Rage Begets Rage
The Trojan War, Part 9: Aphrodite and Hera level the playing field
Content warnings: violence, gore, wounding, war, death
Previously in the life of Hercules:
Find the last two parts of the story of the Trojan War here:
Part 7
Part 8
As his siblings rekindled the fight in earnest, Apollo went to visit Aeneas at his temple sanctuary. Seeing him pleasantly restored by his mother and sister’s ministrations, Apollo took Aeneas by the hand, making him strong and ready to fight before he transported him back to the battlefield to fight anew. As his men saw him, not dead as they had been led to believe but fully recovered, they cheered in their jubilation and relief but had little time to ask any questions, diving again as they were into the fray.
Menelaus and his brother kept the spirits of their armies up and filled with battle-lust, with Agamemnon striking down Deicoon, a son of Pegasus and famed almost to the renown of a prince of Troy. He landed a spear that went straight through Deicoon’s shield and into his stomach, an act that stirred the courage of Agamemnon’s men. Aeneas, reinvigorated, did the same for the Trojan men, killing the brothers Crethon and Orsilochos, both grandsons of the great river god Alpheus.
Menelaus noticed this snuffing of their lives and strode through the fury and the shields with his own rage, an anger compounded by Ares’ influence as the god wanted Aeneas to take down this key player in the Greek army. Antilochos, a wise son of the wiser King Nestor, spotted Menelaus’ path of ire and hastened to his side, worried for the king’s safety; he knew as well as Ares that if Menelaus was killed here, the nine years of war would all be in vain and he had to do everything he could to intimidate the fight from Aeneas and prevent his fatal blows.
Accordingly, Aeneas saw the menacing King Menelaus and the strategic Prince Antilochos side by side and decided against such a challenge, melting back into his army in a moment. Temporarily relieved of their battle, Menelaus and Antilochos took the opportunity to drag the nearby bodies of their comrades to safety before they jumped back into the clash of swords and spears.
Now back in the fight, Menelaus slew Pylaimenes, a Paphlagonian captain, while at his shoulder Antilochos threw a rock at the captain’s driver, Mydon, that struck his elbow. Mydon dropped his horses’ reins and Antilochos pounced, sinking his sword deep into the driver’s skull and left him hanging over the edge of the chariot to die. Antilochos took over the vehicle, driving it back to the Greek army to claim it and rid it of the body it now contained.
Hector saw this scuffle and commanded his men to join him against the pair; Enyo and Ares went ahead, the latter showing his true identity to Hector, met by the Trojan' prince’s surprise and delight. Diomedes, still blessed with Athena’s gift, saw Ares too and was struck with terror, remembering Athena’s words of warning that he must not wound any other god than Aphrodite. He called to his men that Ares’ presence must mean that Hector was some way short of being a man, needing a god’s help to fight a man’s war, tactfully ignoring what that might say about himself. He told his men who Ares was and commanded them to back away slowly, never leaving themselves vulnerable but instructing them not to engage the god of war in his play.
Infuriated by the Greeks’ lack of resistance, Hector killed two of Menelaus’ men, Menesthes and Anchialos, in their chariot. Ajax the Greater, the Greek army’s second-most revered warrior behind Achilles, saw this butchering and refused to leave their bodies behind, choosing to make his stand over them until they could be retrieved. He killed Amphius, a Paisos soldier allied with Priam’s forces, but in attempting to retrieve the fallen man’s armour, Ajax came under heavy fire. A rain of spears fell upon his protective shield, but their mass and force staggered him back from both his prey and his lost brothers-in-arms and he was forced to fall back to his own surviving men.
Far across the span of fighters stood Tlepolemus, a Greek warrior and son of Hercules. He stood face to face with Sarpedon, a son of Zeus, and taunted him for fighting even despite his reputation as something less than the warring kind. Tlepolemus compared his opponent to his father, a mighty hero who had already sacked Troy with only a handful of ships, gibing that Sarpedon was nothing like Zeus and would therefore die at Tlepolemus’ hand.
