Then swift-footed Achilleus scowled at him and said: ‘Make me no appeals, you dog, by knees or parents. 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.’

Then, dying, Hektor of the glinting helmet said to him: ‘Yes, I can tell it – I know you well, and I had no chance of swaying you: your heart is like iron in your breast. But take care now, or I may bring the gods’ anger on you, on that day when for all your bravery Paris and Phoibos Apollo will destroy you at the Skaian gates.’

THE DEATH OF ACHILLES

Posthomerica, Book III

Quintus Smyrnaeus

Translated by Alan James, 2004

This story was written around a millennium after the Homeric epics. Little is known of its author, Quintus Smyrnaeus (third century AD), other than that he came from Smyrna (modern İzmir), in what is now Turkey. He would probably have been familiar with the ancient Epic Cycle (see Story 2), which included a poem on Achilles’ death called the Aethiopis. Homer had merely foreshadowed the death of Achilles, son of Peleus, allowing later poets to imagine how the episode would have played out. Quintus Smyrnaeus dispensed with Paris and made Apollo solely responsible for Achilles’ death.

Quickly from either side on common ground converged

The tribes of Trojans and of Argives firm in the fray,

Eager for fighting now that the battle was set in motion.

There the son of Peleus destroyed a mighty host

Of his foes. All round the life-giving earth was drenched

With blood, and the waters of Xanthos and Simoeis

Were choked with corpses. Achilles still pursued and slaughtered

All the way to the city, since panic possessed the army.

He would have killed them all and dashed their gates to the ground,

Tearing them from their hinges, or would have smashed the bolts

With a sideward blow and opened a way for the Danaans

Into Priam’s city and would have plundered its wealth,

If anger had not filled the merciless heart of Phoibos

At the sight of those countless throngs of warriors slaughtered.

Down from Olympos he came with the speed of a savage beast;

Over his shoulders his quiver was filled with deadly arrows.

Facing Aiakos’ grandson he stood, while on his back

Loudly rattled his bow in its case and from his eyes

Came constant flashes of fire; the ground shook under his feet.