The Ghost of Achilles on Snake Island

By this point, I imagine that most of my readers have probably already heard that, on 24 February 2022, the first day of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, a pair of heavily armed Russian warships attacked Snake Island, a small Ukrainian island in the western Black Sea that was protected at the time by only thirteen Ukrainian border guards.

One of the Russian warships ordered the Ukrainian border guards to surrender and one of the Ukrainians replied: “Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй,” which means “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” This reply has become famous around the world and has widely become seen as emblematic of Ukrainian defiance. It was initially reported that the border guards were all killed, but the Ukrainian military has now publicly confirmed in a post on Facebook that they are actually “alive and well” in Russian captivity.

One thing that many of my readers may not know is that Snake Island—the exact same island where all the events I have described above took place—was known to the Greeks in ancient times as Λευκή (Leukḗ), which means “White Island.” This island is prominent in Greek literature, mythology, and folklore, chiefly because the Greeks believed that Achilles’s mother, the immortal goddess Thetis, transposed his mortal remains, along with those of Patroklos, and interred them in a hero shrine on this island, making it their final resting place.

Several classicists have already written posts about Snake Island’s classical connections, including Mateusz Stróżyński in the online open-access journal Antigone, Peter Gainsford on his blog Kiwi Hellenist, and Christopher Stedman Parmenter on the Society for Classical Studies blog. All of these posts, though, overlook what are, in my personal opinion, the most fascinating stories about the island, which are told by the Greek sophist Philostratos of Athens (lived c. 170 – c. 250 CE) in his dialogue Heroïkos, chapters 54–57. According to Philostratos, the ghosts of Achilles and Helene of Sparta haunt the island together as lovers. (Yes, you read that right; I said Helene, not Patroklos.) The stories he tells about their hauntings on the island are simultaneously captivating and bizarre.

A little background about ancient Greek hero cults

Before I say anything more about Snake Island or Achilles, I feel it is very important to clarify exactly what the word hero means in an ancient Greek context. The English word hero is derived from the Greek third-declension masculine noun ἥρως (hḗrōs), the plural form of which is ἥρωες (hḗrōes), but the Greek word has a drastically different meaning from the English word. Properly speaking, the Greek word hḗrōs refers to a person who has died and become a supernatural being to whom people can make offerings.

The ancient Greeks believed that human beings who had done big and important deeds while they were alive on earth as mortals could sometimes retain the ability to accomplish big things after their deaths as hḗrōes. Like deities, hḗrōes were believed to possess the power to intervene in the affairs of living humans for better or worse. The Greeks believed that they could make hḗrōes favorably disposed to them by giving them offerings. By extension, they believed that, with the right offerings, they could persuade hḗrōes to do things that they wanted.

Today, most people use the English word hero specifically to describe people who do things that help others, but, for the ancient Greeks, the word hḗrōs carried no connotation whatsoever of morality or benevolence. The Greeks believed that whether someone became a ἥρως or not was not determined by their kindness or their loyalty or even their courage, but rather by the sheer scale of the deeds they accomplished.

Allow me to illustrate what I mean with a couple of examples. The Greek travel writer Pausanias (lived c. 110 – c. 180 CE) tells a story in his book The Guide to Greece 6.6.7–8 about a crewmember of Odysseus who supposedly became a local hḗrōs in the city of Temesa because he got drunk while the crew was there, raped an unmarried girl, and was stoned to death by the inhabitants for his terrible crime. He thereafter became a malignant spirit who terrorized and even murdered the inhabitants, forcing them to build a temple to him and leave a beautiful unmarried girl in the temple each year for him to rape so that he would be appeased.

Pausanias tells the story as follows, as translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod, with some edits of my own to make it more accurately reflect the Greek:

“Odysseus, so they say, in his wanderings after the capture of Troy was carried down by gales to various cities of Italy and Sicily, and among them he came with his ships to Temesa. Here one of his sailors got drunk and raped an unmarried girl, for which offence he was stoned to death by the natives.”

