SOURCE: Knox, Bernard. “Achilles.” Grand Street 9, no. 3 (spring 1990): 129-50.

[In the following essay, Knox studies the thematic course of the Iliad embodied by Achilles, observing that the hero traces a path from “godlike self-absorption” driven by honor and rage to his recognition of pity and the values of human community.]

There are in the Iliad two human beings who are godlike, Achilles and Helen. One of them has already come to a bitter recognition of human stature and moral responsibility when the poem begins. Helen, the cause of the war, is so preeminent in her sphere, so far beyond competition in her beauty, her power to enchant men, that she is a sort of human Aphrodite. In her own element, she is irresistible. Every king in Greece was ready to fight for her hand in marriage, but she chose Menelaus, King of Sparta. When Paris, the Prince of Troy, came to visit, she ran off with him, leaving husband and daughter, without a thought of the consequences for others. Her willful action is the cause of all the deaths at Troy, those past and those to come. When she left with Paris she acted like a god, with no thought of anything but the fullfillment of her own desire, the exercise of her own power, the demands of her own nature.

But when the Iliad opens, she has already come to realize the meaning for others of her actions, to recognize that she is a human being. She criticizes herself harshly as she speaks to Priam:

if only death had pleased me then, grim death,
that day I followed your son to Troy, forsaking
my marriage-bed, my kinsmen and my child …(1)

She feels responsible for the human misery she sees all around her; something the gods never do. When Zeus and Hera, for example, settle their quarrel about the fate of Troy, Zeus gives way to Hera but claims her acquiescence whenever he in his turn wishes to destroy a city. Not only does she accept, she actually offers him three cities, those she loves best: Argos, Sparta and Mycenae. That is how the fate of nations is decided. Human suffering counts for nothing in the settlement of divine differences. The gods feel no responsibility for the human victims of their private wars. But Helen has come at last to a full realization of the suffering she has caused; too late to undo it, but at least she can see herself in the context of humankind and shudder at her own responsibility. “My dear brother,” she says to Hector,

dear to me, bitch that I am—vicious, scheming
a horror to freeze the heart! Oh how I wish
that first day my mother brought me into the light
some black whirlwind had rushed me out to the mountains
or into the surf where the roaring breakers crash and drag,
where the waves had swept me off before all this had happened!

This realization of her responsibility explains why she had resisted the goddess Aphrodite, who urged her to go to bed with Paris; in that scene she fell below the level of divine indifference—as from the human point of view she rose above it. She had ceased to be a mere existence, an unchanging blind self. She has become human and can feel the sorrow, the regret that no human being escapes.

At the beginning of the Iliad, Helen has already broken out of the prison of self-absorption, but this is the point at which Achilles enters it. The Iliad shows us the origin, course and consequences of his wrath, his imprisonment in a godlike, lonely, heroic fury from which all the rest of the world is excluded, and also his return to human stature. The road to this final release is long and grim, strewn with the corpses of many a Greek and Trojan, and it leads finally to his own death.

.....

There are, of course, objections that may be made to such a view of Achilles as a tragic hero, a fully created character whose motives and actions form an intelligible unity. Prominent among them are the contradictions and inconsistencies in Achilles' reactions to events that many critics claim to detect in the text of the poem. These are telltale signs, according to one school, of oral improvisation under the pressure of performance, the result, according to another, of later editorial activity. It may be, however, that the critics have underestimated the elegance and sophistication of Homer's narrative technique (a constant danger for those who persist in thinking of him purely in terms of oral composition). In his creation of character, Homer spares us the rich, sometimes superfluous, detail we have come to associate with that word in modern fiction; he gives us only what is necessary to his purpose. Similarly, in his presentation of motivation, he is economical in the extreme. In those sections of the poem where personal relationships and motives are important—the debate in Book 1, the embassy in Book 9, the meeting of Achilles and Priam in Book 24—Homer's method is dramatic rather than epic. The proportion of direct speech to narrative is such that these scenes, the embassy in particular, could be performed by actors, and, as is clear from Plato's dialogue Ion, the later rhapsodes who gave Homeric recitations exploited the dramatic potential of Homer's text to the full. Like a dramatist, Homer shows us character and motivation not by editorial explanation but through speech and action. And he also invokes the response of an audience familiar with heroic poetry and formulaic diction, counting on their capacity to recognize significant omissions, contrasts, variations and juxtapositions. We are not told what is going on in the mind of his characters, we are shown. Homer, like the god Apollo at Delphi in Heraclitus' famous phrase, does not say, nor does he conceal—he indicates.

