Time and Continuity Problems

      When I die and I get to meet Vergil in Dante’s Castle of Limbo, or in the Elysian Fields (alongside Musaeus, but without any fixed address), or wherever he hangs out in the afterlife, the first question I’m going to ask (after the formalities of “o de li altri poeti onore e lume,” etc.) is what on earth is going on with the ages of the younger-generation heroes at Troy. I’ve always been mystified, for example, at how Ascanius (well, Cupid disguised as Ascanius) in the Aeneid is cuddling in Dido’s lap like a three-year-old, or how Ascanius has to hold hands with his father when they’re fleeing from Troy as if otherwise he’d toddle off on his own--and yet, not so long afterward, he’s leading the teenage boys in equestrian show drills and taking charge during a fiery crisis and killing enemy soldiers. His age, as communicated by social cues, seems unbridgeably inconsistent throughout the epic--and don’t try to tell me that Ascanius’ development into manhood is an essential part of the epic’s dramatic arc, because his span of development far overreaches the span of time covered in the Aeneid. It’s distractingly unrealistic.

      A similar problem is presented by another character in the Aeneid: Neoptolemus, aka Pyrrhus. He’s the son of Achilles and tends to dominate the bloodshed and butchery in the Aeneid’s destruction of Troy. He ransacks the private bedrooms of the Trojan royal family and even kills the King of Troy, old Priam himself, all of which would be shocking enough on its own. To truly appreciate its significance, however, we have to go all the way back through Neoptolemus’ origin story, and how Achilles came to have a son.

      You may have certain preconceived ideas about Achilles. He’s spotlighted in the first line of the Iliad (“Sing of the wrath, Goddess, the baneful wrath of Achilles”) and has had guaranteed fame throughout western literary history for that reason. We all know that his mother dipped him in the Styx and made him (mostly) immortal, that he was exceptionally close to his best friend Patroclus, that he was eventually killed by an arrow to the heel administered by the archer god Apollo, but not before--as depicted in the Iliad, that great bulwark of western literature--he could complete his spiritual journey from irate selfishness to mature reconciliation with the man whose son he killed. A decade ago he was depicted on the silver screen as a buff 40-year-old with a fake-looking dye job and some oddly progressive ideas about how to treat slaves. (Huh, Brad Pitt was 40 when Troy was released, who knew.) But the Achilles of the Iliad wouldn’t have been a 40-year-old. In fact, when the Greeks were mustering an army for the Trojan War, Achilles was skirting the low end of acceptably conscriptable age (possibly in his mid-teens), and his mother made great effort to keep him from going to war. She was so intent on preventing his conscription that she dressed him as a girl and hid him among a bunch of princesses on the island of Scyros. The disguise didn’t take--Odysseus was sent over and quickly tricked Achilles into unveiling himself--and the Greeks sailed off for Troy. But Achilles had taken full advantage of the time he spent sharing a bedroom with a princess, and when he sailed away, his former roommate was left pregnant with Neoptolemus.

      So the Greeks spend a long time besieging Troy, and when they finally use the wooden horse ruse to break in, Neoptolemus is charging in with the rest of them and heartlessly butchering the Trojan royal family (even after Priam’s sentimental discussion with Achilles on the nature of fatherhood and family at the end of the Iliad). Wait, how long did that siege last?

      It is a well known tradition that the Greeks spent ten years besieging Troy. Neoptolemus is conceived just a short while before the siege begins, so when the Greeks break the siege, Neoptolemus ought to be nine years old. (‘Neoptolemus,’ as it happens, means ‘young soldier.’) Yet there he is, in the Aeneid, killing people left and right. So this--in my hypothetical afterlife meeting with Vergil--is where I start hassling Vergil about why he has a nine-year-old (who is more or less green in terms of combat experience) fighting alongside grown-up, experienced soldiers who have been involved in this conflict for ten years. Vergil could have, with some effort, established an alternate chronology that made his Neoptolemus older than ten, but he didn’t do it. I’ll say it again: distractingly unrealistic.

      Neoptolemus has a reputation for being bloodthirsty and generally nasty, and not just because of his part in the Trojan slaughter. When the battle died down, he performed a human sacrifice (not generally approved of in Greek culture) over Achilles’ grave. He was awarded Priam’s wife as a slave, which probably didn’t foster a peaceful home life for them, since she had watched him kill her husband. By all accounts Neoptolemus was pretty terrifying to live with, although he did manage to get three children out of her. But here we reach the question of Neoptolemus’ marriages and offspring, which is another contested point in the Neoptolemus mythology (but at least I can’t blame Vergil this time, because he never wrote about any of this). According to some, he was married to Hermione, the daughter of Helen and Menelaus, but on the other hand, some say that that this Hermione was actually married to Orestes (oh, you know--the guy from the Oresteia, who murders his mother Clytemnestra and then goes insane). The two traditions have been somewhat clumsily grafted together with the story that Hermione was married to Orestes first, but her father Menelaus demanded they divorce after Orestes went insane, at which point she could be married to Neoptolemus. There is, however, a more interesting tradition, in which Hermione was not so happy to be married to this nasty Neoptolemus and arranged an end to her marriage. The story goes that Neoptolemus, enraged that Apollo had killed his father, went to Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi and tried to steal some treasures and even burn the sanctuary down. In Euripides’ play Andromache, however, Neoptolemus never did these things--Hermione just spread a rumor that he planned to, and on that account Neoptolemus was murdered by the locals at Delphi.

      It is intriguing to see a bride objecting so forcefully to an undesirable husband, since brides in Greek mythology are generally pretty docile and passive (prizes rather than characters). It would be interesting to read more about Hermione--Homer uses her as a background character in the Odyssey, and Sappho makes scattered references to her, but Sappho’s poems are all so fragmentary it’s hard to tell what sort of portrait she’s creating of Hermione, if any--unfortunately, not much ancient literature seems to concern itself with her. It is also intriguing to see this character who seems like he should be glorified as a young hero--Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, killer of Priam, hero of the Trojan War!--made into such an appalling villain. He seems to have inherited his father’s bloodthirsty selfishness but never developed a sense of social responsibility via losing his best friend in battle and meeting the parent of an enemy he killed. He’s never appealing as a character, and it may be safe to say that any age discrepancies are among the least objectionable things about him.