Iliad Achilles Quotes

Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.

Achilles glared at him and answered, "Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall

And overpowered by memory Both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely For man - killing Hector, throbbing, crouching Before Achilles' feet as Achilles wept himself, Now for his father, now for Patroclus once again And their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.

Why have you come to me here, dear heart, with all these instructions? I promise you I will do everything just as you ask. But come closer. Let us give in to grief, however briefly, in each other's arms.

After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?

Rage - Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls, great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds, and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end. Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed, Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

Will you tell me who hurt you? I imagine saying, 'You.' But that is nothing more than childishness.

A last request—grant it, please. Never bury my bones apart from yours, Achilles, let them lie together . . . just as we grew up together in your house

Fear, O Achilles, the wrath of heaven; think on your own father and have compassion upon me, who am the more pitiable

You've injured me, Farshooter, most deadly of the gods; And I'd punish you, if I had the power.

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star… Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago. I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble. I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluster of men, all smoking pipes, gathered around an exhibit in a glass case that gleamed in the dim light and lit their faces ghoulishly from below. I drew nearer. In the case was a machine revolving slowly on a turntable, a machine with metal parts that slid in and out and collapsed in upon themselves to form new images. An Inca temple… click click click… the Pyramids… the Parthenon. History passing beneath my very eyes, changing every moment. 'I thought I'd find you here,' said a voice at my elbow. It was Henry. His gaze was steady and impassive in the dim light. Above his ear, beneath the wire stem of his spectacles, I could just make out the powder burn and the dark hole in his right temple. I was glad to see him, though not exactly surprised. 'You know,' I said to him, 'everybody is saying that you're dead.' He stared down at the machine. The Colosseum… click click click… the Pantheon. 'I'm not dead,' he said. 'I'm only having a bit of trouble with my passport.' 'What?' He cleared his throat. 'My movements are restricted,' he said. 'I no longer have the ability to travel as freely as I would like.' Hagia Sophia. St. Mark's, in Venice. 'What is this place?' I asked him. 'That information is classified, I'm afraid.' 1 looked around curiously. It seemed that I was the only visitor. 'Is it open to the public?' I said. 'Not generally, no.' I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point. 'Are you happy here?' I said at last. He considered this for a moment. 'Not particularly,' he said. 'But you're not very happy where you are, either.' St. Basil's, in Moscow. Chartres. Salisbury and Amiens. He glanced at his watch. 'I hope you'll excuse me,' he said, 'but I'm late for an appointment.' He turned from me and walked away. I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall.

His reward is the eternal fame that is both priceless and worthless

My friend Patroclus, whom I loved, is dead. I loved him more than any other comrade. I loved him like my head, my life, myself. I lost him, killed him. [. . .] . . .my Patroclus, son of Menoetius.

Aristotle says in the Poetics,” said Henry, “that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art.” “And I believe Aristotle is correct. After all, what are the scenes in poetry graven on our memories, the ones that we love the most? Precisely these. The murder of Agamemnon and the wrath of Achilles. Dido on the funeral pyre. The daggers of the traitors and Caesar’s blood—remember how Suetonius describes his body being borne away on the litter, with one arm hanging down?” “Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.” “Well said,” said Julian. “Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.” I looked at Camilla, her face bright in the sun, and thought of that line from the Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining. “And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?” “To live,” said Camilla. “To live forever,” said Bunny, chin cupped in palm. The teakettle began to whistle.

Sing, goddess, of Achilles' ruinous anger Which brought ten thousand pains to the Achaeans, And cast the souls of many stalwart heroes To Hades, and their bodies to the dogs And birds of prey.

Patroclus, in Achilles' arms, enlighten'd all with stars,

The beautiful word minunthadios, “short-lived,” is used of both Achilles and Hector, and applies to all of us.

Everywhere in Homer's saga of the rage of Achilles and the battles before Troy we are made conscious at one and the same time of war's ugly brutality and what Yeats called its "terrible beauty." The Iliad accepts violence as a permanent factor in human life and accepts it without sentimentality, for it is just as sentimental to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as it is to deny that it has its own strange and fatal beauty, a power, which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage and self-sacrifice that peacetime, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command.

