ACHILLES AND PENTHESILIA: NECROPHILIA, OR SACRED MARRIAGE?

 

By ArchaiOptix - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88625666

Rage. The great bard, Homer, employed wrath as the driving force behind the events of his Iliad, including the deaths of his leading man, Achilles – the warrior-hero of the Greeks – and the Amazon Wonder Woman, Penthesilea. For, had the warrior woman not first killed one of her own, she would not have been compelled to find redemption in battle against the Greeks. Perhaps, she would instead have died somewhere on her native steppes, unremembered.

Such a death – our loss, as well as that of Penthesilea and her people – would have been sad, indeed. Her name would have then been forever lost to time and anonymity. That ancient name conveyed some connotation of sadness: penthos meant “sorrow” in Ancient Greek.

The second syllable of the warrior queen’s name is not so easy to decipher. Maybe, it came from the Latin verb for “silence”: sileo. Or perhaps it was some Scythian derivative of the related Proto-Indo-European seyl-, “still”, “windless”, “quiet”, or “slow”.

Did the Greeks in their ancient retelling of her tale capture the pathos of her tragic life, encapsulating it in a poetic name? Or was that the way she was remembered among her own people? Either way, Penthesilea’s name rings out oddly for that of a renowned warrior queen, a ricochet of her tragedy echoing down the centuries in “silent sorrow”.

In the years before the Trojan War, Penthesilea had inadvertently murdered another Amazon and been exiled from her people as penance. Returning just before the war, the other Amazons mandated that the only way she could wash the stench of murder from her poetic name was to die heroically in battle. Fortunately – or unfortunately – just such an opportunity was looming on the horizon.

“Blind” Homer’s voice did not utter the last word on the Trojan War or on those who fought and died in it. Those poets who followed in the legendary bard’s footsteps offered other details missing from or taking place after the events in the Iliad. In a few cases, these Classical Johnny-come-latelys chose to relate the story of Penthesilea, the Amazon warrior queen who led her people to the aid of Troy, fought mano-a-mano with the greatest Greek soldier of all time, Achilles, and died tragically by his hand. Some add a strange footnote: that Achilles, upon removing Penthesilea’s helmet, fell in love with her just as the light left her eyes, and committed necrophilia on her body. He then killed another Greek warrior for jeering at him for his supposed weakness.

One of the two most telling of these accounts comes to us in fragments. It is the lost eighth-century BC poem, Aethiopis, ostensibly by Arctinus of Miletus, who may have been Homer’s one-time pupil. Aethiopis was a five-book epic telling how Penthesilea, that doughty “daughter of Ares”, and Memnon, the “Ethiopian”, came to fight for Troy and lost their lives to Achilles’ swift sword. Not long after, an arrow shot from Paris’ bow but directed by the sure hand of the sun god, Apollo, cut down Achilles. According to the fifth century AD author, Proclus, the fragment referring to Penthesilea reads:

The Amazon Penthesilea arrives to aid the Trojans in war. She is the daughter of Ares and a Thracian by birth. Achilles kills her while she is fighting at her best, and the Trojans bury her. Achilles kills Thersites, who railed at him and reproached him for loving Penthesilea.

 

A thousand years after Arctinus, in the fourth century AD, another poet gives us the Amazon’s backstory. Quintus Smyrnaeus (of Smyrna, in what is now Turkey) was the poet to the imperial Greek court. He built on the Homeric tradition by rehashing the Epic Cycle, which resulted in the Posthomerica: a retelling of the deaths of Penthesilea, Memnon of Ethiopia, and Achilles and the events that followed. From Quintus, we learn that Penthesilea had gone deer hunting with her sister, Hippolyta. (It is unclear whether by “sister”, the poet means “sister in arms” or “biological sister”). Her throw missed the deer and hit Hippolyta, killing her. Penthesilea became suicidal, but Amazon law dictated that she must die honorably in battle. Smyrnaeus gives us the Trojan chronology:

 

Thus, they performed the burial of Hector. Then came the Amazon, the daughter of great-souled Ares the slayer of men.

 

These fragmentary hints leave us with little detail…and more questions. If Achilles committed necrophilia on Penthesilea, then why? Why would the experienced warrior take the time in the middle of a crowded and deadly battlefield – or was the battle over at this point? – to stop and gratify a strange sexual need?

Was necrophilia even on the Mycenaean menu? That is, was it a common practice among the proto-Greeks? Was Achilles defiling the body of a hated enemy, a female warrior: to the Mycenaean Greeks a strange, foreign, and just plain wrong dichotomy? Or else, was the act intended to honor a valiant foe?

Or could it have been something else? Some other, long-forgotten practice?

Could this story have symbolized a widespread custom: that of the sacred marriage between a horse-warrior and a human priestess who characterized the earth, or the Earth Goddess? Was this part of an ancient ritual originating in the East, in which Achilles ritually “married” Penthesilea, a woman-proxy embodying the land, in order to inherit her earthly possessions, or to wed himself to the Mother Goddess? Or was this done for some other arcane reason?

Spoiler alert: The search for answers to these questions has led me down a research rabbit hole.

Translation: We won’t be circling back to Scythians and Picts for the space of about sixteen posts. But I am enjoying every minute of this sojourn south of BC. I hope you will, too…

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Hewlett, Maurice Henry. Little Iliad. Nabu Press, 2010.

Miletus, Arctinus of. “Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica.” Edited by Roy Tennant, The Online Medieval and Classical Library, 2016, mcllibrary.org/Hesiod/aethiop.html.

Quintus, Q, and Neil Hopkinson. Posthomerica. Harvard University Press, 2018.

Unknown, Unknown. “Penthos.” Wiktionary, 2019, en.wiktionary.org/wiki/penthos.

Unknown, Unknown. “Sileo.” Wiktionary, 2019, en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sileo#Latin.