [sic] than your brother or your sister.”33 Today the “loss of a buddy,” along with “fear of death,” is recognized as one of the standard primary causes of war trauma. At the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a grieving soldier returned from Iraq “walks the hospital campus in the bloodied combat boots of a friend he watched bleed to death.”34 ([Location 2500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2500)) > The creation of Achilles’ alter ego, his sacrificial second self, allowed Homer to unleash the emotions that will always most authentically memorialize war. In the concluding lines of his magisterial account of the Great War, John Keegan offers a summation that is true of all: Men whom the trenches cast into intimacy entered into bonds of mutual dependency and sacrifice of self stronger than any of the friendships made in peace and better times. That is the ultimate mystery of the First World War. If we could understand its loves, as well as its hates, we would be nearer understanding the mystery of human life. ([Location 2508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2508)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The god himself is at his forge, working on twenty tripods, each set on golden wheels “so that of their own motion they could wheel into the immortal gathering.” Wheeled tripods from Cyprus are known from the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.; ([Location 2565](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2565)) > Thetis’ tearful plea represents the enduring prayer of all terrified mothers whose sons must go to war. Whether holding bake sales to raise money for ceramic-plated body armor for their sons in Iraq10 or pleading directly with the smith of the gods, the objective is the same—magic armor that will protect my son. ([Location 2598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2598)) > “ ‘I wish that I could hide him away from death’ ”—Hephaistos knows as well as Thetis does that this cannot be done. The smith of the gods can make tripods with magic wheels, a brazen house for every Olympian, gates of the sky “moving of themselves,” even golden attendants “in appearance like living young women,” capable of speech and intelligence—all such wonders he can work, but he cannot hide the son of Thetis from his fated death. ([Location 2616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2616)) > The first piece of armament he turns to is Achilles’ shield. “Huge and heavy,” it is composed of five overlapping folds of metal and has a “triple rim” for additional strength: ... and upon it he elaborated many things in his skill and craftsmanship. He made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea’s water, and the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness, and on it all the constellations that festoon the heavens. . . . On it he wrought in all their beauty two cities of mortal men. And there were marriages in one, and festivals. They were leading the brides along the city from their maiden chambers under the flaring torches, and the loud bride song was arising. . . . But around the other city were lying two forces of armed men shining in their war gear. For one side counsel was divided whether to storm and sack, or share between both sides the property and all the possessions the lovely citadel held hard within it. . . . He made upon it a soft field, the pride of the tilled land, wide and triple-ploughed, with many ploughmen upon it who wheeled their teams at the turn and drove them in either direction. . . . The earth darkened behind them and looked like earth that has been ploughed though it was gold. Such was the wonder of the shield’s forging. ([Location 2621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2621)) > Hesiod’s Shield of Heracles, dating to around 600 B.C.,14 is a lengthy epic fragment dominated by the depiction of that hero’s shield: “In the middle was Fear, made of adamant, unspeakable, glaring backwards with eyes shining like fire . . . upon it burned Tumult and Murder and Slaughter . . . upon it deadly Fate was dragging men by the feet through the battle, holding one who was alive but freshly wounded, another who was unwounded, another who had died.”15 Monsters, gods, terrors personified are the predominant motifs, along with themes manifestly borrowed from Homer—a “servile dependence upon Homeric models,” according to one indignant editor of the work.16 The Homeric model in this case was not the shield of Achilles but the shield of Agamemnon, which, it will be recalled, was emblazoned with Fear and Terror and the “blank-eyed face of the Gorgon.”17 ([Location 2639](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2639)) > This is the last and most magnificent of the Iliad’s four, thematically similar but psychologically distinct arming scenes; “Paris arms for shame, Agamemnon for security, Patroclus for loyalty and friendship, but Achilles arms in anger and grief,” as one commentator observed:26 ([Location 2748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2748)) > Hera puts a voice in Xanthos, so that the horse can speak, and once again the divine gifts of Peleus to his son serve as a haunting reminder of the cost to him of this war: ([Location 2765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2765)) > In his study of combat trauma on American veterans of the Vietnam War, Dr. Jonathan Shay was struck by how vividly and realistically the descriptions of Achilles’ actions and state of mind after the death of Patroklos resembled those of the veterans under his psychiatric care. This was particularly striking of the phenomenon, triggered by some incident—injustice, betrayal, loss of a friend—of the so-called berserk state. As one veteran recalled: I just went crazy. I pulled him out into the paddy and carved him up with my knife. When I was done with him, he looked like a rag doll that a dog had been playing with. . . . I lost all my mercy. I felt a drastic change after that. . . . I couldn’t do enough damage. . . . For every one that I killed I felt better. Made some of the hurt went [sic] away. EVERY TIME YOU LOST A FRIEND IT SEEMED LIKE A PART OF YOU WAS GONE. Get one of them to compensate what they had done to me. I got very hard, cold, merciless. I lost all my mercy.31 ([Location 2840](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2840)) > “Courage is a moral quality,” wrote Lord Moran in 1945, in his classic examination of the same, drawing upon his memory of behavior he had witnessed—and medically treated—in the trenches of an earlier war; “it is not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives.”44 ([Location 2923](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=2923)) > behind both feet he pierced the tendon between heel and ankle and fastened there ox-hide straps, and bound him to his chariot and let the head drag along. ([Location 3100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=3100)) > “Since about tea time yesterday I don’t think there’s been a shot fired on either side up to now,” wrote an anonymous British soldier on Christmas Day 1914, recording the almost surreal suspension of all action early in the Great War that came to be known as the Christmas Truce. Across the trench lines, British and German soldiers spontaneously sang carols, lit candles, and played impromptu soccer games in No-Man’s-Land. “We can hardly believe that we’ve been firing at them for the last week or two—it all seems so strange.”35 “ ‘I for my part did not come here for the sake of the Trojan / spearmen to fight against them, since to me they have done nothing,’ ” Achilles declared passionately in the very opening of the Iliad. ([Location 3508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002QBV8H0&location=3508))