hector's white bones in soft robes of purple

Orestes and Electra

Charles-André van Loo, 1705-1765

Venus requesting Vulcan to make arms for Aeneas, ca.1735

αἲ γάρ πως αὐτόν με μένος καὶ θυμὸς ἀνήη ὤμʼ ἀποταμνόμενον κρέα ἔδμεναι, οἷα ἔοργας, ὡς οὐκ ἔσθʼ ὃς σῆς γε κύνας κεφαλῆς ἀπαλάλκοι, οὐδʼ εἴ κεν δεκάκις τε καὶ εἰκοσινήριτʼ ἄποινα στήσωσʼ ἐνθάδʼ ἄγοντες, ὑπόσχωνται δὲ καὶ ἄλλα, οὐδʼ εἴ κέν σʼ αὐτὸν χρυσῷ ἐρύσασθαι ἀνώγοι Δαρδανίδης Πρίαμος· οὐδʼ ὧς σέ γε πότνια μήτηρ ἐνθεμένη λεχέεσσι γοήσεται ὃν τέκεν αὐτή, ἀλλὰ κύνες τε καὶ οἰωνοὶ κατὰ πάντα δάσονται. I wish I could eat you myself, that the fury in my heart would drive me to cut you in pieces and eat your flesh raw, for all that you have done to me. So no man is going to keep the dogs away from your head, not even if they bring here and weigh out ten times or twenty times your ransom, not even if Dardanian Priam offers to pay your own weight in gold. Not even so will your honoured mother lay you on the bier and mourn for you, her own child, but the dogs and birds will share you for their feast and leave nothing.

Shakespeare’s hugely condensed version of their encounter is, as we have seen, entirely different, reducing many pages of exchanged speeches, sallies and divine intervention into an ignominious few lines. All the same, Achilles seems to echo remotely the Homeric original. Immediately after the speech quoted above, the retreat sounds, and Achilles speaks again:

The dragon wing of night o’erspreads the earth And, stickler-like, the armies separates. My half-supped sword, that frankly would have fed, Pleased with this dainty bait, thus goes to bed.

Both the sentiment and even the construction here (‘would have fed’) recalls Achilles’ final speech to Hector in Iliad 22, ‘I wish I could eat you myself’. The one element of the Homeric scene that is retained is the most monstrous.

Chapman did not publish his version of Iliad 22 until 1611, but I don’t think that means we need to assume that Shakespeare was looking directly at the Greek. It is much more likely that, when he decided to write a fashionably Homeric play, he consulted some kind of Latin edition. In fact, even a version as compressed as the Ilias Latina could have given him this particular detail, since this is one of the handful of passages that the Ilias Latina translates quite closely:

Quid mea supplicibus temptas inflectere dictis pectora, quem possem direptum more ferarum, si sineret natura, meis absumere malis? Te uero tristesque ferae cunctaeque uolucres diripient, auidosque canes tua uiscera pascent. “Why do you try with your words of supplication to bend my heart, you whom I could, like wild beasts their prey, consume, if nature allowed it, in return for all my suffering? For sure, the grim beasts and all the birds will tear you apart, and the hungry dogs feast on your entrails.”

Helen, her women, and Menelaus. Athenian red-figure dinos fragment, attributed to the Copenhagen Painter, 500 to 450 BC.

A marble relief from Herculaneum. Achilles scrapes rust from his spear into the wound of Telephus.