Achilles plays no part in the events described in Books 2-8; he sits by his ships on the shore, waiting for the fulfillment of his mother's promise. And by the end of Book 8, the supplication of Thetis and the will of Zeus have begun to produce results. The Greeks are in retreat, penned up in their hastily fortified camp at nightfall, awaiting the Trojan assault which will come with daybreak. And Agamemnon yields to Nestor's advice to send an embassy to Achilles, urging him to return to the battleline. Agamemnon admits that he was wrong and proposes to make amends:

                                                                                                                        Mad, blind I was!
Not even I would deny it …
But since I was blinded, abandoned to such inhuman rage,
now, at last, I am bent on setting things to rights:
I'll give a priceless ransom paid for friendship.

In a bravura passage, he details the priceless ransom. Not only will he return Briseis and swear an oath that he has never touched her; he will give Achilles lavish gifts—gold, horses and women among them. He will also offer him the hand of one of his three daughters, with seven cities as her dowry.

It is a magnificent offer but there is one thing missing: Agamemnon offers no apology to Achilles, no admission that he was in the wrong. Quite the contrary. His confession that he was mad, at the beginning of his speech, is effectively canceled out by the way he ends it.

“Let him submit to me!
Let him bow down to me! I am the greater king,
I am the elderborn, I claim—the greater man.”

This is a harsh summons to obedience. The word translated “bow down” is a passive form, dmetheto, of a verb damno which means: “tame,” “subdue.” It is a word the Homeric poems use for the taming of wild asses, the taming of a bride by a man, the subjection of a people to a ruler, of a beaten warrior to the victor. Agamemnon will still not recognize Achilles' claim to honor as predominant in battle; in fact, these words reveal that the splendid gifts reflect honor on Agamemnon rather than on Achilles. They are the enormous bounty a ruler can, if he wishes, bestow on a subject, and will do so only if the subject recognizes his place.

Once the ambassadors arrive, Odysseus describes the plight of the Achaeans, begs Achilles to relent and then launches into the recital of the magnificent gifts Agamemnon offers in recompense. The whole of the long recital, rich in detail and rising in intensity throughout, is repeated almost verbatim from Agamemnon's speech; the audience relished a repeat of such a virtuoso passage—this is one of the pleasures of oral poetry in performance. But this is no mere oral poet repeating mechanically, no mere servant of the tradition. We are suddenly reminded that Odysseus' speech is not just a welcome reprise of Agamemnon's brilliant catalogue of gifts—it is a speech of a wily ambassador in a delicate situation. Odysseus cuts short the repetition of Agamemnon's speech at the line “All this / I would extend to him if he will end his anger.” And we remember what came next, what Odysseus has suppressed: “Let him submit to me!”

Achilles' reply is a long, passionate outburst; he pours out all the resentment stored up so long in his heart. He rejects out of hand this embassy and any other that may be sent; he wants to hear no more speeches. Not for Agamemnon, nor for the Achaeans either, will he fight again. He is going home, with all his men and ships. As for Agamemnon's gifts …

His gifts, I loathe his gifts …
I wouldn't give you a splinter for that man!
Not if he gave me ten times as much, twenty times over, all
he possesses now, and all that could pour in from the world's end—
not all the wealth that's freighted into Orchomenus, even into Thebes,
Egyptian Thebes where the houses overflow with the greatest troves of treasure …
no, not if his gifts outnumbered all the grains of sand
and dust in the earth—no, not even then could Agamemnon
bring my fighting spirit round until he pays me back,
pays full measure for all his heart-breaking outrage!

“Pays full measure / for all his heart-breaking outrage”—this is the point. Achilles is a killer, the personification of martial violence, but there is one area in which his sensibilities are more finely attuned than the antennae of a radar scanner—that of honor among men. And he senses the truth. Odysseus did not report Agamemnon's insulting demand for submission, but Achilles is not deceived. In all Odysseus did say there was no hint that Agamemnon regretted his action, no semblance of an apology, nothing that “pays full measure / for all his heart-breaking outrage.” Seen in this context, the gifts are no gifts, they are an insult. Gold, horses, women—he has no need of such bribes. And the offer of Agamemnon's daughter is that of an overlord to a subject; without an apology, an admission of equal status, it is one more symbol of subordination. His father will find him a bride at home; he will live there in peace, live out his life, choose the other destiny his goddess mother told him he carried towards the day of his death:

if I make it back to the fatherland I love,
my pride, my glory dies …
true, but the life that's left me will be long …

This speech of Achilles is sometimes seen as a repudiation of the heroic ideal, a realization that the life and death of glory is a game not worth the candle.

Cattle and fat sheep can all be had for the raiding,
tripods all for the trading, and tawny heads of stallions.
Ah, but a man's life breath cannot come back again—
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man's clenched teeth.

These are indeed strange words for Achilles, but in the context of the speech as a whole they are not inconsistent with his devotion to honor. It is the loss of that honor, of that recognition as the supreme arbiter of the war, which has driven him to these formulations and reflections. He would still be ready to choose the other destiny, a short life with glory, if that glory had not been taken away from him by Agamemnon, and were not even now, in the absence of an apology, withheld.

