Characters
- Artemis — god of fire; burns plain and river at Hera’s command
- Trojan assembly — saved from the flood to continue his aristeia
- Trojans — lose their river’s active help thereafter in this stretch
- Xanthus — burned into submission; swears neutrality
- Zephyrus / Notus — fanned by Hera to strengthen the blaze
Places
- Assembly — first consumed by Hephaestus’s fire
- Scamander’s banks and channels — boiled and forced to yield
Themes
Narrative
When Scamander’s flood has Achilles at bay, Hera calls to Hephaestus: arm yourself in flame and stop Xanthus while she brings the west wind and the white south to fan the blaze. Hephaestus kindles a prodigious fire. First he burns the plain—the dead trees, the elms and willows and tamarisks along the banks, the lotus and reeds in the water-meadows—and scorches the corpses Achilles has left. Then he turns on the river itself. The water boils; fish and eels suffer in the heat; Scamander’s fair streams steam.
The river-god cries out, unable to bear Hephaestus’s blast, and swears to Hera he will cease aiding the Trojans and will not hold Achilles back from Troy’s destruction if only the fire stops. Hera checks her son; Hephaestus quenches the marvelous flame. Scamander returns to his bed. The elemental duel ends: fire has mastered water at Hera’s will so that Achilles’ fate may run its Homeric course toward Hector, not toward drowning in a Trojan river.
Catalogue Hephaestus’s intervention as the Olympian answer to Scamander’s assault—plain and river burned until the god of the stream yields.