“Now Odysseus, it is said, cared nothing about his loss and sailed away. But the ghost of the stoned man never ceased killing without distinction the people of Temesa, attacking both old and young, until, when the inhabitants had resolved to flee from Italy for good, the Pythian priestess forbad them to leave Temesa, and ordered them to propitiate the hḗrōs, setting him a sanctuary apart and building a temple, and to give him every year as wife the fairest maiden in Temesa.”

Just a few chapters later, in his Guide to Greece 6.9.6–9, Pausanias tells another story about a boxer named Kleomedes who became a local hḗrōs for the people of Astypalaia because he murdered his opponent in an Olympic boxing match and then went on a psychotic murder-spree in which he attacked a school building and murdered sixty schoolchildren. Here is the story, as translated by W.H.S. Jones and H.A. Ormerod (once again, with some edits of my own):

“At the Olympiad previous to this, it is said that Kleomedes of Astypalaia killed Ikkos of Epidauros during a boxing-match. On being convicted by the umpires of foul play and being deprived of the prize he became mad through grief and returned to Astypalaia. Attacking a school there of about sixty children he pulled down the pillar which held up the roof.”

“This fell upon the children, and Kleomedes, pelted with stones by the citizens, took refuge in the sanctuary of Athena. He entered a chest standing in the sanctuary and drew down the lid. The Astypalaians toiled in vain in their attempts to open the chest. At last, however, they broke open the boards of the chest, but found no Kleomedes, either alive or dead. So they sent envoys to Delphoi to ask what had happened to Kleomedes.”

“The response given by the Pythian priestess was, they say, as follows:—

‘Last of hḗrōes is Kleomedes of Astypalaia;
Honor him with sacrifices as being no longer a mortal.’

So from this time have the Astypalaians paid honors to Kleomedes as to a hḗrōs.”

Thus, to reiterate, in Greek religion, hḗrōes were not necessarily good people. On the contrary, a person who had committed terrible crimes could become a hḗrōs on account of the enormity of their crimes. For the Greeks, the word hḗrōs is not a moral term, but rather a cultic term; a person has only become a hḗrōs when they are dead and people are making ritual offerings to them.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the northwest heroön, or shrine to a hḗrōs, at the site of Sagalassos in the region of Pisidia in Asia Minor

The creation of Leuke

With that clarification out of the way, let’s talk about what Philostratos says about Achilles.

Philostratos’s Heroïkos nominally takes the form of a dialogue between a vine-tender and a Phoenician stranger. In it, the vine-tender claims to be in contact with Protesilaos, who, according to Greek mythology, was the first Achaian warrior to die at Troy, and he starts telling the Phoenician everything that he knows about Protesilaos. Near the end of the dialogue, the vine-tender and the Phoenician start talking about Achilles and the island of Leuke.

Philostratos portrays the vine-tender as saying that, after Achilles and Helene of Sparta died, they both became hḗrōes and they fell passionately in love with each other. There was only one problem, he says, which was that they were not destined to be together in any land upon which the sun shone. Achilles’s mother Thetis, however, found a novel way to cheat destiny and make it so that her son could live forever with the woman whom he loved. The vine-tender tells the story as follows in the Heroïkos 54.5–9, as translated by Jeffrey Rusten for the Loeb Classical Library (with some edits of my own):

“Thetis asked Poseidon to create a new island from the sea in which they could settle; he remembered how long the Black Sea was, and that sailing it offered no lodging because there was no island in it; and so brought forth the island of Leuke, whose size I have described, as a home for Achilles and Helene and as a stopping point and anchorage in the sea for sailors.”

“Poseidon controls all liquid substance everywhere, so he noticed that the rivers Thermodon, Borysthenes, and Danube empty with irresistible and ever-flowing streams into the Black Sea, and heaped up the silt which they sweep from their Skythian headlands into the sea and fashioned an island of the size I have described, and fastened it to the floor of the Black Sea.