In the face of this passionate rejection there is nothing Odysseus can say. It is Phoenix who now takes up the burden, Achilles' tutor and guardian from the days of his boyhood. In the name of that relationship he asks Achilles to relent. Even the gods, he says, can be moved, by prayer and supplication. He goes on to describe the spirits of Prayer. Litai is the Greek word and prayer is not an exact translation, for the English word has lost some of its original sense of “supplication”—the root sense of the Greek. These “Prayers for forgiveness” are humble and embarrassed—“they limp and halt … can't look you in the eyes.” Their attitude represents the embarrassment of the man who must apologize for his former insolence; it is hard for him to humble himself, it affects even his outward semblance. But he makes the effort, and the Prayers, the entreaties, come after the Spirit of Ruin to repair the damage done; they must not be refused.

But this appeal too will fall on deaf ears. And with some justice. Apollo relented in Book 1 but only after full restitution was made and a handsome apology, “Prayers for forgiveness.” And where are the prayers, the embarrassed, lame pleas of Agamemnon? The Spirit of Ruin, Agamemnon's Ate, is all too plain, but Achilles has seen no prayers from him—only from Odysseus, and now from Phoenix. Who now tries again, with an example of another hero, Meleager, who relented, but too late—a prophetic paradigm in the framework of the poem. He too withdrew from the fighting in anger, endangered his city, refused entreaties of his fellow citizens and even of his father, refused the gifts they offered him, and finally when the enemy had set fire to the city, yielded to the entreaties of his wife and returned to the battle. But the gifts he had spurned were not offered again. You too, Phoenix is saying, will someday relent, if Hector drives the Achaeans back on their ships, but if so, you will fight without the gifts that are the visible symbols of honor, the concrete expression of the army's appreciation of valor. Phoenix is talking Achilles' language now, and it has its effect: Achilles admits that he finds Phoenix's appeal disturbing—“Stop confusing / my fixed resolve with this, this weeping and wailing.” And he speaks now not of leaving the next day but of remaining by the ships and ends by announcing that the decision, to stay or to leave, will be taken on the morrow.

Ajax, the last to speak, does not mention Agamemnon, but dwells on the army's respect and affection for Achilles. It is the plea of a great, if simple, man and again Achilles is moved. He still feels nothing but hate for Agamemnon, but he now decides that he will stay at Troy. But he will not fight until

                    the son of wise King Priam, dazzling Hector
batters all the way to the Myrmidon ships and shelters,
slaughtering Argives, gutting the hulls with fire.

Since his ships, as we have been told, are drawn up on the far flank of the beachhead, this is small comfort for Agamemnon; the embassy is a failure.

The battle resumes and Zeus fulfills his promise to Thetis: Hector and the Trojans drive the Achaeans back on their ships. The main Achaean fighters, Agamemnon, Diomedes and Odysseus are wounded and retire from the mêlée. Achilles, watching all this from his tent, sends Patroclus off to inquire about another wounded man who has been brought back to the ships, Machaon, the physician of the Greek army. And he revels in the setbacks of the Achaeans. “Now,” he says, “I think they will grovel at my knees, / our Achaean comrades begging for their lives.” This passage is of course one of the mainstays of those who wish to attribute Book 9 to a later poet: it seems to them to show ignorance of the embassy to Achilles. But this is because they take it that Agamemnon's offer of gifts was a fully adequate satisfaction; Grote (the most eloquent champion of this view) even speaks of “the outpouring of profound humiliation” by the Greeks and from Agamemnon especially. But as we have seen, Odysseus' speech to Achilles contained not the slightest hint of apology on Agamemnon's part, and certainly nothing like what Achilles demands—that Agamemnon “pay full measure for his heart-breaking outrage.” There was no supplication made on behalf of Agamemnon; Phoenix's mention of the Litai that come humbly and embarrassed to beg favor only underscored the point. Now, says Achilles, now they are beginning to feel the pinch, they will come to their knees, to the suppliant position of abject prostration, confession of utter weakness and dependence.

Patroclus comes back from the tents of the Achaeans with news of Machaon's wound and with a purpose: Nestor has primed him to ask Achilles, if he will not fight himself, to send Patroclus out in his armor. What Achilles now hears from Patroclus is the kind of balm for his wounded pride that he had hardly dared to hope for. Not only is Hector at the ships but

there's powerful Diomedes brought down by an archer,
Odysseus wounded, and Agamemnon too, the famous spearman,
and Eurypylus took an arrow-shot in the thigh …

This should be enough to satisfy even Achilles: no more dramatic proof of his superiority in battle could be imagined. And he begins to relent. He is still resentful of Agamemnon's treatment of him but “Let bygones be bygones now. Done is done / How on earth can a man rage on forever?” He is willing to save the Achaeans, now that they are suitably punished for the wrong they did him. Why, then, does he not go into battle himself? He tells us.

