Not The Wooden Horse
Fair warning before we start. This is a full summary, so every death and the ending are in it. The poem is very old, but a spoiler is a spoiler.
Here is the question that surprises people. How does the Iliad end? Not with the wooden horse. In Butler’s text, the horse is not in the poem at all. Troy does not fall inside it. The poem stops at a funeral, after the war has already run for ten years.
So I built two things from the text itself. First, the poem’s own calendar, made only from the dawns, nights and day counts it states. Second, a tally of every named man who dies, book by book. The answer is that the whole poem is one man’s anger, and it keeps careful time.
Which Translation
I am using Samuel Butler’s translation, and it is in prose. Its title page says it is rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original.
Catalog records at the Internet Archive and HathiTrust both give eighteen ninety-eight as its year. The free copy I read is Project Gutenberg ebook number twenty-one ninety-nine, and it has no preface, so I will not say more about its history.
One thing trips people up. Butler uses the Roman names for the gods. So Zeus is Jove, Hera is Juno, Athena is Minerva, Aphrodite is Venus and Poseidon is Neptune. The Greeks are mostly called Achaeans. I will use his names all the way through.
If you want the other poem, our Odyssey video covers Ulysses and his long trip home. This one stays at Troy.
Nine Days Of Plague
Book one opens with the anger of Achilles, and the poem says plainly that this anger sent many brave souls down to Hades. Then the poem tells us where it came from. A priest named Chryses begs Agamemnon for his daughter back, and Agamemnon refuses. Apollo answers with a plague.
Here is the first number. He shot his arrows among the people for nine whole days. On the tenth day Achilles calls an assembly, and the seer Calchas names the cause. Agamemnon gives up the girl Chryseis, but takes Briseis from Achilles in exchange.
Achilles withdraws from the war. His mother Thetis asks Jove to let the Trojans win until her son is honoured. Jove is away, so she must wait, and Butler says he returns twelve days later. Book two begins with a lying dream. Agamemnon tests his army by proposing to sail home, and the men run for the ships, until Ulysses stops them.
Day One, Then A Truce
Books three to seven are the first day of fighting. Paris challenges the Achaeans, then shrinks from Menelaus, and Venus carries him off. In book four Pandarus breaks the oath with an arrow, and the first named deaths of the whole poem arrive. There are seven of them, and they all come at the end of that book.
Book five is the loudest. Diomed, helped by Minerva, even wounds Venus and Mars. In book six, Hector goes into the city to ask for prayers, and he says goodbye to Andromache and their baby son at the gate.
In book seven, Hector and Ajax fight until darkness, and the heralds part them. The next morning the two sides burn their dead under a truce, and the Achaeans build a wall and a trench. That is day two on my calendar, and the poem says the work was finished by sunset.
The Day Of The Scales
Book eight opens with morning in a saffron robe. Jove forbids every god to join in, and watches from Mount Ida. Until midday the fighting is even. Then he lifts his golden scales, and the Achaean side sinks.
Hector drives them back behind the wall. Teucer shoots a run of Trojans with his bow, and eight of them are named one after another. Then the sun sinks into Oceanus, and the Trojans camp on the plain, with watchfires all night.
Books nine and ten are the night. Agamemnon despairs, and Diomed and Nestor rebuke him.
An embassy of Ulysses, Ajax and Phoenix goes to Achilles with gifts. He refuses, and says he may sail home in three days. In book ten, Diomed and Ulysses catch the spy Dolon and kill him, then take the horses of the Thracian king Rhesus.
Notice the tally here. Book nine has no named deaths at all, because it is all talk. Book ten has two, and both come from that night raid.
The Longest Day
Book eleven starts with a line I can place exactly. Dawn rises from her couch beside Tithonus. I found no new dawn after it until book nineteen, so by my reading books eleven to eighteen are one single day. That is my inference, and I will say it each time.
Agamemnon cuts down Trojan after Trojan, and Butler names eight of them. Then a wound sends him off the field.
Hector takes his turn, and Butler names nine Achaeans he kills. Diomed, Ulysses, Machaon and Eurypylus are wounded too. Book twelve brings the Trojans over the wall, and Hector smashes the gate with a stone.