“There Achilles and Helene first saw and embraced each other. Their wedding was celebrated by Poseidon himself and Amphitrite, and all the Nereids and rivers and their divinities that flow into Lake Maiotis [i.e., the Sea of Azov] and the Black Sea. It is said that the island is inhabited by white birds, which are wet and smell of the salt air. Achilles has made them his servants, and they clean his grove with the breeze from their wings and the moisture from them, which they do by flying low and a little raised off the ground.”

At this point, some of my readers may think that the idea of Achilles and Helene living forever as ghostly lovers on an otherwise deserted island that Poseidon created out of the Black Sea especially for them, tended by a flock of perpetually wet bird servants who clean Achilles’s grove by fanning air and water droplets onto it with their wings, is pretty weird. This, however, is only the beginning! Just wait until you see how gloriously bizarre Philostratos’s story actually gets!

Achilles’s ghostly singing

The vine-tender goes on to explain in Heroïkos 54.10–13 that sailors who anchor at Leuke never spend the night on the island, but those who are forced to spend the night on their ships while they are anchored there report hearing Achilles and Helene drinking and singing songs together on the island at night. He says (in Rusten’s translation, with my edits):

“The island may be visited by men who sail this vast sea, and stands as a hospitable haven for their ships; but neither sailors nor dwellers in the region, Greek or barbarian, may ever make it their home. If they anchor and sacrifice there, they must board their ships at sunset and not spend the night on land; if the wind is favorable they sail away, otherwise they tie up and sleep below deck.”

“For it is then that Achilles and Helene drink together, engage in song, and sing their love for each other, Homer’s verses about Troy, and Homer himself. The poetic talent which came to Achilles from Kalliope [i.e., the muse of epic poetry] he still prizes and practices even more now that his fighting is over. His song for Homer is quite finely and poetically composed; Protesilaos knows it, and has sung it to me.”

The vine-tender then proceeds to quote a poem that Achilles supposedly wrote in honor of Homer, which reads as follows in Ancient Greek:

“Ἀχώ, περὶ μυρίον ὕδωρ
μεγάλου ναίοισα πέρα Πόντου,
ψάλλει σε λύρα διὰ χειρὸς ἐμᾶς·
σὺ δὲ θεῖον Ὅμηρον ἄειδέ μοι,
κλέος ἀνέρων,
κλέος ἁμετέρων πόνων
δι’ ὃν οὐ θάνον,
δι’ ὃν ἔστι μοι
Πάτροκλος, δι’ ὃν ἀθανάτοις ἴσος
Αἴας ἐμός,
δι’ ὃν ἁ δορίληπτος ἀειδομένα σοφοῖς
κλέος ἤρατο κοὐ πέσε Τροία.”

This means (in my own translation):

“Echo, dwelling amid myriad water,
beyond great Pontos,
the lyre plays for you by my hand;
and, you, sing to me divine Homer,
glory of men,
glory of our sufferings,
through whom I did not die,
through whom there is for me
Patroklos, through whom equal to the immortals
is my Aias,
through whom Troy, won by the spear, sung by wise men,
acquired glory and did not fall.”

Through this poem, Achilles attributes his own immortality and the immortality of the other Achaian hḗrōes to Homer, since Homer was the one who composed the Iliad, which enshrined the memory of the Achaian hḗrōes forever. This ties in with the broader Greek notion that having a person’s glory told through epic poems after their own death made the person themself, in some sense, immortal.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a Roman marble portrait bust depicting how the legendary poet Homer was traditionally imagined to have looked in antiquity, based on an earlier Greek bust of the second century BCE, now held in the British Museum

Other mysterious sounds and sights on Leuke

In addition to Achilles’s singing, the vine-tender also reports a number of other strange sounds and sights that were supposedly seen on Leuke in the Heroïkos 56.1–5. He says (in Rusten’s translation, with my edits):

“These are the songs there, and the voice in which they sing them resounds divine and clear; it travels so far over the sea that it puts a shudder of amazement in the sailors. Those who have anchored there claim to hear the hoof beats of horses, the clash of armor, and the cries like those at war. If sailors anchor on the north or south side of the island and a wind is going to strike their anchorage, Achilles appears at their stern to announce it and tell them to change their mooring and escape the wind.”