Still by god, I said I would not relax my anger,
not till the cries and carnage reached my own ships.
So you, you strap my splendid armor on your back,
you lead our battle-hungry Myrmidons into action!

But Patroclus is not to go too far. He is to drive the Trojans back from the ships, no more: above all, he is not to assault Troy. He is to win glory for Achilles by beating off the Trojan attack, and then—“they'll send her back, my lithe and lovely girl / and top it off with troves of glittering gifts.” Unlike the Meleager of Phoenix's cautionary tale, he will receive the gifts once offered and refused, even though he does not join the fighting himself.

All through this speech confused emotions are at war within him. What does he really want? He talks of the restitution of Briseis and gifts, the compensation offered and refused before. He talks of “the beloved day of our return.” Perhaps he does not know himself at this moment. But at the end of the speech there comes out of him the true expression of the godlike self-absorption in which he is still imprisoned.

Oh would to god—Father Zeus, Athena and
          Lord Apollo—
not one of all these Trojans could flee his death, not one,
no Argive either, but we could stride from the slaughter,
so we could bring Troy's hallowed crown of towers
toppling down around us—you and I alone!

Clearly what he really wishes for is a world containing nothing but himself and his own glory, for Patroclus, whom he now sends out in his own armor, he regards as a part of himself. This solipsistic dream of glory—“every body dead but us two,” as a scandalized ancient commentator summarized it—so offended the great Alexandrian scholar Zenodotus that he condemned the lines as the work of an interpolator who wished to inject into the Iliad the later Greek idea (for which the text gives no warrant) that Achilles and Patroclus were lovers.

All too soon the news comes from the battlefield: Patroclus is dead and the armies are fighting over his corpse. Achilles will return to the battle now, to avenge his friend; he sees the death of Patroclus as the fatal consequence of his quarrel with Agamemnon and wishes that “strife could die from the lives of gods and men.” He will make peace with Agamemnon. “Enough. Let bygones be bygones. Done is done.” But this is not regret or self-criticism: he is still angry. “Despite my anguish I will beat it down / the fury mounting inside me, down by force.” But he is angrier still with Hector. “Now I will go and overtake that murderer, / that Hector who destroyed my dearest friend.” His mother has just told him that his death is fated to come soon after Hector's, and though deeply disturbed by this news, he accepts his fate. Not to avenge Patroclus by killing Hector would be a renunciation of all that he stands for and has lived by, the attainment of glory, of the universal recognition that there is “no man my equal among the bronze-armed Achaeans.”

He cannot go into battle at once for he has no armor; his father's panoply has been stripped off the corpse of Patroclus. Hector wears it now. Thetis goes off to have the god Hephaestus make new armor for her son, and when she brings it he summons an assembly of the Achaeans, as he had done at the very beginning of the poem. The wounded kings, Odysseus, Diomedes, Agamemnon, their wounds testimony to Achilles' supremacy in combat, come to hear him. His address is short. He regrets the quarrel with Agamemnon and its results. He is still angry—that emerges clearly from his words—but he will curb his anger: he has a greater cause for anger now. He calls for an immediate general attack on the Trojan ranks, which are still marshaled outside the city walls, on the level ground.

Agamemnon's reply to Achilles' short, impatient speech is long and elaborate. It is, in fact, an excuse. Achilles has come as close as he ever could to saying that he was wrong, but Agamemnon, even now, tries to justify himself as he addresses not only Achilles but also the army as a whole, which, as he is fully aware, blames him for the Achaean losses. In fact his opening lines are an extraordinary appeal to the assembly for an orderly reception of his speech. “When a man stands up to speak, it's well to listen. / Not to interrupt him, the only courteous thing.” He disclaims responsibility for his action.

                                                                                                                                  I am not to blame!
Zeus and Fate and the Fury stalking through the night.
They are the ones who drove that savage madness in my heart …

He is the victim, he claims, of Ate, a word that means both the madness of self-delusion and the ruin it produces. “I was blinded,” he says, “and Zeus stole my wits.” He is talking now to a full assembly of the Achaeans, which includes

Even those who'd kept to the beached ships till now,
the helmsmen who handled the heavy steering-oars
and stewards left on board to deal out rations—

At the council of the kings, when the embassy to Achilles was decided on, he had spoken more frankly: “Mad, blind I was! / Not even I would deny it.” He does not make so honest an admission here. And now he promises to deliver the gifts that were offered and refused, to restore Briseis and to swear a great oath that he has not touched her.

