If you’ve ever imagined the siege of Ilium, as I did professionally for more than twenty years, I have to tell you that your imagination almost certainly was not up to the task. Mine wasn’t. The reality is far more wonderful and terrible than even the blind poet would have us see.
First of all there there is the city, Ilium, Troy, one of the great armed poleis of the ancient world—more than two miles away from the beach where I stand now but still visible and beautiful and domineering on its high ground, its tall walls lighted by thousands of torches and bonfires, its towers not quite as topless as Marlowe would have us believe, but still amazing—tall, rounded, alien, imposing.
Then there are the Achaeans and Danaans and other invaders—technically not yet “Greeks” since that nation will not come into being for more than two thousand years, but I will call them Greeks anyway—stretched mile after mile here along the shoreline. When I taught the Iliad, I told my students that the Trojan War, for all its Homeric glory, had probably been a small affair in reality—some few thousands of Greek warriors against a few thousand Trojans. Even the best informed members of the scholia—that group of Iliad scholars going back almost two millennia—estimated from the poem that there could not possibly be more than 50,000 Achaeans and other Greek warriors drawn up in their black ships along the shore.
They were wrong. Estimates now show that there are more than 250,000 attacking Greeks and about half that number of defending Trojans and their allies. Evidently every warrior hero in the Greek Isles came running to this battle—for battle meant plunder—and brought his soldiers and allies and retainers and slaves and concubines with him.
The visual impact is stunning: mile upon mile of lighted tents, campfires, sharpened-stake defenses, miles of trenches dug in the hard ground above the beaches—not for hiding and hunkering in, but as a deterrent to Trojan cavalry—and, illuminating all those miles of tents and men and shining on polished spears and bright shields, thousands of bonfires and cooking fires and corpse fires burning bright.
Corpse fires.
For the past few weeks, pestilence has been creeping through the Greek ranks, first killing donkeys and dogs, then dropping a soldier here, a servant there, until suddenly in the past ten days it has become an epidemic, slaying more Achaean and Danaan heroes than the defenders of Ilium have in months. I suspect it is typhus. The Greeks are sure it is the anger of Apollo.
I’ve seen Apollo from a distance—both on Olympos and here—and he’s a very nasty fellow. Apollo is the archer god, lord of the silver bow, “he who strikes from afar,” and while he’s the god of healing, he’s also the god of disease. More than that, he’s the principle divine ally of the Trojans in this battle, and if Apollo were to have his way, the Achaeans would be wiped out. Whether this typhoid came from the corpse-fouled rivers and other polluted water here or from Apollo’s silver bow, the Greeks are right to think that he wishes them ill.
At this moment the Achaean “lords and kings”—and every one of these Greek heroes is a sort of king or lord in his own province and in his own eyes—are gathering in a public assembly near Agamemnon’s tent to decide on a course of action to end this plague. I walk that way slowly, almost reluctantly, although after more than nine years of biding my time, tonight should be the most exciting moment of my long observation of this war. Tonight, Homer’s Iliad begins in reality.
Oh, I’ve witnessed many elements from Homer’s poem that had been poetically misplaced in time, such as the so-called Catalogue of Ships, the assembly and listing of all the Greek forces, which is in Book Two of the Iliad but which I saw take place more than nine years ago during the assembly of this military expedition at Aulis, the strait between Euboea and the Greek mainland. Or the Epipolesis, the review of the army by Agamemnon, which occurs in Book Four of Homer’s epic but which I saw take place shortly after the armies landed here near Ilium. That actual event was followed by what I used to teach as the Teichoskopia, or “View from the Wall,” in which Helen identifies the various Achaean heroes for Priam and the other Trojan leaders. The Teichoskopia appears in Book Three of the poem, but happened shortly after the landing and Epipolesis in the actual unfolding of events.
If there is an actual unfolding of events here.
At any rate, tonight is the assembly at Agamemnon’s tent and the confrontation between Agamemnon and Achilles. This is where the Iliad begins, and it should be the focus of all my energies and professional skills, but the truth is that I don’t really give a shit. Let them posture. Let them bluster. Let Achilles reach for his sword—well, I confess that I’m interested in observing that. Will Athena actually appear to stop him, or was she just a metaphor for Achilles’ common sense kicking in? I’ve waited my entire life to answer such a question and the answer is only minutes away, but, strangely, irrevocably . . . I . . . don’t . . . give . . . a . . . shit.
The nine years of painful rebirth and slow memory return and constant warfare and constant heroic posturing, not to mention my own enslavement by the gods and the Muse, have taken their toll. I’d be just as happy right now if a B-52 appeared and dropped an atomic bomb on both the Greeks and the Trojans. Fuck all these heroes and the wooden chariots they rode in on.
But I trudge toward Agamemnon’s tent. This is my job. If I don’t observe this and make my report to the Muse, it won’t mean loss of tenure for me. The gods will reduce me to the bone splinters and dusty DNA they re-created me from and that, as they say, will be that.
2
Ardis Hills, Ardis Hall
Daeman faxed into solidity near Ada’s home and blinked stupidly at the red sun on the horizon. The sky was cloudless and the sunset burned between the tall trees on the ridgeline and set both the p-ring and the e-ring glowing as they rotated in the cobalt sky. Daeman was disoriented because it was evening here and it had been morning only a second before when he faxed away from Tobi’s Second Twenty party in Ulanbat. It had been years since he visited Ada’s home, and except for those friends whom he visited most regularly—Sedman in Paris, Ono in Bellinbad, Risir in her home on the cliffs of Chom, a few others—he never had a clue as to what continent or time zone he would find himself in. But then, Daeman did not know the names or positions of the continents, much less the concepts of geography or time zones, so his very lack of knowledge meant nothing to him.
It was still disorienting. He had lost a day. Or had he gained it? At any rate, the air smelled different here—wetter, richer, wilder.
Daeman looked around. He stood in the center of a generic faxnode pad—that usual circle of permcrete and fancy iron posts topped with a yellow crystal pergola, and near the center of the circle the post holding the inevitable coded sign that he could not read. There was no other structure visible in the valley, only grass, trees, a stream in the distance, the slow revolution of both rings crossing above like the armatures of some great, slow gyroscope.
It was a warm evening, more humid than Ulanbat, and the faxpad was centered in a grassy meadow surrounded by low hills. Twenty feet beyond the pad circle stood an ancient two-person, one-wheeled, open carriole, with an equally ancient servitor floating above the driver’s nook and a single voynix standing between the wooden tongues. It had been more than a decade since Daeman had visited Ardis Hall, but now he remembered the barbaric inconvenience of all this. Absurd, not having one’s home on a faxnode.