In book thirteen Neptune, in human shapes, rallies the Achaeans. In book fourteen Juno borrows Venus’s girdle and puts Jove to sleep, and Ajax stuns Hector with a stone. Book fifteen has Jove wake up angry. Apollo heals Hector, and the Trojans reach the ships. These five books hold eighty-two named deaths. Remember that number, because the middle of the poem is where the bodies are.
Patroclus In Borrowed Armour
Book sixteen is the hinge. Patroclus begs to wear Achilles’ armour, and Achilles agrees, with a warning to turn back once the ships are safe. Patroclus rushes in and kills Sarpedon, a Lycian ally of Troy.
He does not turn back. Apollo strikes him, a Trojan named Euphorbus wounds him, and Hector finishes him. Thirty-nine named men die in this book, the most in the poem, tied with book five.
Book seventeen is the fight over his body. Menelaus kills Euphorbus, and Hector puts on Achilles’ armour. In book eighteen, Antilochus brings the news. Achilles goes to the trench, with Minerva’s aegis on his shoulders and a flame above his head, and shouts, three times. The Trojans panic. The text says twelve of their best champions fall in the confusion.
Juno then sends the sun down, and the long day ends. All night the Achaeans mourn Patroclus, and Achilles swears he will not bury him until Hector pays. His mother has promised armour made by Vulcan.
Achilles Comes Back
Book nineteen is dawn. Achilles gives up his anger. Agamemnon hands over seven tripods, twenty cauldrons, twelve horses and seven women, and Briseis comes back too. Then Achilles arms, and in book twenty he starts killing. Butler names fourteen men he kills in that one book.
Book twenty-one drives the Trojans into the river. Achilles takes twelve young men alive, kills Lycaon, and then the river itself rises against him, until Vulcan’s fire drives it back.
Book twenty-two has one named death, and it is the one the poem was built for. Hector waits alone outside the walls. Achilles chases him three times round the city. Minerva, wearing the voice of Deiphobus, tricks Hector into standing his ground, and Achilles kills him.
Twelve Days
Now the poem slows. In book twenty-three the ghost of Patroclus asks for burial. The Achaeans gather wood, and the pyre burns all night. Then come the funeral games, with a chariot race, boxing and wrestling. There are no named deaths in this book, only prizes.
In book twenty-four, Achilles drags Hector’s body round his friend’s tomb at dawn, and Apollo shields it from harm. Mercury says it has lain twelve days by the ship. Jove says the gods have been quarrelling for nine of them. At last he sends Thetis to her son.
Priam comes to Achilles by night, and begs at his feet. They weep together, one for his son, one for his friend. Achilles agrees to hold back the war, and Priam asks for time. Nine days to mourn, the tenth to bury, the eleventh for the mound, and on the twelfth, if need be, they fight. The poem ends on the funeral of Hector tamer of horses.
The Tally
Here is what I counted. By my reading, Butler names about two hundred and thirty-two men who die in the Iliad. Treat that as approximate, because a few lines are ambiguous. Books one to eight hold seventy-six, books nine to sixteen hold one hundred and twenty-three, and the last eight books hold only thirty-three.
Eight of the twenty-four books have no named death at all. They are one, two, three, nine, eighteen, nineteen, twenty-three and twenty-four.
And here is a count from a script. I counted the name Achilles in each book. In books three to eight combined, about thirty-two thousand words, it appears nine times. In book twenty-four alone it appears sixty-two times. The hero is nearly absent, and then he is everywhere.
Is It Worth Reading
In my reading, this is a poem about anger turning into grief, and then into mercy. The last book is the best argument for the whole thing, and you can feel the nine days of the calendar tightening around it. The poem starts with Agamemnon refusing a ransom, and it ends with Achilles accepting one, and I think that is the whole point.
My honest warning is that books two, five and eleven to fifteen are long runs of names and wounds. The catalogue of ships in book two is a list. If you are short on time, read book one, then books sixteen, twenty-two and twenty-four. That gets you the quarrel, the death of Patroclus, the duel and the funeral in under a fifth of the words.
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