To all this, Achilles is utterly indifferent. He shows no interest in Agamemnon's excuses or in the gifts: clearly he feels that this is all a waste of time. He has only one thing on his mind: Hector. And he urges immediate resumption of the fighting. He is talking of sending back into combat men who are many of them wounded, all of them tired, hungry, thirsty; Odysseus reminds him of the facts of life. “No soldier can battle all day, cut-and-thrust / till the sun goes down, if he is starved for food.” Odysseus suggests not only time for the army to rest and feed, but also a public ceremony of reconciliation: the acceptance of Agamemnon's gifts, the swearing of the oath about Briseis. Agamemnon approves the advice and gives orders to prepare a feast. But Achilles' reply is brusque and uncompromising. He is not interested in ceremonies of reconciliation which will serve to restore Agamemnon's prestige, he is not interested in Agamemnon's apology, still less in food; he thinks of one thing and one thing only: Hector. He is for battle now, and food at sunset, after the day's work. The corpse of Patroclus makes it impossible for him to take food or drink before his death is avenged. Only Hector's death can avenge Patroclus and reestablish Achilles' identity as the unchallengeable, unconquerable violence of war in person.

                                                                                                              You talk of food?
I have no taste for food—no, no, gorge Achilles
on slaughter and blood and the choking groans of men!

It is inhuman, godlike in fact. But the others are men, and Odysseus reminds him what it is to be human.

We must steel our hearts. Bury our dead,
with tears for the day they die, not one day more.
And all those left alive, after the hateful carnage,
remember food and drink

Human beings must put limits to their sorrow, their passions; they must recognize the animal need for food and drink. But not Achilles. He will not eat while Hector still lives. And, as if to point up the godlike nature of his passionate intensity, Homer has Athena sustain him, without his knowledge, on nectar and ambrosia, the food of the gods.

When he does go into battle, the Trojans turn and run for the gates; only Hector remains outside. And the two champions come face to face at last. Hector offers a pact to Achilles, the same pact he has made before another fight long ago, the formal duel with Ajax in Book 7—the winner to take his opponent's armor, but give his body to his fellow-soldiers for burial. The offer is harshly refused. This is no formal duel and Achilles is no Ajax, he is hardly even human, he is godlike, both greater and lesser than a man. The contrast between the raw self-absorbed fury of Achilles and the civilized responsibility and restraint of Hector is maintained to the end. It is of his people, the Trojans, that Hector is thinking as he throws his spear at Achilles: “How much lighter the war would be for Trojans then / if you, their greatest scourge, were dead and gone!” But it is Hector who dies, and as Achilles exults over his fallen enemy, his words bring home again the fact that he is fighting for himself alone; this is the satisfaction of a personal hatred. The reconciliation with Agamemnon and the Greeks was a mere formality to him, he is still cut off from humanity, a prisoner of his self-esteem, his obsession with honor—the imposition of his identity on all men and all things.

Hector!—surely you thought when you stripped Patroclus' armor
that you, you would be safe! Never a fear of me,
far from the fighting as I was—you fool!
Left behind there, down by the beaked ships
his great avenger waited, a greater man by far
that man was I …

He taunts Hector with the fate of his body. “The dogs and birds will maul you, shame your corpse / while Achaeans bury my dear friend in glory!” And in answer to Hector's plea and offer of ransom for his corpse, he reveals the extreme of inhuman hatred and fury he has reached:

Beg no more, you fawning dog—begging me by my parents!
Would to god my rage, my fury would drive me now
to hack your flesh away and eat you raw—

This is how the gods hate. His words recall those of Zeus to Hera in Book 4.

                                                                                                              Only if you could breach
their gates and their long walls and devour Priam
and Priam's sons and the Trojan armies raw—
then you just might cure your rage at last.

And as Achilles goes on, we recognize the tone, the words, the phrases:

No man alive could keep the dog-packs off you,
not if they haul in ten, twenty times that ransom
and pile it here before me and promise fortunes more,
no, not even if Dardan Priam should offer to weigh out
your bulk in gold! Not even then …

We have heard this before, when he refused the gifts of Agamemnon:

Not if he gave me ten times as much, twenty times over, all
he possesses now, all that could pour in from the world's end …
no, not if his gifts outnumbered all the grains of sand
and dust in the world, no, not even then …

It is the same wrath now as then, implacable, unappeasable, like the wrath of Hera and Athena—only its object has changed.

