... Here, as Hektōr charged, was where noble Achilles speared
him:
clean through his tender neck drove the spear point, and yet
the bronze-laden ash-wood spear never severed the windpipe,
so he could still frame words, could make a response
when down in the dust, with Achilles exulting above him:
“Hektōr, you doubtless thought, while stripping Patroklos,
you’d be safe—I was elsewhere, to me you gave not a thought.
You fool! His distant avenger, stronger by far,
was left behind by the hollow ships: that was I, who have
now
unstrung your limbs! You the dogs and birds of prey
will tear apart vilely, while he will get burial from the
Achaians.”
To him bright-helmeted Hektōr faintly replied: “By your life
I implore you, by your knees, by your parents, do not let
the dogs make a meal of me beside the Achaians’ ships!
Rather take the bronze and gold, unstinted, that my father
and lady mother will give you, and return my body
to be conveyed to my home, in order that the Trojans
and Trojan wives may give me my share of fire in death....
(The Iliad, Homer and Peter Green, 2015)
Margaret Macmillan, “War: How Conflict Shaped Us”, 2020:
“… The ancient Greeks knew the horrors of battle but their
writers described them dispassionately, with a cool appraisal of the wounds
given and received and with scant grieving over the waste of lives. Death was
something that happened to warriors. In the Iliad spears and arrows go into
guts or eyes or chests or groins and the men die in agony. As Homer says of
one, “gasping out his life as he writhed along the ground / like an earthworm
stretched out in death, blood pooling, / soaking the earth dark red…” And no
heaven waits for them as a consolation; they are borne away into the dark. By
contrast, in Christianity and Islam there is the promise of eternal life as a
recompense for suffering and sacrifice on earth…”
रॉबिन लेन फॉक्स यांच्या 'The Invention of Medicine: From Homer to Hippocrates', २०२० मध्ये हे आहे:
“… It is not only that a doctor is pivotal to the Iliad’s
plot. In the view of Galen, the greatest doctor of the second century AD, Homer
was the founder and patron of medicine. This unusual tribute to an epic poet is
based on a distinctive aspect of his Iliad: its description of about 300
wounds. The majority are briefly described as fatal wounds through a hero’s
chest or skull, but about thirty are followed in inner and outer detail through
the body. Homer’s range of bodily detail far surpasses the range in other epic
traditions. Unlike most modern readers, his Greek audience was able to relate
to poetry on the passage of spears through entrails, the lower stomach or, most
gruesomely, the face: ‘Hector hit him under the jaw and the ear, and the spear
thrust out his teeth by the roots and cut through the middle of his tongue
The emphasis of these detailed descriptions is on killing,
not dying. The poem’s first audience surely included warriors who knew very
well what a wound in close combat could involve. The details were not given for
amusement. They are dispassionate and precise, and if there is an implicit
emphasis, it tends to fall less on the victim’s poignant suffering than on the
striker’s might. It is never moralized as violence, though some of the extreme
wounds are surely meant to seem horrific, at times when the violence of the
fighting in the poem is increasing. Three of the most gruesome are inflicted by
one and the same warrior, Meriones, himself a grisly character. Even so, most
of them befall victims whose past or present behaviour is relevant to what they
receive.
These scenes of wounding show doctors cutting out weapons
and applying medicaments. Long before any medical texts about wounds and
surgery, they seem to be drawing on close observation of parts of the male
body. They also relate to two critical questions for medicine’s future: the
degree to which traumas and diseases were ascribed to interventions by the gods
and the social status of doctors themselves.
Readers who have a medical training still admire what they
regard as Homer’s ‘anatomical topography’: it impels them to analyse it
clinically. This type of study began in Italy in the early seventeenth century
and by 1879 Hermann Frölich, himself a military doctor, concluded that Homer
must have been one too, not the top doctor in king Agamemnon’s camp but perhaps
the second-in-command who could take a general view of the action. ‘Doctor
Homer’ continues to be discovered by surgeons and pathologists. They count and
tabulate Homeric wounds as data (53 in heads and necks or 54 thoracic, of which
70.37 per cent are fatal …) and continue to claim Homer as a surgeon like
themselves. Their wound counts vary but the premise behind such studies is
unsound. Homer’s descriptions of wounds owe much to phrasing inherited from his
poetic predecessors. They need not owe anything to his own witnessing or
surgical skill….”
"... The climactic killing of Hector by Achilles contains
accurate detail too. As a superhero, Achilles first throws his massive ashen
spear and then uses the same weapon for thrusting, a double use which is beyond
ordinary mortals and spears nowadays. Nonetheless, he makes contact with bodily
reality when he thrusts at Hector’s gullet, his unarmoured spot, described as
just above the collarbone. He drives his spearpoint right through it, but the
windpipe is expressly said not to be severed. As a result, Hector can utter his
last poignant plea for mercy in the brief moments before he dies. The windpipe
would indeed have remained untouched by such a wound, one which modern doctors
credit with cutting the carotid artery and jugular vein, and so Hector could
have made one last utterance..."
