How the Iliad Ends

Anyone who comes to the Iliad expecting the end of the Trojan War will not find it. The poem does not end with the fall of the city, nor with the wooden horse, nor with the death of Achilles. It ends with a funeral, that of Hector. This choice by Homer is the key to understanding what the poem meant to say from its very first line.

What the Iliad leaves out

To understand the ending, it is helpful first to know what the Iliad leaves out. It does not recount the abduction of Helen, it does not tell of the wooden horse offered by the Greeks, it does not narrate the death of Achilles, nor does it mention Achilles' heel. The poem covers only the final weeks of the war's last year. Those who listened to Homer already knew the story of Troy; what held their attention was how things unfolded.

And the poem announces in its very first line the path the entire work will follow: mênin áeide, "sing, goddess, the wrath." It is not the war in general, nor any ordinary hero. It is the rage of Achilles.

The ending: from Hector's funeral to the final line

Achilles' rage reaches its end in Book XXIV. After killing Hector, he drags the body around the tomb of Patroclus for twelve days, and only stops when Priam, the old king of Troy, enters his tent by night and asks for his son back. What happens there is the subject of another article, why Achilles weeps before Priam. What matters here is what follows.

Achilles returns the body to Priam and grants a truce for the funeral. According to what Priam asks and Achilles accepts, there are nine days of mourning at home, the pyre on the tenth, the burial mound on the eleventh, and the war resumes only on the twelfth, if necessary. The Trojans carry out every step: they lay Hector on the pyre, quench the fire with wine, gather the white bones into a golden urn, cover it with stones, and raise the burial mound, posting watchmen in case the Greeks attack before the appointed time. Then, a feast in Priam's palace.

The poem concludes in Book XXIV, line 804: "Such was the burial of Hector, breaker of horses." It is a line without victory and without a city in flames.

What this ending reveals

The poem that begins with rage, with the wrath of a warrior, ends with the burial of his enemy. The same figure opens and closes the work, Achilles, but what brings it to a close is not his battle cry: it is the rite of those who lost.

There are two things to notice. The first is that the ending restores to Hector what the poem had stripped from him, his funeral. In Book XXII, Achilles had refused any pact and threatened to leave the body to the dogs; to deny burial was, to the Greeks, an immense outrage. It is the right to bury one's own dead, a theme Sophocles would later revisit in Antigone. The second is that the final line speaks of Hector, in Troy, among the Trojans. The epithet "breaker of horses" is the same one the poem had used for him in life, amid the chase around the springs. The book of the Greeks ends by honoring a Trojan.

What the ending leaves open

The ending does not resolve everything. The fall of Troy and the death of Achilles are foretold within the poem, and Hector himself, as he dies, declares that Achilles will fall beside the Scaean Gates, yet neither event is narrated. It also leaves open whether Achilles' choice, glory in exchange for a short life, was truly worth it. The person who raises that doubt is Achilles himself, who reappears in the Odyssey when Odysseus encounters him in Hades. That encounter is part of reading the second epic, and is discussed in the article The Odyssey, by Homer: summary and analysis.

If the Iliad ends this way, the question it leaves behind is not who won the war. It is what to do with justified rage: it wounds even the innocent, and yields only when one looks upon the suffering of another.

Continue: Why Achilles Weeps Before Priam · Hector Flees from Achilles: The Detail of the Three Laps · The Iliad, by Homer: Summary and Analysis · Eros and agape: from Plato to Benedict XVI
Source class: Ilíada, de Homero