Achilles lashes Hector's body to his chariot and drags it in full view of the Trojans on the walls, to his tent, where he organizes a magnificent funeral for Patroclus. After the burning of the pyre, the hero's memory is celebrated with funeral games—contests, simulated combat, in honor of a fallen warrior. Such was the origin, the Greeks believed, of all the great games—the Olympian, the Pythian, the Isthmian, the Nemean games, and in Homer himself we hear of funeral games for Amarynceus of Elis and for Oedipus of Thebes. The honor paid to the dead man is marked by the richness of the prizes and the efforts of the contestants. Here the prizes are offered by Achilles, so he himself does not compete. There are to be many contests: a chariot race (which earns the longest and most elaborate description), a boxing match, wrestling, a foot race; after that a fight in full armor, discus throwing, and an archery contest. As the events are described, we see all the great Achaean heroes familiar to us from battle scenes, locked not now in combat but in the fierce effort of peaceful contest. Homer takes our minds away from the grim work of war and the horror of Achilles' degradation of Hector's corpse to show us a series of brilliant characterizations of his heroes in new situations. But the most striking feature of this account of the games is the behavior of Achilles. This seems to be a different man. It is the great Achilles of the later aristocratic tradition, the man of princely courtesy and innate nobility visible in every aspect of his bearing and conduct, the Achilles who was raised by the centaur Chiron. It is a vision of what Achilles might have been in peace, if peace had been a possibility in the heroic world, or, for that matter, in Homer's world. “The man,” says Aristotle in the Politics, “who is incapable of working in common, or who in his self-sufficiency has no need of others, is no part of the community, like a beast, or a god.” As far as his fellow Achaeans are concerned, Achilles has broken out of the self-imposed prison of godlike unrelenting fury, reintegrated himself in society, returned to something like human feeling; he is part of the community again.

All through the games he acts with a tact, diplomacy and generosity that seem to signal the end of his desperate isolation, his godlike self-absorption; we almost forget that Hector's corpse is still lying in the dust, tied to his chariot. But if we had forgotten we are soon reminded. Once the games are over, Achilles, weeping whenever he remembers Patroclus—“his gallant heart—/ what rough campaigns they'd fought to an end together …”—drags Hector's corpse three times round Patroclus' tomb. But Apollo wards off corruption from the body and on Olympus the gods are filled with compassion for Hector, all the gods, that is, except Hera, Athena and Poseidon—a formidable combination. Apollo (the champion of Troy as the other three are its enemies) speaks up for action to rescue Hector's body. For him, Achilles is the lower extreme of Aristotle's alternatives—a beast: he is

                                                                                                    like some lion
going his own barbaric way, giving in to his power
his brute force and wild pride …

Hera, on the other hand, sees him as closer to the other alternative—a god: “Achilles sprang from a goddess—one I reared myself.” So Zeus makes a decision designed to satisfy both sides: Thetis is to tell Achilles to surrender Hector's body to Priam, but Priam is to come as suppliant to Achilles' tents, bringing a sign of honor, a rich ransom.

When Thetis conveys to Achilles the will of Zeus, his attitude is exactly the same as his reaction to Agamemnon's renewed offer of gifts after the death of Patroclus—cold indifference. He agrees to accept the ransom, but his speech shows no relenting; his heart is still of iron. What is needed to break the walls down, to restore him to full humanity, is the arrival in his tent not of the heralds whom he evidently expected to bring the ransom, but of Priam himself, alone, a suppliant in the night. And that unforeseen confrontation is what Zeus now moves to bring about.

The god Hermes brings Priam safely through the Achaean sentries and through the gate that bars the entrance to Achilles' courtyard; Priam takes Achilles by surprise as he sits at table, his meal just finished. His appearance, unannounced, is a mystery, a thing unprecedented, and Achilles is astonished. Homer expresses that astonishment by means of a simile, one of the most disconcerting of the whole poem:

                    as when the grip of madness seizes one
who murders a man in his own fatherland and flees
abroad to foreign shores, to a wealthy noble host
and a sense of marvel runs through all who see him …

It seems to reverse the situation, as if Priam, not Achilles, were the killer. And yet it is carefully chosen. For Achilles, a child of the quarrelsome, violent society of the Achaeans we know so well from the bitter feuds of the camp, from old Nestor's tales of cattle raids, ambush and border war, from the tales of Achaean suppliants fleeing their homeland with blood on their hands, for Achilles the appearance of a distinguished stranger and his gesture of supplication evoke the familiar context of the man of violence seeking shelter. Achilles cannot imagine the truth. And now Priam tells him who he is—but not at once. First he invokes the memory of Achilles' father—pining at home for a son he may never see again. And then he reveals his identity and makes his plea. It ends with the tragic and famous lines, “I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before / I put my lips to the hands of the man who killed my son.”