Sarpedon responded hotly that Hercules had only had the opportunity to raid Troy thanks to King Laomedon’s own folly and hubris. He added that he would be the one to kill Tlepolemus instead, throwing his spear neatly toward his cocky opponent. The other man had raised and thrown his own spear at the same time, though, and while Sarpedon’s aim was true, striking Tlepolemus in the neck and killing him at once, Zeus had glanced his weapon away to only hit Sarpedon in the thigh.
His fellow Trojan allies bore Sarpedon away, in too much of a rush to remove the spear as it lolled lazily from his leg, dragging along in the dust behind him. The unlucky and unprotected Tlepolemus was borne away by his own allies, though no amount of help could save him now.
Odysseus saw Tlepolemus’ unfortunate end and was riled, though he was also torn between pursuing Sarpedon to finish him off or killing more Lycians, as he had been doing so far. Faithful Athena, ever close by to advise him, knew that the Fates had no plans for Odysseus to kill Sarpedon. Instead, she affirmed his plan to continue hacking through the Lycian forest of men and spears, pushing him into action in that direction instead.
He killed many, including Coiranos, Alastor, Chromios, Alcandros, Halios, Noemon and Prytanis. He would have continued on in his savagery and killed still more, but Hector had spotted his fierce fight and stormed toward him to put a stop to his spree. Sarpedon, being carried away, called out to Hector as he passed for his help to die back in the city, seeing as he wasn’t to go home to his wife and child after all. Hector, though, only had eyes for Odysseus and ignored his request entirely.
Sarpedon was carried on without a glance from his commander and went on to be placed at the foot of an old oak tree. Pelagon, Sarpedon’s faithful companion, finally pulled out the spear from his thigh there and Sarpedon fainted with the effort and the pain. He was rescued from the brink of death by the North Wind, Boreas, who blew his restoring winds in his direction and ushered him away from the banks of the Styx.
Hector had, by now, found Odysseus and was harrying him and his forces alongside Ares’ might. Diomedes had warned the Greek army of Ares’ presence, though, and they knew not to turn their backs on their pursuers or to engage them if such a feat was possible. Together, Hector and Ares killed many of these men including Teuthras, Orestes, Trechos, Oinomaus, Oresbios and Helenus, a son of Oenops.
Hera saw the devastation wrought on the Greek army by her son and called to Athena to join her. She gestured to the warring men below and declared that such a slaughter was a slight on her words of encouragement so freely given and so freshly abandoned. She asked whether Athena would be amenable to lend her aid in an effort to stop Ares’ rampage and fulfil the promise they had made to Menelaus that he would win the war at Troy.
Athena agreed at once, just as desperate as Hera to obtain such an end. She stepped from her richly embroidered dress and into her father’s war tunic, donning her gleaming armour, cape and aegis, her prized shield mounted with the deadly head of Medusa.
While she did this, Hera, Queen of the Gods, and her daughter Hebe readied the chariot, affixing the grand wheels and saddling up the snorting stallions to pull it. The Horai, the Seasons who guarded the gates of Olympus, pulled open the grand doors to let the goddesses through and Hera flicked the reins, bearing herself and Athena aloft in the wake of their magnificent horses.
They found Zeus at Olympus’ summit, brooding over the battle so far below. Hera hailed and consulted him, asking whether he would bless Athena to disrupt Ares’ reign of brutality over the battlefield. She added that while Ares had been slaughtering the masses on the Trojans’ behalf, Athena and Apollo had merely been assisting their chosen sides rather than slaying the masses themselves. Zeus agreed, giving Athena all the license she could ask for to reign in Ares, known as she was to be able to temper his whims to her will with her wisdom.
With his word and blessing, the goddess’ chariot leapt into the air once again. It soared down to the plains of Troy where the battle was in full steam, the rush and clash of bronze on bronze rising to greet them as they landed. The pair of Olympians stole through the brush and disguised themselves, heading into the fray proper.
