The ghost of Achilles appeared to the survivors of the war, demanding Polyxena, the Trojan princess, be sacrificed before anybody could leave. Neoptolemus did so. Neoptolemus also sacrificed her father, Priam, to Zeus. With Andromache, who had been enslaved, Neoptolemus was the father of Molossus and ancestor of Olympias , the mother of Alexander the Great.
From a Volute-Crater, Iliupersis Painter, c. Neoptolemus was killed after he attempted to take Hermione from Orestes as her father, Menelaus , promised, or after he denounced Apollo, the murderer of his father.
He was killed by Orestes or some Delphian priests of Apollo. Greek Mythology. Aeneid II. All three poems deal with the Trojan War and its aftermath. All three are considered to be great masterpieces of Western literature. Homer composed about BC. Virgil was writing around 8 BC, eight centuries later. It is sublime. My poor husband Richard, having endured many years of fear and the cane in Latin class, never even got the reward of Virgil at the end of his suffering, but only a passage of Caesar and his baggage stuck in a swamp.
It is a nightmarishly beautiful work of art. The other is the romantically tragic Book Four, which tells of the doomed love affair between Dido and Aeneas.
Although Virgil was writing over two thousand years ago, his way of cutting from scene to scene always strikes me as cinematic. There is always movement in Virgil's scenes, and he often shows them from unexpected angles. From there he watches the horrors that unfold below.
His point of view is almost omniscient, but he is powerless to help. Open to view is the house within and the long courtyards lie exposed… Aeneid II. In one chilling scene from Book Two, Virgil shows us the horse at night as it 'gives birth' to the Greeks who have been hiding in its 'wooden womb'.
The warriors emerge from their dark confinement to attack the hapless Trojans, asleep after celebrating the end of a ten year siege and blissfully unaware that their end is near. Some of the fiercest and bravest of the Greeks descend a rope in sliding spondees: Menelaus, Odysseus, and Neoptolemus, the teenage son of Achilles. My first thought on reading this was how clever Homer was to imagine the terror of those usually brave heroes. This was not an attack made in the heat of battle, but a small band of men in a dark, confined space risking discovery and slow death.
My second thought was why was Neoptolemus the only one of all the Greeks who was not afraid? I recently read Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test and was struck by some of the characteristics of people with psychopathic tendencies. One of the most surprising is that they do not dread pain as much as normal humans and therefore often seem fearless. In the mid s, a prison psychologist named Robert Hare did a series of experiments with psychopath and non-psychopath volunteers.
He wanted to find out what distinguished psychopaths from the 'ordinary criminals'. He found that when they were told they would receive a harmless but painful electric shock, the psychopaths did not dread it as much as the others. Even when they had felt its unpleasant effects they were not bothered. Almost as if they lacked a certain ability to imagine pain. Hare's theory is that there is something different about the amygdala the 'reptilian' part of the brain in psychopaths.
Hare eventually came up with a list of twenty criteria for someone with psychopathic tendencies. Another striking characteristic of psychopaths — and the most chilling — is their lack of empathy. Like a tiger, bear or snake, they kill with impassive eyes. Once inside the palace, Pyrrhus chases down the Trojan prince Polites, killing him in front of his father, the aged King Priam, who has taken shelter at the household alters.
The old king, in one of the most moving moments in the Aeneid , rises, trembling with grief and age, to deliver a ringing speech that calls down the wrath of the gods upon Pyrrhus for his double blasphemy: killing a son in front of his father, and defiling a sanctuary.
But you cannot shame a man like Pyrrhus. Now, die! He seizes the old man by his hair, and drags him, slipping in the blood of his son, to the altar to dispatch him.
It is not enough for Pyrrhus to have killed him, he must also dishonor him—mutilating his body and depriving his soul of its eternal peace. The hope kindled in the meeting between Achilles and Priam is snuffed, utterly, by the son. Pyrrhus killing Priam on the altars, with Hector's baby son, Astyanax, as a club. Sadly, that is only the beginning.
When he finds her, he seizes from her arms her infant son, Astyanax, and smashes his brains out against the wall. Andromache herself he takes captive, as his slave-wife.
It is a horrifying cruelty: forcing her to share the bed of the man who murdered her son, and whose father murdered her husband.
Perhaps it will be no surprise to hear that such a violent man comes to a violent end. Pyrrhus, upon returning to Greece, decides that no bride is worthy of him except for the daughter of Helen herself, Hermione—even though she is already betrothed to Orestes. Rather than wooing her, or trying to negotiate with her father, Pyrrhus presses forward with his usual method: force.
He abducts the girl, and rapes her. Pyrrhus sacrificing the Trojan princess Polyxena. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen. There is no Memnon here, no Hector, no Penthesilea.
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