24.228–264

The old king will try to bend the fierce will of his enemy with material riches, a situation we have seen more than once in the poem. Agamemnon sends his ambassadors to Achilles in Book 9, offering gold, silver, tripods, cauldrons, horses, and slave women from Lesbos and Troy, including Briseis, the captive women the two men fought during their quarrel in Book 1. And when they return to Greece, he will throw in seven cities and even one of his own daughters (9.121–61). Achilles scorns the offer. His honor is not for sale. (9.308–429). Later, after Patroclus has been killed, Agamemnon tries again to patch things up, but Achilles, now consumed with exacting revenge from Hector, has moved beyond the first dispute over honor and dismisses the offer with the equivalent of “whatever” (19.144–53).

Given the failure of these offers, we do not expect Priam to be any more successful than Agamemnon. The poet’s sole aim here was never to answer the question, “What is Achilles’s price?” The larger underlying issue, beginning with the quarrel in Book 1, has been on how to evaluate a human life. Is Agamemnon worthy of more status than Achilles because he is the leader of the expedition, or is Achilles’s fighting skill, based on the qualities he was born with—some of them due to his divine mother, presumably—more worthy? Paris and Helen are both exceptionally beautiful. Should this be valued more than, say, Odysseus’s intelligence? And if their beauty incites envy or even scorn in others, is it their fault or are the gods, who gave them these gifts, to blame? When Hector attacks his brother in Book 3 for being a cowardly womanizer, Paris replies:

μή μοι δῶρ᾽ ἐρατὰ πρόφερε χρυσέης Ἀφροδίτης:
οὔ τοι ἀπόβλητ᾽ ἐστὶ θεῶν ἐρικυδέα δῶρα
ὅσσά κεν αὐτοὶ δῶσιν, ἑκὼν δ᾽ οὐκ ἄν τις ἕλοιτο.

Do not throw in my face the lovely gifts of golden Aphrodite;
not to be thrown aside are the glorious gifts of the gods,
given of their own free will, even if we were to choose them willingly.

Iliad 3.64–66

In the mouth of Paris, given what we know of his past actions (and inaction), these words sound self-serving. But the ideas here will resurface in the most important speech in the poem, Achilles’s magisterial reply to Priam (24.517–51), and provide the key to unlocking some of the Iliad’s most profound wisdom. Priam is famous for his riches, but the loss of his son has him writhing in the dirt. Achilles, semi-divine, an invincible fighter, articulate and beautiful, everything that mortals are supposed to strive to be, is crumbling under the weight of misery and self-loathing as he yearns for Patroclus. Only when the two men reach out to console each other in Achilles’s hut will they find some relief.

The treasures assembled, Priam turns his anger on the Trojans who have gathered. Don’t they have family of their own to mourn? Now that Hector is dead, they, failures and disgraces, will be easy prey for the Achaeans when they sack Troy. Not he:

                                                 αὐτὰρ ἔγωγε
πρὶν ἀλαπαζομένην τε πόλιν κεραϊζομένην τε
ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ἰδεῖν βαίην δόμον Ἄϊδος εἴσω.

                                                                             Yet I,
before I see my city destroyed and people destroyed,
would sooner go down into the house of Hades.

Iliad 24.243–45

Verbal abuse turns into a physical assault, as the old king drives his subjects away, beating them with a stick. His fury fixes now on his remaining nine sons, liars, experts in singing and dancing, eating up the food of others. They can at least get his wagon ready.

As he prepares to make his way toward the Greek camp, Priam mirrors no one so much as Achilles. Both men are isolated by their own choice from ordinary citizens and those closest to them, angry and scornful of lesser men; both are driven by their grief, away from the living and toward the dead. The unlikely convergence of the two, marked first by their mortification (18.22–27; 24.163–65), then by anger and alienation from loved ones, will culminate in a mysterious union between implacable enemies. As we have seen, movement from place to place in the poem, for gods or mortals, can be marked by a single verse or, if the journey itself is a vehicle for adding meaning to a passage, a more elaborate description. The night journey of Priam falls into the latter category. The poet layers the episode with multiple levels of meaning, so that the passage of the old man across the plain moves the story toward the thematic synthesis that concludes with the burial of Hector.

Further Reading

Van Nortwick, T. 1992. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero’s Journey in Ancient Epic, 76–79. New York: Oxford University Press.