24.776–804

Nine days pass while they do their work, then on the tenth, the hero goes into the earth. These last solemn acts roll out in a steady rhythm, the familiar hexameter phrases coming back once more, as if the traditional style, evolving over centuries of repetition, could carry us through the sadness of the funeral:

ἦμος δ᾽ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς,
τῆμος ἄρ᾽ ἀμφὶ πυρὴν κλυτοῦ Ἕκτορος ἔγρετο λαός.
αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ᾽ ἤγερθεν ὁμηγερέες τ᾽ ἐγένοντο
πρῶτον μὲν κατὰ πυρκαϊὴν σβέσαν αἴθοπι οἴνῳ
πᾶσαν, ὁπόσσον ἐπέσχε πυρὸς μένος: αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα
ὀστέα λευκὰ λέγοντο κασίγνητοί θ᾽ ἕταροί τε
μυρόμενοι, θαλερὸν δὲ κατείβετο δάκρυ παρειῶν.
καὶ τά γε χρυσείην ἐς λάρνακα θῆκαν ἑλόντες
πορφυρέοις πέπλοισι καλύψαντες μαλακοῖσιν.
αἶψα δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἐς κοίλην κάπετον θέσαν, αὐτὰρ ὕπερθε
πυκνοῖσιν λάεσσι κατεστόρεσαν μεγάλοισι:
ῥίμφα δὲ σῆμ᾽ ἔχεαν, περὶ δὲ σκοποὶ ἥατο πάντῃ,
μὴ πρὶν ἐφορμηθεῖεν ἐϋκνήμιδες Ἀχαιοί.

When early-born, rosy-fingered Dawn appeared,
then the people gathered around the pyre of famous Hector;
but when they were gathered in one place and all together,
first they quenched the fire’s embers with gleaming wine,
all of it, as much as the force of the fire held; but then
Hector’s brothers and companions gathered the white bones,
grieving, and warm tears flowed down their cheeks.
And lifting them they placed them in a golden urn,
covered all around with soft purple robes.
Swiftly they set the urn into a hollow grave,
and over it they piled huge, closely-packed stones;
quickly they poured a funeral barrow; around it guards sat
all night, lest the well-greaved Achaeans attack too soon

Iliad 24.788–800

The pace is unhurried, with a strong coincidence of verse structure and sentence structure. No verse ends with a harsh break in the syntax of the sentence. The meaning is carefully articulated by temporal markers: ἦμος … τῆμος … αὐτὰρ ἐπεί … πρῶτον … αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα. Like the soft robes that cover Hector’s remains, a soothing regularity wraps these final rituals.

Priam has Achilles’s promise to hold back the Greeks for eleven days, but the poet keeps a residual edginess in the all-night vigil of the guards around the burial site. Once the funeral mound is poured, the Trojans can finally leave their hero to his rest:

χεύαντες δὲ τὸ σῆμα πάλιν κίον: αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα
εὖ συναγειρόμενοι δαίνυντ᾽ ἐρικυδέα δαῖτα
δώμασιν ἐν Πριάμοιο διοτρεφέος βασιλῆος.
ὣς οἵ γ᾽ ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο.

They piled up the grave barrow and went away; but then
coming together they enjoyed a glorious meal
in the home of Priam, the king nourished by Zeus.
So they buried Hector, tamer of horses.

Iliad 24.801–4

The Iliad begins in the Greek camp and ends in Troy. Anger and the threat of violence provide the energy to propel us into the story, winding up the plot. The last scenes, by contrast, play out quietly. A somber dignity informs the last rites for Hector, a gentle diminuendo ending with ἱπποδάμοιο the epithet that celebrates his power to civilize by taming the wild energy of horses to build a community, instead of the metrically interchangeable ἀνδροφόνοιο, the emblem of his warrior’s strength. But the quiet is only temporary. The war will resume on the twelfth day, making these last verses a fleeting respite, followed soon, so the later stories tell us, by the death of Achilles and the fiery destruction of Troy.

The feast that brings the Trojans together for one last meal is held in the palace of Priam, διοτρεφέος βασιλῆος, “king nourished by Zeus.” Homer leaves us with a challenge: how can we understand the “nurture” that Zeus provides his loyal king? Richmond Lattimore translates the phrase, “king under God’s hand,” suggesting that we see the epithet as marking the same mixture of tenderness and violence we find in the series of passages in the last six books of the poem featuring the touch of a hand (18.317; 23.18; 24.369–70, 374, 507–17, 671–72). (see essay on 24.468–506) As always, the purposes of the gods remain mysterious.

Conclusion

The end of a story marks a boundary, which creates a final shape for the narrative, and that shape generates meaning. Why does the Iliad end where and as it does? The proem asks the Muse to sing through the poet the μῆνις of Achilles, with all its baneful effects, but that rage, however destructive, is not the ultimate focus of the Iliad. Rather, the source of the emotion, especially within Achilles, holds the key to understanding what the poem has to teach us about human experience. Achilles is a liminal figure, straddling the boundary between god and human, who struggles to accept the limits that come with his mortal nature. His anger is profoundly existential, provoked by his inability to understand himself as fully human. The narrative patterns that inform his portrait in the poem, the Withdrawal and Return of the Hero, the Second-Self motif, and the action of grief, all imply an acceptance of limits, and those paradigms come to fruition in Book 24. When Achilles gives the body of Hector back to Priam, the thematic structure of his evolution comes to its conclusion. His last two great speeches mark a new level of understanding in him, of his mortal existence (and by extension, ours) and the perspective that condition suggests. Why then, does the poem end in Troy? Why is our last glimpse of Achilles not in bed, alongside Briseis once again (676)? We must hear verses 677-804 because they offer us one last look at what can be lost when humans allow anger, pride, and arrogance to blind them to their true selves. The compassion that Achilles shows to Priam is the quality in him that is scorched away by anger and can only return to him when he has let go of the desire to transcend his mortal nature. It’s appearance also marks a fundamental truth of our condition as humans: we can only truly love another when we have come to know ourselves. So the Iliad comes to rest in injunction most often associated with Greek wisdom: know thyself.

Further Reading

Edwards, M. 1987. Homer: Poet of the Iliad, 315-316. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Nagler, M. 1974. Spontaneity and Tradition: The Oral Art of Homer, 197–198. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Schein, S. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad, 168-195. 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, 86-88. New York: Oxford University Press.

Whitman, C. 1958. Homer and The Heroic Tradition, 218–220. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.