“Many of those who have sailed out of the Black Sea put in here and report these things to me; and further, by Zeus, that whenever, traveling on this endless sea, they see the island in the distance, they embrace each other and cry tears of joy. After landing and kissing the earth they go to the shrine to pray and sacrifice to Achilles, and the victim [i.e., the animal for the sailors to sacrifice] stands ready beside the altar opposite the ship and its crew.”

Various ancient writers record stories about people supposedly hearing the disembodied sounds of horses, the clatter of arms, and the cries of battle at ancient battlefields. For instance, as I discuss in this article I wrote in October 2021, Pausanias says in his Guide to Greece 1.32.4 that people who happened to stumble upon the site of the ancient Battle of Marathon at night would often hear sounds of disembodied men fighting and horses neighing.

It is interesting, though, that Philostratos claims that there were stories about people hearing sounds of fighting on Leuke, considering that Leuke was not generally known as the site of any major historical battles. It seems that Achilles’s shared associations with the Trojan War and with Leuke may have led stories about disembodied sounds of battle to become associated with the island.

ABOVE: Ancient Greek polychromatic vase painting dating to c. 300 BCE, depicting Achilles wearing armor and a plumed helmet, preparing to kill Memnon, the king of the Aithiopians

Achilles and the last princess of Troy

Philostratos’s vine-tender character tells another story in the Heroïkos 56.6–10 that illustrates the compassion Achilles was thought to show toward sailors who visited his island. The story also suggests that Achilles was sometimes thought to ask sailors to do favors for him and offer them fine rewards in return. Here is what the vine-tender says (in Rusten’s translation, with my edits):

“It is said that Achilles once visited a merchant who frequented the island, and told him what had happened in Troy; he also entertained him with drink, and commanded him to sail to Ilion and bring back to him a specific Trojan girl who was the slave of a particular master.”

“The stranger was amazed, and made bold to ask why he needed a slave from Ilion. He answered, ‘Because, stranger, she is from the same line as Hektor and his ancestors and is the last of the blood of the children of Priamos and Dardanos.’ The merchant thought that Achilles was in love, so he bought the girl and returned to the island; Achilles was pleased at his arrival and told him to keep the girl on his ship (I suspect because no women were allowed on the island), but to come himself at night to the shrine to feast with him and Helene.”

“When he came, he gave him a great deal of money, always pleasing to merchants, and said he made him his guest friend, and granted him a prosperous voyage and fair sailing. At daybreak Achilles said, ‘Now take these things and sail, but leave the girl on the shore for me.’ They were not more than a stade away from shore, when the girl’s scream reached them—Achilles was tearing her apart, and ripping limb from limb.”

At first, the conclusion to this story may come as a bizarre shock. The vine-tender, through his narration, certainly lulls the readers into thinking that Achilles is in love with the Trojan girl, but then he brutally murders her by ripping her limb from limb.

The conclusion of the story, though, is in keeping with Achilles’s character. The most famous aspect of Achilles’s portrayal in the Iliad is most likely his brutal, murderous rampage against the Trojans in books twenty through twenty-two, which culminates in book twenty-two with his final, bloody vengeance against Hektor for the death of Patroklos.

Meanwhile, throughout many works of ancient Greek art and literature, the Achaians are portrayed as determined that at least all male descendants of the house of Priamos must be destroyed. Some surviving Greek vase paintings graphically illustrate this by depicting Achilles’s son Neoptolemos bludgeoning King Priamos to death with the mangled corpse of his infant grandson Astyanax. In other versions of the story, either Neoptolemos or Odysseus is said to have killed Astyanax by hurling the baby off the walls of Troy to fall and splatter on the ground beneath.

