Couples Therapy For the Gods
The Five-Minute Iliad, #4
This is another ongoing series as I do a slow-read of THE ILIAD by Homer, translated by Rouse. Previous installments include book 1, 2, and 3.
Zeus and Hera are pretty messed up.
The war isn’t going well, and the parents of the gods know that they can’t keep working directly against each other and expect to succeed. They both have their favorites and unfortunately for Hera, Zeus’s favorite city is Ilios (Troy). They open book 4 with an argument over who gets to prevail here, and it’s as ugly a marital spat as anything you might see in the trailer park—provided you haven’t seen lightning and thunder in the trailer park, created ex nihilo.
Zeus openly declares his intention to support King Priam and Troy. Hera, who is of the same birth and standing as Zeus, offers him any of her favorite cities in return and promises not to defend them if he wants to destroy them, he just has to give up on Troy. (She seriously offers him Argos, Sparta, and Mycenai.)
Hera succeeds in nagging her husband into compliance and Zeus eventually agrees to let her manipulate the Trojans into breaking the pact they just made with the Achaians; as long as Paris is kept away from Menelaus, Menelaus can’t kill him, and until one of the two is dead, the armies can’t honorably engage one another. (Honor’s a big deal so they abide by it.)
Ergo, someone needs to screw up.
Enter Athena, Again.
The Greeks and Trojans both witness Athena coming down from Olympus and they get a little stoked. Things are happening! She favors our side…no, she favors our side! I guess we’ll see!
No, you won’t see, because Athena pulls a divine chameleon act and disguises herself as a soldier so she can move among the Trojan army. She finds an archer by the name of Pandaros and starts putting the charm on him, hyping him up to do something really stupid. Before long he’s pulling out his prized bow, lining up an arrow, and taking a shot at Menelaus from not too great a distance (“He let himself be persuaded, poor fool!”)
As soon as the arrow flies, that same Athena crosses the battlefield and deflects the arrow from its lethal destination, instead embedding it in Menelaus’ belt buckle so that it nicks his flesh but doesn’t wound him. The Greeks see their champion bleed, see the Trojan arrow sticking out of his clothes, and know the pact has been violated.
The “it” switch has officially been flipped into the “on” position. Agamemnon sends for a surgeon to stitch up Menelaus, and then both sides draw their weapons for an earnest, blood-in-the-sand fight. Agamemnon talks some trash, Odysseus stands up for himself, and there’s some “poetic negotiating” to get the men motivated to scrap, but scrap they do, and soon both Greek and Trojan are stacking bodies. You might not know this, but Odysseus is pretty good at fighting, and I suspect that’ll come in handy with things he has to tackle later in life.
But yeah, for now, things have just gotten increasingly real. Most people just have another kid when they’re having marital problems; Zeus and Hera like to stir the pot harder than that.
Go read my boy’s adventure novel FOSSIL FORCE, set in the Utah desert, featuring four friends who use ancient power armors to defend the surface from a hollow-earth invasion.
Love reading this ancient Greek stuff. Thanks.