The Hardest Moment Comes After Success

Come read with me — quietly, slowly, deeply

Reading: The Great Conversation, Vol 4 · The Iliad of Homer — Book X

The Trojans have driven the Greeks back to their ships, the fires of the enemy burn across the plain, and no one knows what the morning will bring. Agamemnon and Menelaus move through the darkness gathering their leaders. Nestor proposes a dangerous but straightforward solution: send someone into the Trojan camp to discover what the enemy intends.

The task is clear.

Find out what is happening. Return alive.

Diomedes answers first, volunteering with the confidence of a man who has never shrunk from danger. When he asks for a companion, several others immediately offer themselves, but Diomedes chooses Odysseus because no one is more capable when courage must be joined to judgment. Before they leave, both men pray that Athena will grant them success and allow them to return after accomplishing a mighty exploit.

It is an ordinary human prayer.

We ask for enough strength to do what lies before us. We hope to succeed. We hope our efforts will amount to something worthy.

At first, everything unfolds exactly as hoped.
They encounter Dolon, a Trojan spy sent on the same mission for the Trojans that they have undertaken for the Greeks. Pursued like a deer by hunting dogs, he is captured and, hoping to save his own life, tells them everything they need to know.

The Trojans are awake and guarding their fires.
Their allies are sleeping separately.
The newly arrived Thracians are camped apart from the others.
Their king, Rhesus, possesses magnificent horses unlike any in the war.
They have obtained everything Dolon can tell them.

The reconnaissance could have ended here.

When they did not take Dolon captive and return to the Greek camp, I assumed they were going to verify the information and gather further intelligence.

Instead, something changes.
Or perhaps it would be truer to say that necessity has been satisfied. Opportunity has taken its place.

That shift is easy to miss because everything still appears courageous. Odysseus and Diomedes remain brave, skilful and astonishingly effective. Homer does not suddenly transform them into different men.

He quietly transforms the world they are moving through.

Before they met Dolon, they were spies.

Now they are hunters.

The imagery has been preparing us for this all along. Before leaving their respective camps, both Dolon and the Greeks clothe themselves in the skins of wild animals. Dolon wears a wolf’s skin, yet is pursued like a frightened deer. The darkness is no longer the world of open battle where one warrior faces another beneath the sun. It has become the world of stalking, pursuit and prey.

Guided by the information Dolon has given them, they reach the sleeping Thracians. Diomedes moves among them like a lion entering a flock of sheep or goats. One by one the men are killed as they sleep. Their bodies are dragged aside so that the extraordinary horses can be led safely away.

The raid is undeniably successful.
But it is also something different from the mission that brought them there.

The hunt has become something more than reconnaissance.

The courage is real.
But so too is the question Homer has quietly placed inside the night.

What governs a capable person once necessity has been satisfied and success has made more possible?

That question does not arise before the mission begins.

Before success, there is only one obvious problem.
Will they dare?

After success, a different problem appears.
What now?

Even after killing Rhesus and his men, Diomedes does not think first about returning home. He wonders what further daring deed he might accomplish. Should he take the king’s armour? Should he seize the chariot as well?

It is Athena who tells him that the time has come to leave.

Capability keeps discovering new possibilities.

Homer does not say that courage was misplaced.
He does not suggest that excellence is the problem.
Nor does he ask us to distrust ambitious, capable people.

The difficulty lies elsewhere.

Capability does not contain its own limit.

The more we discover we can do, the more judgment is required to decide what we should do.

That is a different kind of courage.

Many of us prepare ourselves for the difficulty of beginning.
We wonder whether we have enough strength to act, enough resilience to endure, enough ability to succeed.

Far fewer of us prepare for the questions that success will ask.

The successful business that offers one opportunity after another.
The leader who keeps pressing because one victory suggests another.
The professional who has already achieved what was required but feels the pull of one more meeting, one more acquisition, one more risk, one more triumph.

Success creates options.

Options require judgment.

Book 10 ends quietly.

Odysseus and Diomedes return safely to the ships. Their companions greet them with relief. They wash away the blood and sweat of the night, anoint themselves with oil, sit down to eat, and pour out a drink offering to Athena.

They have not won the war.
But they have proved something that mattered.
They could still act.

Perhaps that is why Homer leaves the night as he does.

Not with triumph.

Not with certainty.

But with gratitude, measure, and the quiet recognition that success itself asks something of us.

Before success, the question is
Will I act?

After success, the question is
Will I know when enough is enough?

Come read with me — quietly, slowly, deeply.

This essay is part of the Conversations reading journey.