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BOOK TWELVE
The twelfth Book contains some of the most celebrated scenes in the Iliad:
Hektor's riposte to Pouludamas at 231-50, Sarpedon's address to Glaukos
at 310-28, and Hektor's breaking through the gates at 445-66, as well as
some notable narrative scenes such as the Trojan storming party at 256-64.
The Book also contains some of the finest Iliadic similes, the snowflakes of
278-86 and the lion of 299-306. However, these undoubted qualities of
execution exist within one of the most weakly constructed Books of the Iliad.
Yet all should have been clear: at 88-104 the Trojans divide themselves into
five battalions; the attacks of each, thought of as simultaneous but narrated
in sequence, should then have followed. The plan would have been simple,
easy to handle, and above all clear. In fact, after the assault of Asios the
storyline loses itself and only partially recovers with the attacks of Sarpedon
and Hektor. For Leaf and other analysts the immediate solution was easy:
the catalogue at 88ff. was the work of that author who 'so often interpolated
into the speeches of Nestor untimely displays of tactical erudition'. Surgery
of that kind, however, does little to remove the impression that the shape
and detail of the Achaean fortress has not been worked out in the Iliad so
well as the geography of the main battlefield.
In the scholia to the Iliad there are traces of an old controversy about the
number of gates to the Achaean fortress. Nowhere indeed are we told clearly
how many gates the poet imagined. Aristarchus wrote a monograph, TTepi
TOO vauaTdOiiOU, in which he argued that there was only one gate. As part
of that argument he had to athetize lines 175-80. Those are rather pointless
lines, but they do contain a reference to aAAcci m/Acci, i.e. at least two
more besides the one under attack. Elsewhere references to unspecific TTUAOCI
could be as easily understood to mean the gate, the single gate, as several;
for the Iliad, as Aristarchus noted (Arn/A at 9.383), does not use TTUAT| in
the singular.
How plausible is Aristarchus' suggestion in the narrative, supposing that
he has not fallen into a historicist fallacy and attributed to the poet more
precision than was ever intended? If there is a single gate, the question
arises: where was it? bT to 7.339 provide the most detailed note: uia uev fjv
iTTTrnAccTos 8TTI TO dpioTEpov TOO VOCUOT&OUOU Trpos TO 'POITEIOV (similarly
Arn/A on 12.118). Verses 118-19 do indeed state that Asios proceeded
vrjcov ITT' dpiorepd where the Achaeans were still pouring into the camp.
From his standpoint, however, 'left' would mean the Achaean right where
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