And Achilles begins to break out at last from the prison of self-absorbed, godlike passion: “like the gods,” Priam called him, but that is the last time this line-end formula (exclusive to Achilles) appears. He will move now to man's central position between beast and god. But the change is not sudden. The stages in his return to feelings are presented with masterly psychological insight. Achilles took the old man's hands and pushed him “gently,” says Homer, away, and wept. Not for Priam but for his own aged father, to whose memory Priam has appealed and who will soon, like Priam, lose a son. He raises Priam to his feet and sits him in a chair, and speaks to him in awed admiration: “What daring,” he asks, “brought you down to the ships, all alone … ?” It was indeed an action calling for the kind of extraordinary courage that is Achilles' own preeminent quality. He comforts the old man, with what small comfort mortals can take for their lot. From his two urns of good and evil, Zeus dispenses now evil, now evil mixed with good. So it was with Peleus, Achilles' own father, who had great honor and possessions. But then,

only a single son he fathered, doomed at birth
cut off in the spring of life—
and I, I give the man no care as he grows old
since here I sit in Troy, far from my fatherland,
a grief to you, a grief to all your children.

That last phrase is a new view of the war; he sees it now from Priam's point of view. And moves on from pity for his own father to pity for the bereaved king of Troy.

And you too, old man, we hear you prospered once …
But then the gods of heaven brought this agony on you …

This is a new way of thinking for Achilles; he sees himself as another man must see him, in this case, as he must appear to the father of his enemy, Hector.

He tells Priam to bear up and endure, but the old man, his moment of danger past, his end accomplished, grows impatient and asks for Hector's body at once. Suddenly we are shown that the new-found emotions have only a precarious existence in Achilles' heart; at any moment they may be overwhelmed by a return of his anger, his self-centered rage. He knows this himself, and warns Priam not to go too fast; he knows how tenuous a hold his new mood has:

No more, old man, don't tempt my wrath, not now! …
                                        Don't stir my raging heart still more.
Or under my own roof I may not spare your life, old man—
suppliant that you are …

Achilles goes to collect the ransom, and when he orders Hector's body to be washed and anointed, he gives orders to have it done out of Priam's sight:

he feared that, overwhelmed by the sight of Hector,
wild with grief, Priam might let his anger flare
and Achilles might fly into fresh rage himself,
cut the old man down …

He knows himself. This is a new Achilles, who can feel pity for others, see deep into their hearts and into his own. For the first time he shows self-knowledge and acts to prevent the calamity his violent temper might bring about. It is as near to self-criticism as he ever gets, but it marks the point at which he ceases to be godlike Achilles and becomes a human being in the full sense of the word.

He tells Priam Hector's body is ready. And offers him food. It will be Priam's first meal since his son's death. And he speaks to Priam as Odysseus had spoken to him before the battle; there must be a limit to mourning for the dead, men must eat and go on with their lives.

Now, at last, let us turn our thoughts to supper.
Even Niobe with her lustrous hair remembered food,
though she saw a dozen children killed in her own halls …
Nine days, they lay in their blood …
then on the tenth the gods of heaven interred them.
                    And Niobe, gaunt, worn to the bone with weeping
turned her thoughts to food.

It is an admission of mortality, of limitations, of the bond which unites him to Priam, and all men.

He has a bed made for Priam outside the tent, for any Achaean coming into the tent and seeing Priam would tell Agamemnon. Achilles assumes the role of the old king's protector; even in his new-found humanity, he is still a man alone—his sense of honor will not allow him to let Priam fall into the Achaeans' hands. And he promises to hold off the fighting for the twelve days Priam needs for the funeral of Hector. He has come at last to the level of humanity, and humanity at its best; he has forgotten himself and his wrongs in his sympathy for another man. It is late, only just in time, for when the fighting resumes, he will fall in his turn as his mother told him and as Hector prophesied with his dying breath. The poem ends with the funeral of Hector. But this is the signal for the resumption of the fighting. The first line of the poem gave us the name of Achilles and its last line reminds us of him, for his death will come soon, as the fighting resumes. The poem ends, as it began, on the eve of battle.

.....

The tragic course of Achilles' rage, his final recognition of human values, this is the guiding theme of the poem, and it is developed against a background of violence and death. But the grim progress of the war is interrupted by scenes which remind us that the destruction of war, though an integral part of human life, is only part of it. Except for Achilles, whose worship of violence falters only in the final moment of pity for Priam, the yearning for peace and its creative possibilities is never far below the surface of the warriors' minds. This is most poignantly expressed by the scenes which take place in Troy, especially the farewell scene between Hector and Andromache, but the warriors' dream of peace is projected over and over again in the elaborate similes, those comparisons with which Homer varies the grim details of the bloodletting, and which achieve the paradoxical effect of making the particulars of destructive violence familiar by drawing for illustration on the peaceful, ordinary activities of everyday life. Dead men and armor are trampled under the wheels of Achilles' chariot as white barley is crushed under the feet of oxen on a threshing-floor. Hostile forces advancing against each other are like two lines of reapers in the wheat or barley field of a rich man, cutting their way forward; the two fronts in tense deadlock at the Achaean wall hold even like the scales held by a widow, working for a pitiful wage, as she weighs out her wool; the combatants fighting for possession of Sarpedon's corpse swarm over it like flies over the brimming milk buckets in spring. Menelaus bestrides the body of Patroclus, as a lowing cow stands protectively over its first-born calf; Ajax is forced back step by step like a stubborn donkey driven out of a cornfield by boys who beat him with sticks; the pain that suddenly assails Agamemnon as his flesh wound in the arm contracts is like the sharp sorrow of pain that descends on a woman in labor. These vivid pictures of normal life, drawn with consummate skill and inserted in a relentless series of gruesome killings, have a special poignancy; they are one of the features of Homer's evocation of battle which make it unique: an exquisite balance between the celebration of war's tragic, heroic values and those creative values of civilized life which war destroys.

