The Madman Fights a River

 The Madman Fights a River

One of the most unusual events in Homer’s Iliad takes place in Book XXI when Achilles took on the Scamander/Xanthus River in one-on-one combat. Achilles had been overcome with a fit of uncontrollable rage caused by the death of his dear friend Patroclus at the hands of the Trojan Hector. Achilles chased half the enemy fighters across the plain back towards their city and the other half he trapped in the Xanthus River.

They came to the ford of the fair-flowing river, the eddying Xanthus that Zeus had created and there Achilles cleaved them asunder, one half of them he drove across the plain towards the city where the Achaeans had fled in great fear the day before when glorious Hector was raging about. A number of them poured forth to take flight and Hera spread before them a thick mist to help restrain them. The other half of them he trapped in the deep-flowing silver-eddying river. They flung themselves into the river with a great crash and the banks of the river resounded with noise and with much noise they thrashed around swimming this way and that in the whirling eddies. Just like when locusts flee on the wing to escape the onrush of a fire and fly into a stream and it scorches them with its sudden coming and they shrink into the water, even so in front of Achilles was the roaring stream of the deep-eddying Xanthus filled in utter confusion with both chariots and men.

He took time out from his slaughter of the Trojans to capture 12 of their young men and had them bound and sent back to the Greek encampment so that they could later be sacrificed on the funeral pyre of Patroclus. Also in a cold-hearted fashion, he slew Lycaon, who was a son of Priam, and threw then his body into the river so that it could be swept away and the Trojan prince would be denied the privilege of a solemn and ritual funeral. Asteropaeus, the son of Pelegon, suffered the same ignoble fate at the hands of Achilles. Achilles killed so many Trojans that the river became clogged with corpses to the extent that the Xanthus (Scamander) begged him to stop.

Swift Achilles would have slain more of the Paeonians, had the deep-eddying river not got angry and called out to him in the guise of a man, sending forth a voice from out the deep eddy. “O Achilles, you are stronger than most men and you do more harm than them for surely the gods always help you. If that is so, the son of Cronos has given you the power to slay all the men of Troy for you drive them all from my waters and you do your baneful work on the plain. My lovely stream is now full of corpses and my waters are unable to flow to the bright sea, being choked with the bodies of all those whom you have slain so ruthlessly. That is enough O leader of the people for I am filled with horror.”

In desperation the river mounted an attack against Achilles and unleashed its massive waves and torrents against the hero in an attempt to drown him.

As many times as the swift-footed Achilles tried to make a stand against him and to find out if all the gods in heaven were trying to put him to rout, just as many times would the divine-born river beat on his shoulders with its great flood. He would spring up on high with great vexation in his heart and the river kept tiring his knees beneath him with its great flow and kept on taking his feet from under him.

The hero fought the water itself and nearly lost to the divine forces of nature. Achilles invoked the gods of heaven to come to his aid and to prevent him from suffering the ignoble death of drowning:

Looking up to the wide heavens, the son of Peleus uttered a loud cry. “Father Zeus, how is it that not one of the gods takes pity on me and comes to rescue me from the river? Thereafter, let whatever is to happen to me take place. I do not blame any of the other gods of the heavens so much, only my dear mother who deceived me by saying that I would die under the wall of the well-armoured Trojans having been cut down by the swift missiles of Apollo. It would have been better if Hector had killed me, he who is the best man here, for then a brave man would have been the killer and a brave man would have been killed. But now a sad death awaits me, cut off and drowned in a great river like a young swineherd who is swept away by the torrent as he tries to cross the river in the wintertime.”

            The goddess Hera intervened as she watched him struggle with the river from her vantage point on Mount Olympus. She sent her son Hephaestus, the god of fire, to combat the river. Hephaestus burned the banks of the river and boiled its water until the river god agreed to give up his efforts to aid the Trojans.

The mighty river was set ablaze as well and he called out to the god by name. “Hephaestus, there is no god who is strong enough to be able to contend with you and I have no wish to fight against you, all ablaze as you are. Stay your strife and permit the godlike Achilles to drive the Trojans out of their city. What part do I play in fighting or in offering assistance?”

Thus he spoke burning with fire and his fair streams were boiling over, just like when a cauldron boils when set on a fierce flame and it melts the lard of a fattened hog and bubbles away on all sides and dry kindling is set beneath it, so did the fire burn in his fair streams and the water seethed. Nor was he of a mind to flow forward but was stayed back for the blast of the inventive Hephaestus oppressed him.

            Achilles doing battle with the River Xanthus was an unusual event, to say the least. Its real significance lies in the fact that it underscored a peak moment in the wrath of Achilles, showing him as a force so powerful that he disrupted the natural order. When he faced the elements that warred against him, he was reminded of his own mortality and begged the gods to be allowed the kind of death that was worthy of a hero.

            With this event, we find Achilles at the zenith of his uncontrollable rage and grief over the death of Patroclus. These were not the actions of a normal human in normal circumstances. His actions depicted a character driven by trauma to the extent that he abandoned mortal norms and attempts to defy divine limits. Achilles had become dysfunctional, a madman. He had been consumed by grief and lashed out at nature itself. We have a picture in our minds of a madman beating his head against a wall, but Achilles lacked a wall. He did however have a river and in a complete lack of self-control, he attacked it as if it were a mortal enemy. With his complete disregard for social and heroic norms, he demonstrated a psychopathic abandonment of empathy and respect for human life and reverence for the dead. He broke the traditional heroic code and became a destructive force that the gods had to contain. In a blind and berserk rage, and likely suffering what today we would call PTSD, this mortal took on an immortal foe, an impossible task and one which almost led to his demise. Only divine intervention could save him.

            The madman Achilles fighting the river symbolized the hero’s total surrender to raw emotion, an emotion that changed his grief over the death of his friend into a destructive and shameful force that, for a time, rendered him less than human. In his fall from grace, the wrath of Achilles turned him from super-hero to anti-hero. It would take the tears of Priam to bring him back from this brink of shamefulness.