24.159–199

The goddess materializes in the midst of a familiar tableau, with mourners surrounding the old king in his palace:

παῖδες μὲν πατέρ᾽ ἀμφὶ καθήμενοι ἔνδοθεν αὐλῆς
δάκρυσιν εἵματ᾽ ἔφυρον, ὃ δ᾽ ἐν μέσσοισι γεραιὸς
ἐντυπὰς ἐν χλαίνῃ κεκαλυμμένος: ἀμφὶ δὲ πολλὴ
κόπρος ἔην κεφαλῇ τε καὶ αὐχένι τοῖο γέροντος
τήν ῥα κυλινδόμενος καταμήσατο χερσὶν ἑῇσι.

The children sat around their father inside the hall,
soaking their clothes with tears, and the old man
sat in the middle, veiled, smothered in his mantle;
and dung was all over the old man’s head and neck,
which he smeared on with his hands, rolling in the dirt.

Iliad 24.161–65

Priam’s response to losing Hector is typical of grieving figures. Sinking to the ground, then covering himself with excrement, the old king symbolically moves toward his dead son, who is now “dumb earth” (cf. κωφὴν … γαῖαν, 49), and he will soon push away the living as he sets out for the Greek camp (239–46). He is “mortifying” himself, in the strict sense of the word, rendering himself dead (Latin mors, “death”+ facio, “make” or “do”). That symbolic status will be apt when he enters the Greek camp, as we will soon see.

We are reminded of Achilles’s earlier response to the news of Patroclus’s death:

ὣς φάτο, τὸν δ᾽ ἄχεος νεφέλη ἐκάλυψε μέλαινα:
ἀμφοτέρῃσι δὲ χερσὶν ἑλὼν κόνιν αἰθαλόεσσαν
χεύατο κὰκ κεφαλῆς, χαρίεν δ᾽ ᾔσχυνε πρόσωπον:
νεκταρέῳ δὲ χιτῶνι μέλαιν᾽ ἀμφίζανε τέφρη.
αὐτὸς δ᾽ ἐν κονίῃσι μέγας μεγαλωστὶ τανυσθεὶς
κεῖτο, φίλῃσι δὲ χερσὶ κόμην ᾔσχυνε δαΐζων.

So [Antilochus] spoke, and a black cloud of pain covered him,
and gathering grimy dust with both hands,
he poured it over his head, and fouled his handsome face,
and black ashes settled on his fragrant tunic.
Stretched out on the sand, great in his greatness.
he lay, and tearing his hair with his hands, he defiled it.

Iliad 18.22–27

Achilles too moves downward, a physical expression of his own sudden descent from the over-weaning pride and arrogance that led to Patroclus’s death. In his case, the mortification has extra significance, since he has sought, abetted by Thetis, to defy the limitations imposed by mortality and will soon take that defiance to new and frightening extremes in his pursuit of Hector. The parallels between Achilles’s and Priam as mourners might seem unlikely, as they are sworn enemies. But Zeus means to bring them together, because neither can be healed without acknowledging their kinship as suffering mortals.

Iris’s sudden appearance frightens Priam, whose knees begin to shake. Encountering a god can be unnerving for humans, since they face an omnipotent being who can change their life—or end it—in an instant, and the gods’ purposes are always inscrutable to mortals. Though Priam’s fear seems to show the poet preparing to highlight the dramatic potential in the scene, Iris takes care to reassure the old man, standing close and speaking softly in his ear, rather than making a spectacular entrance and using Priam’s fear to achieve Zeus’s aims. Her mission is to get the king moving, so that for him as for Achilles, the healing power of love can finally prevail over searing hatred in the poem’s final resolution. The movement from now on will be toward transcending the apparent divide between the two sides of the conflict.

Given that overriding imperative, it might be surprising that when he speaks to Hecuba about Iris’s message, he will omit Zeus’s reassurance that no harm will come to him from Achilles (194–99). Here the storyteller’s instinct for drama overrides consistency and verisimilitude. If the king feels serenely confident in Zeus’s protection and says as much to those around him, the urgency leaks out of the mission. We must experience Priam’s night journey as perilous and possibly life-threatening, holding our attention in the moment and making the tone match the mythical paradigm he has planned for it. The key to his purposes lies in the figure of Hermes.

Hermes has two roles in early Greek myth, both of which follow from his position as a deity associated with boundaries (cf. ἕρμα, “boundary stone”). He can be a trickster figure, crossing over boundaries and making trouble. This version appears in the sixth-century hexameter poem, the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, about how the baby god, just one day old, steals the cattle of Apollo and gets the attention of Zeus, leading to a gain in status, from a lowly cave in the Arcadian mountains to a place among the other Olympian gods. The second role is as the guide of souls to the Underworld. We see both versions reflected in the Odyssey, the first when the god gives Odysseus a magic drug, moly, which nullifies the power of Circe and allows him to enter her house—and bed—unharmed (Od. 10.275–310), the second when he leads the souls of the dead suitors to the Underworld at the end of the poem (Od. 24.1–204). Priam’s encounter with Hermes draws on both roles of the god to charge the old man’s journey with powerful mythic overtones.

Further Reading

Hyde, L. 1998. Trickster Makes This World, 203–225. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Van Nortwick, T. 2008. Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture, 25–27. Westport, CT: Praeger.