These two poles of the human condition, war and peace, with their corresponding aspects of human nature, the destructive and creative, are implicit in every situation and statement of the poem, and they are put before us, in something approaching abstract form, on the shield which the god Hephaestus makes for Achilles. Its emblem is an image of human life as a whole. Here are two cities, one at peace and one at war. In one a marriage is celebrated and a quarrel settled by process of law; the other is besieged by a hostile army and fights for its existence. Scenes of violence—peaceful shepherds slaughtered in an ambush, Death dragging away a corpse by its foot—are balanced by scenes of plowing, harvesting, work in the vineyard and on the pasture, a green on which youths and maidens dance. War has its place on the shield, but it is the lesser one; most of the surface is covered with scenes of peaceful life—the pride of the tilled land, wide and triple-plowed, the laborers reaping with the sharp sickles in their hands, a great vineyard heavy with clusters, young girls and young men carrying the sweet fruit away in baskets, a large meadow in a lovely valley for the sheep flocks and above all, the dance, the formal symbol of the precise and ordered relations of people in peaceful society.

Here young boys and girls, beauties courted
with costly gifts of oxen, danced and danced,
linking their arms, gripping each other's wrists.
And the girls wore robes of linen light and flowing,
the boys wore finespun tunics rubbed with a gloss of oil,
the girls were crowned with a bloom of fresh garlands,
the boys swung golden daggers hung on silver belts.
And now they'd run in rings on their skilled feet,
lightly, quick as a crouching potter spins his wheel,
palming it smoothly, giving it practice twirls
to see it run, and now they would run in rows,
in rows crisscrossing rows—rapturous dancing.
A breathless crowd stood round them struck with joy
and through them a pair of tumblers dashed and sprang,
whirling in leaping handsprings, leading out the dance.

And all around the outermost rim of the shield the god who made it set the great stream of the river Oceanus, a river which is at once the frontier of the known and imagined world and the barrier between the quick and the dead.

The imbalance of these scenes on the shield of Achilles shows us the total background of the carnage of the war; it provides a frame which gives the rage of Achilles and the death of Hector a true perspective. But it is not enough. The Iliad remains a terrifying poem. Achilles, just before his death, is redeemed as a human being, but there is no consolation for the death of Hector. We are left with a sense of waste, which is not adequately balanced even by the greatness of the heroic figures and the action; the scale descends towards loss. The Iliad remains not only the greatest epic poem in literature, but also the most tragic.

Homer's Achilles is clearly the model for the tragic hero of the Sophoclean stage; his stubborn, passionate devotion to an ideal image of self is the same force that drives Antigone, Oedipus, Ajax and Philoctetes to the fulfillment of their destinies. Homer's Achilles is also, for archaic Greek society, the essence of the aristocratic ideal, the paragon of male beauty, courage, and patrician manners—“the splendor running in the blood,” says Pindar, in a passage describing Achilles' education in the cave of the centaur Chiron. And this too strikes a tragic note, for Pindar sang his praise of aristocratic values in the century which saw them go down to extinction, replaced by the new spirit of Athenian democracy. But it seems at first surprising that one of the most famous citizens of that democracy, a man whose life and thought would seem to place him at the opposite extreme pole from the Homeric hero, who was so far removed from Achilles' blind instinctive reactions that he could declare the unexamined life unlivable, that Socrates, on trial for his life, should invoke the name of Achilles. Explaining to his judges why he feels no shame or regret for a course of action which has brought him face to face with a death sentence, and rejecting all thought of a compromise which might save his life (and which his fellow citizens would have been glad to offer) he cites as his example Achilles, the Achilles who, told by his mother that his own death would come soon after Hector's, replied: “Then let me die at once …” rather than “sit by the ships / a useless dead weight on the good, green earth …”

And yet, on consideration, it is not so surprising. Like Achilles, he was defying the community, hewing to a solitary line, in loyalty to a private ideal of conduct, of honor. In the last analysis the blood-stained warrior and the gentle philosopher live and die in the same heroic, and tragic, pattern.

Note

1. All the translations from the Iliad are by Robert Fagles.