Given these contexts, it therefore makes sense that Achilles living as a hḗrōs on the island of Leuke might want to brutally rip the last living descendant of the house of Priamos to shreds.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing an Attic black-figure amphora dating to between c. 520 and c. 510 BCE depicting Neoptolemos bludgeoning King Priamos of Troy to death with the corpse of his infant grandson Astyanax, whom Neoptolemos has already murdered

Achilles repulses an Amazonian invasion

Finally, Philostratos portrays the vine-tender as telling one last lengthy story about Leuke. He says that, once, a whole army of Amazons tried to invade the island, but the spirit of Achilles violently repulsed their invasion attempt, resulting in all sorts of grisly carnage for the Amazons. He tells the story as follows in his Heroïkos 57.8–17 (in Rusten’s translation, with my own edits):

“Once a group of sailors and shipbuilders, on many ships, carrying merchant goods from the Black Sea to the Hellespont, were carried off course to the left bank of the sea, where the women are said to live. They were captured by them, bound, and fattened up for some time, so that they could take them to the other side of the river and sell them to Skythian cannibals.”

“But when one of the Amazons took pity on a young man captured with them for his youth and it led to love, she asked the queen, who was her sister, not to sell the foreigners. After the sailors were released and lived among them and spoke their language, telling the Amazons of the storm and their adventures at sea, they came to recounting the sanctuary on the island that they had visited not long before, and described its wealth.”

“The women decided to take advantage of the foreigners, since they were sailors and builders of boats—their country happened to have the resources to build boats—and constructed ships for horse transport to attack Achilles on horseback. (Dismounted from their mares, Amazons are a womanly race, and as weak as other women.)”

“In the spring, when they had taken up rowing and practiced sailing and consolidated their skill in sailing, they cast off from the mouth of the Thermodon on I believe fifty ships and sailed to the shrine about two thousand stades distant.”

“They landed on the island, and first commanded their captives from the Hellespont to chop down the trees arranged in a circle around the shrine; but when the axes bounced back against them, striking some in the head, some in the neck, and all those at the trees fell, the Amazons thronged the shrine on horseback with a cry.”

“But Achilles glared back at them with terrible ferocity, and leaped as he had at the River Skamandros and at Troy, and cast on the mares a terror stronger than any bridle, which made them rear up against their riders, considering the women an alien and excessive burden; they reacted by reverting to their wild natures, attacking the fallen Amazons, trampling them with their hooves, shaking their manes, ears perked up against them like ravening lions.”

“They gnawed at the bare arms of the fallen, tore open their chests and mauled and devoured their intestines. Intoxicated with human flesh the mares thundered around the island in a frenzy of blood; once they stood on the summit and saw the crest of the waves, thinking they had reached the plain, they cast themselves down into the sea.”

“The Amazons’ ships were also destroyed, when a strong wind blew against them. Since they were empty and moored haphazardly, they crashed into each other and were broken; just as in a naval battle one ship tries to sink or smash another, now all the sideways or head-on collisions that captains produce in war, these happened to ships empty and sailing without guidance.”

“Many wrecks were carried ashore to the sanctuary with women still on board breathing and half-alive, or with scattered human limbs and pieces of flesh which the horses had spit out. Achilles cleaned the island easily by pulling in the tide and cleaning and washing it away.”

It is possible that the sounds of battle the vine-tender mentioned earlier in the dialogue may be supposed to be the sounds of the ghosts of the Amazons who died trying to capture the island from Achilles, reenacting the gruesome slaughter in which they are said to have died. Philostratos, however, does not say this.

In any case, this is the last story that Philostratos’s vine-tender tells about Leuke. The dialogue itself ends shortly afterward.

ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic red-figure lekythos attributed to the Eretria Painter dating to around 420 BCE depicting Amazons fighting, now held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art