24.596–642

It is evening, and Achilles pledges that Priam will be able to set out for home at dawn. The two men seem to have finished their business together, but it remains for the implications of their encounter to be worked out. Achilles’s first speech to Priam reflected a radical change in his understanding of himself and his place in the world. Now he looks through that new lens at everything that has happened since he turned his deadly μῆνις against Agamemnon and explores how his new perspective offers a wider context for his actions. His words will complete the double consolation and extend its meaning far beyond the two men.

The second speech mirrors the structure of the first, with a mythical paradigm framed by the invitation to eat, but the initial resemblance can be misleading. The description of the two jars of Zeus supplies a new context for understanding Achilles’s behavior, which undermines the justification he has given earlier for his anger and desire for vengeance. Niobe’s story is less straightforward, a compressed and elusive narrative that interacts with the story of Priam and Achilles on multiple levels. The point of contact between the outer story of Priam and Achilles and the inner narrative of the myth is the need for nourishment the two men must eat to renew their participation in human life, an important stage in the progress of each through the process of grief. They must eat to be strong, to “bear up,” as Achilles has urged in his first speech. Niobe too grieves the loss of children and, we are told, must “remember nourishment” (607), but the remainder of her story reflects the poem’s major themes more opaquely.

Though Niobe remembered food, we have no further context for that sustenance, no other humans as companions in her consolation. The one other mention of eating in her story touches on an idea we have seen before, that grief, like sex, sleeping, and eating, provides nourishment that humans need (see above, p.10). Because she compared herself to a god, Apollo and Artemis have killed her six children, who have lain unburied for nine days, since the gods “made the people into stone” (611). On the tenth day the gods buried them, and we hear again that Niobe remembered food, as she wore herself out pouring down tears. Suddenly, Niobe herself becomes stone, a lonely cliff in the mountains, where she “digests her sorrows from the gods:” θεῶν ἐκ κήδεα πέσσει (617). Priam will soon echo Achilles’s injunction to eat, recalling how, as he waited for Achilles’s to release Hector’s body, αἰεὶ στενάχω καὶ κήδεα μυρία πέσσω, “always I groaned and digested my countless sorrows” (639).

Niobe, like Achilles, pays a terrible price for claiming equality with the gods. Her final petrified state, with mountain streams running across her “face,” evokes a persistent image that reverberates across the poem, of tears flowing across hard rock. Both Agamemnon and Patroclus, fearful as the Trojans threaten to overrun the Greek camp, pour down tears “like a dark-watered spring,” χέων ὥς τε κρήνη μελάνυδρος (9.14 = 16.3). The horses of Achilles, after their charioteer Patroclus dies, refuse to move:

ἀλλ᾽ ὥς τε στήλη μένει ἔμπεδον, ἥ τ᾽ ἐπὶ τύμβῳ
ἀνέρος ἑστήκῃ τεθνηότος ἠὲ γυναικός,
ὣς μένον ἀσφαλέως περικαλλέα δίφρον ἔχοντες
οὔδει ἐνισκίμψαντε καρήατα: δάκρυα δέ σφι
θερμὰ κατὰ βλεφάρων χαμάδις ῥέε μυρομένοισιν
ἡνιόχοιο πόθῳ: θαλερὴ δ᾽ ἐμιαίνετο χαίτη
ζεύγλης ἐξεριποῦσα παρὰ ζυγὸν ἀμφοτέρωθεν.

But they stood fast like a funeral monument, which stands
, so they remained, holding the beautiful chariot still,
leaning their heads along the ground, and warm
tears flowed to the ground from under their eyelids as they
longed for their charioteer. And their soft manes were sullied
as they flowed down the yoke on either side of the yoke pad.

Iliad 17.434–40

If we hear an echo of Ἀχιλλεύς in Ἀχελώϊον (616), as some scholars have suggested, then the poem’s final vision of Niobe holds in suspension a rich and evocative collection of themes.

The precise meaning of all the ideas and images compressed into Niobe’s story is probably unrecoverable. But we can say that Achilles’s speech encapsulates central themes in the poem, the jealousy and awful power of the gods, the dangers of human pride, the love of parents, sometimes unwittingly destructive of their children, the suffering of the innocent, the horror of unburied corpses. The katabasis motif, insofar as it informs Priam’s journey to ransom his son’s body, casts Achilles in a transcendent role, as the lord of the Underworld, lending a somewhat detached, almost magisterial perspective to his first speech. As he weaves his images together here in his last vision, Achilles assumes a different kind of transcendence, that of the poet, recreating the entire poem in a dense but powerful complex of meaning, expressive but finally mysterious.

Spurred by Priam to make contact with the mortal world of his father, Achilles reimagined the meaning of his life and his place in the larger order of the universe in his first speech, then in the second re-envisioned the poem from that new perspective, so that it became an argument for the acceptance of mortality as the definitive human condition, the final stage of the double consolation. After the speech, the style and tone of the poem settle back from this exalted level to accommodate a more familiar setting. Achilles plays the role of host, preparing shared meal for the two men, described in the deliberate, measured and largely traditional language that dominates the rest of the poem. After the meal the mysterious union of Priam and Achilles reaches its zenith. From hatred to simple acceptance to admiration is a major journey in the world of the Iliad. Now the poet strips their relationship down yet further, to silent wonder:

αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ πόσιος καὶ ἐδητύος ἐξ ἔρον ἕντο,
ἤτοι Δαρδανίδης Πρίαμος θαύμαζ᾽ Ἀχιλῆα
ὅσσος ἔην οἷός τε: θεοῖσι γὰρ ἄντα ἐῴκει:
αὐτὰρ ὃ Δαρδανίδην Πρίαμον θαύμαζεν Ἀχιλλεὺς
εἰσορόων ὄψίν τ᾽ ἀγαθὴν καὶ μῦθον ἀκούων.

But when they had quenched their desire for food and drink,
Priam, son of Dardanos, gazed in wonder at Achilles,
his size and his beauty; for he seemed equal to the gods.
But Achilles wondered in turn at Priam, son of Dardanos,
seeing his brave countenance and hearing him speak.

Iliad 24.628–32

And finally, rest. They have “enjoyed” (τάρπησαν, 633) looking at each other, and Priam has one last request:

λέξον νῦν με τάχιστα διοτρεφές, ὄφρα καὶ ἤδη
ὕπνῳ ὕπο γλυκερῷ ταρπώμεθα κοιμηθέντες:

Put me to bed now, beloved of Zeus, so that
we may lie down and take pleasure from sweet sleep.

Iliad 24.635–36

The enjoyment the two will have parallels the process of grief, also something to be “enjoyed,” like eating and sex, in the world of the poem.

Further Reading

Nagler, M. 1974. Spontaneity and Tradition: The Oral Art of Homer, 193–195. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Schein, S. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad, 32–33. Berkeley. University of California Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 1992. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero’s Journey in Ancient Epic, 83–84. New York: Oxford University Press.