Hera became the spitting image of Stentor, a herald known for having a voice as loud as fifty other men combined, and yelled above the din of the battle. She provoked the Greeks with her words, calling that men as handsome as them should surely fight the best but that they weren’t living up to such a standard, that the missing Achilles was so beautiful that the Trojans hadn’t even dared to fight when he roamed the warpath; now, she hollered, the Greek army was fighting up against their own ships, unable to scare any but the weakest of enemies. Such insults kindled a fire in the hearts of the Greeks, spurring them on to fight harder and faster against the Trojans.
Athena espied Diomedes, pressed in on all sides and struggling under the weight of his heavy shield on the wound that Pandaros had given him. He was bleeding in earnest now and Athena cooled his wound as she neared, taking hold of his horses to speak to him. She, too, made insults her encouragement, proclaiming that he was so unlike his father. He had defied Athena’s advice, she said, fighting even when she opposed it, but his son had done no such thing; indeed, even with her help, Diomedes flagged and grew tired, grew weak and afraid of the enemy pressed so close.
Diomedes retorted that he was fully aware of her attempts to manipulate him, that she was using her might as a goddess to provoke him even though he had obeyed her instruction. It was she, after all, who had told him that he should fight no gods but Aphrodite and to wound only her; with that wound given, he could not go against Ares without first failing her commands.
Athena, taken aback that her champion had actually listened to her advice for once, ruled against her own orders: take Ares, she said, fight him and win against him, with her at his side. Ares, she went on, had promised to fight on the Greeks’ side but had gone back on his word, throwing his lot in with the Trojans again. He had lost her loyalty, and she vowed to help Diomedes remove him from the battlefield.
Athena yanked the steadfast Sthenelus from his place at Diomedes’ side, though he jumped quickly out of the way at her touch, and took the reins herself. She whipped up the horses in Ares’ direction, seeing how he was stripping the fallen champion Periphas of his armour, and pulled Hades’ helm of invisibility over her head to obscure her from her half-brother’s view.
Though he couldn’t see Athena, Ares did spot Diomedes, his chariot on a direct course to meet him at great speed. He leapt into a run toward him, abandoning the armour behind him and throwing his spear with deadly accuracy. Deadly, except for the meddling of Athena, who guided it harmlessly past Diomedes’ ear and out of the way.
Rapidly approaching his target now, Diomedes threw his own spear right at Ares’ chest and Athena drove it calmly into his gut, finding a weak joint in his armour and sinking the spearhead deep into his godly form. Diomedes pulled it back out once it had stopped true, eliciting an enormous, terrible roar from Ares, one the strength of ten thousand men.
The battlefield shook and hesitated as the awful noise rippled around the flat plains before the swords and spears clashed once more. Ares, freed from his wounding tether, vanished from the battleground in a whirl of black roiling mist, ascending the god of war back to Olympus in a moment.
Safely home in Olympus, Ares appeared in Zeus’ hall, staggering up beside his father to complain, at length, of mankind. It was, he whined, a losing battle to try and help man as they would always find a way to make you pay: first Diomedes had had the gall to injure his precious Aphrodite and now he had teamed up with Zeus’ favoured to wound him too. It was all Athena’s fault, he added, and Zeus’ too for letting her run so wild and free, able to do anything without extracting a word of punishment from their mighty father.
The mighty father in question half-listened to Ares’ prattling on about the unfairness of all that had transpired until at last he could tolerate no more. He told his son to stop complaining, that Ares was the living god he hated the most and that he shared his mother’s insufferable temper. It was solely because he shared his blood that he would not leave him to perish, Zeus assured him coldly, and he would allow healing to Ares but that he did so reluctantly. He added that had he been any other god of any other immortal pair, he would happily leave Ares to die, so angry and resentful his son was and so bitter, bringing war where it was never wanted.
With these biting words, Zeus summoned Paieon the healer and bade him tend to Ares’ wound. He did so, kickstarting his immortal healing and recrafting his immaculate skin to smooth perfection once more. Hebe, Ares’ younger sister, diligently attended to him, helping him to bathe and dress before he attended their father again, this time with a much more cheerful disposition after some tender attention.
A successful Hera and Athena arrived home in Olympus too, their sole object of removing Ares from the war satisfyingly complete.
Find the tenth part of the story of the Trojan War here:
