But now, when the son of devious-devising Kronos has given
me the winning of glory by the ships, to pin the Achaians
on the sea, why, fool, no longer show these thoughts to our people.(18.293-5)
'Now' is wrong: Hector's day is over, and the next will be his last.
But while the action itself is so tightly bound in a few days, the Iliad makes us feel the pressure of the
time that has gone before and will come after. Much of the long span between the quarrels on earth and
Olympus in Book 1 and the first full-scale battle well on in Book 4 is taken up in giving us some sense of
the previous nine years. Agamemnon himself admits
And now nine years of mighty Zeus have gone by, and the timbers
of our ships have rotted away and the cables are broken,
and far away our wives and our young children
are sitting within our halls and wait for us, while still our work here
stays forever unfinished ... (2.134-8)The frustration weighs heavy, and Odysseus has to remind the Greeks of Chalcas' interpretation of the
omen at Aulis, that they would take Troy only in the tenth year (2.299ff.). Then we have the marshalling
of the Achaeans, the catalogues of Greeks and Trojans, and the advance of the two armies. In Book 3 we
have Helen of Troy, the view from the walls which further introduces the Greek leaders, the attempt at
negotiations, the single combat of Paris and Menelaus, and the repetition of the fatal coupling of Paris and
Helen. In Book 4 the treachery of Pandarus re-enacts the guilt of Troy; and then at last battle is joined.
The past of the war has passed fleetingly before our eyes.
The future is almost all concentrated into two momentous events of destruction: the death of Achilles and
the sack of Troy. Though they will happen months after the end of the poem, both are made the inevitable
consequence of events within it. The death of Patroclus means the return of Achilles to battle; that means
the death of Achilles himself and the death of Hector; and that means the sack of Troy. We are made to
anticipate and envisage these future events so that imaginatively they are part of the Iliad. Of the many
previsions two of the most vivid come close to the very death of Hector. With his last words he warns
Achilles of the threat of his doom, but Achilles knows it well already and replies: 'Die: and I will take my
own death at whatever time Zeus and the rest of the immortal gods choose to accomplish it' (22.365-6).
And as Hector's corpse is dragged in the dust the lamentation goes through Troy-'It was most like what
would have happened, if all lowering Ilion had been burning top to bottom in fire' (22. 410-11).
The poem is rounded off by the meeting of Priam and Achilles which leads to the burial of Hector 'and on
the twelfth day we shall fight again, if so we must do' (24. 667). The poem is opened by the visit to the
Greek camp of another old man who comes to ransom his child; and the speculation that Chryses was
invented to counterbalance Priam is hard to resist. The few days in between are in no way a snippet from
the Trojan saga, but stand for the whole war from the crime of Paris to the ashes of Troy.