Homer’s Iliad(Bk.XXI) gives an account of God Volcano’s intervention in the War of Troy who by the request of her mother Juno to save Achilles from drowning in the river Scamander, sent forth the Lava and heated its waters; Juno called Volcano as her ‘Crook-foot’ son. She cried, ‘my child, be up and doing, for I deem it is with you that Xanthus is fain to fight; help us at once, kindle a fierce fire; I will then bring up the west and the white south wind in a mighty hurricane from the sea, that shall bear the flames against the heads and armour of the Trojans and consume them, while you go along the banks of Xanthus burning his trees and wrapping him round with fire. Let him not turn you back neither by fair words nor foul, and slacken not till I shout and tell you. Then you may stay your flames…Then he turned tongues of fire on to the river. He burned the elms the willows and the tamarisks, the lotus also…’.
This exemplifies the action of a live Volcano who dried up streams of both the rivers Xanthus and the Scamander.
Achilles, the hero of the Achaeans, came face to face with Asteropaeus, son of the broad river Axius and Perinoea, eldest daughter of Acessamenus and killed him. River Xanthus was filled up with corpses and the river could not tolerate such killings of the Trojans like Thersilochus, Mydon, Astypylus, Mnesus, Thrasius, Oeneus, and Ophelestes, and others. Xanthus took up the human form in anger and spoke to Achilles, ‘ Achilles, if you excel all in strength, so do you also in wickedness, for the gods are ever with you to protect you: if, then, the son of Saturn has vouchsafed it to you to destroy all the Trojans, at any rate drive them out of my stream, and do your grim work on land. My fair waters are now filled with corpses, nor can I find any channel by which I may pour myself into the sea for I am choked with dead, and yet you go on mercilessly slaying. I am in despair, therefore, O captain of your host, trouble me no further.”
Achilles answered, “So be it, Scamander, Jove-descended; but I will never cease dealing out death among the Trojans, till I have pent them up in their city, and made trial of Hector face to face, that I may learn whether he is to vanquish me, or I him.”
River Scamander then said to Apollo, ‘Surely, son of Jove, lord of the silver bow, you are not obeying the commands of Jove who charged you straight that you should stand by the Trojans and defend them, till twilight fades, and darkness is over on the earth.’
No God stood by law of the day but were caught by sheer love of their own stocks.
Achilles then sprang from the bank of the Scamander into its mid-stream, and the river then raised a high wave and attacked him. ‘He swelled his stream into a torrent, and swept away the many dead whom Achilles had slain and left within his waters. These he cast out on to the land, bellowing like a bull the while, but the living he saved alive, hiding them in his mighty eddies. The great and terrible wave gathered about Achilles, falling upon him and beating on his shield, so that he could not keep his feet; he caught hold of a great elm-tree, but it came up by the roots, and tore away the bank, damming the stream with its thick branches and bridging it all across; whereby Achilles struggled out of the stream, and fled full speed over the plain, for he was afraid. But the mighty river god ceased not in his pursuit, and sprang upon him with a dark-crested wave, to stay his hands and save the Trojans from destruction.’
Achilles tried to escape from the rushing waves of the Scamander; he ran as fast as he could to save himself. The angry flood made him tired, and ‘ate the ground from under his feet’.
Then the son of Peleus cried out, ‘Father Jove, is there none of the gods who will take pity upon me, and save me from the river?’
Achilles blamed his mother Juno saying that ‘she beguiled and tricked me into the war’. She told me I was to fall under the walls of Troy by the flying arrows of Apollo.
He wanted to die fighting against Hector; ‘I should fall a hero by the hand of a hero; whereas now it seems that I shall come to a most pitiable end, trapped in this river as though…’
Neptune and Minerva came up to him in the likeness of two men, and took him by the hand saved the son of Peleus from the torrential waves of the Scamander.
‘Nevertheless Scamander did not slacken in his pursuit, but was still more furious with the son of Peleus. He lifted his waters into a high crest and cried aloud to river Simois saying, ‘Dear brother, let the two of us unite to save this man, or he will sack the mighty city of King Priam, and the Trojans will not hold out against him.’
Scamander upraised his tumultuous flood high against Achilles, but Juno, called out to Vulcan her son. ‘Crook-foot’ to dry up the streams of the river Scamander and save Achilles.
On this Vulcan kindled a fierce fire, which broke out first upon the plain and burned the many dead whom Achilles had killed and whose bodies were lying about in great numbers’.
The river then spoke, ‘Vulcan, there is no god who can hold his own against you. I cannot fight you when you flare out your flames in this way; strive with me no longer.’
Scamander was boiling; ‘as a cauldron upon ‘a large fire boils when it is melting the lard of some fatted hog, and the lard keeps bubbling up all over when the dry faggots blaze under it- even so were the goodly waters of Xanthus heated’.
He could flow no longer but stayed his stream, so afflicted was he by the blasts of fire which cunning Vulcan had raised. Then he prayed to Juno and besought her saying, ‘Juno, why should your son vex my stream with such especial fury?
I am not so much to blame as all the others are who have been helping the Trojans. I will leave off, since you so desire it, and let your son leave off also. Furthermore I swear never again will I do anything to save the Trojans from destruction, not even when all Troy is burning in the flames which the Achaeans will kindle.’
As soon as Juno heard this she said to her son Vulcan, ‘Son Vulcan, hold now your flames; we ought not to use such violence against a god for the sake of mortals.’
‘When she had thus spoken Vulcan quenched his flames, and the river went back once more into his own fair bed’. Xanthus was now beaten also.
Thus Iliad puts the plain of the three rivers into its narratives that finds Achilles and the rivers Scamander, Xanthus and the Simois joined in a tug of war. It shows that City of Troy, the Volcano, and the rivers Scamander and the Xanthus are very close to each other and also near the sea. Homer’s Iliad pinpoints the real existence of a volcano in the ‘first land’ from where the ancient migration started after an eruption from it.
It is not difficult now to find out the geographical situations of not only the ancient volcano, or the rivers, but also the landmass that has gone into the descriptions of all epics as well.
River Scamander is identified with Chandrabhaga on the seashore at the Sun Temple near Konark. This river is no more at the site now where local people assembled to worship the ancient site where once this river was flowing. But scholars who worked on Chinese pilgrims’ accounts, showed it wrongly as a river of the present day Kashmir.