What mostly happens in the Iliad is that Achilles has a hissy fit because Agamemnon has stolen a slave girl of his, sulks in his tent for eight books and spends the ninth telling Agamemnon he’s had enough and he’s going home.

my rage, my fury would drive me now to hack your flesh away and eat you raw – such agonies you have caused me - achilles, killing hector

The Wrath of Achilles is my theme, that fatal wrath which, in fulfillment of the will of Zeus, brought the Achaeans so much suffering and sent the gallant souls of many nobleman to Hades, leaving their bodies as carrion for the dogs and passing birds.

Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage, Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls Of heroes into Hades' dark, And left their bodies to rot as feasts For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done.

Priam and Achilles meet in the very twilight of their lives. Their extinction is certain and there will be no reward for behaving well, and yet, in the face of implacable fate and an indifferent universe, they mutually assert the highest ideals of their humanity.

The greatest war story ever told commemorates a war that established no boundaries, won no territory, and furthered no cause.

I could not burn your mortality from your body, so live before your days are gone and regret fills your heart.

No, ogni uomo nobile e saggio ama la sua donna e ne ha cura come io con tutto il cuore amavo la mia, e non importava se era una schiava di guerra. (Achille, da "Omero, Iliade")

There was no room for fear in Achilles' heart and he sprang at the Trojans with his terrible war-cry.

Now please, Achilles, subdue your pride.

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.

Knowledge of death motivates Achilles to kill with terrifying gentleness and dispassion, calling his enemy “my friend” even as he ends his life.

Achilles groaned, heartbroken. He howled in agony.

The sound of marching feet reverberated. In their midst, Achilles put on his armor.

The young fool might have known his prayers were doomed to fail. Achilles was not kind or tender-hearted, but a man of fierce passions

The tale of Achilles’ wrath, and therefore the poem, ends only once the alienated hero is able to accept loss as an inevitable element in the shared life of mortals.

Wrath—sing, goddess, of the ruinous wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles,

Also remember that Achilles, son of Thetis with the finely braided hair, is absent from the fighting. He is sitting beside the ships and ripening his anger, to cause more heartsickness.

—so as the great Achilles rampaged on, his sharp-hoofed stallions trampled shields and corpses, axle under his chariot splashed with blood, blood on the handrails sweeping round the car, sprays of blood shooting up from the stallions' hoofs and churning, whirling rims—and the son of Peleus charioteering on to seize his glory, bloody filth splattering both strong arms, Achilles' invincible arms—

In the war of Troy, the Greeks having sacked some of the neighbouring towns, and taken from thence two beautiful captives, Chryseis and Briseis, allotted the first to Agamemnon, and the last to Achilles.

Revere the gods, Achilles! Pity me in my own right, remember your own father! I deserve more pity...I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before - I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.

If modern scholars overlook the entertainment motive, dominant in the Iliad, and treat Homer as a Virgil, Dante, or Milton, rather than as a Shakespeare or Cervantes, they are doing him a great disservice. The Iliad, Don Quixote and Shakespeare’s later plays are life—tragedy salted with humour; the Aeneid, the Inferno and Paradise Lost are literary works of almost superhuman eloquence, written for fame not profit, and seldom read except as a solemn intellectual task. The Iliad, and its later companion-piece, the Odyssey, deserve to be rescued from the classroom curse which has lain heavily on them throughout the past twenty-six centuries, and become entertainment once more; which is what I have attempted here. How this curse fell on them can be simply explained.

Nastes and Amphimachus, the illustrious sons of Nomion - but Nastes, chilldish fool that he was, Went into battle decked out in gold like a girl. But gold could not help him escape a horrible death at the hands of Aeacus' grandson, the swift Achilles, In the bed of the river, and Achilles, fierce ad fiery, Took care of all his gold.

...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get. See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On. The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour. And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes.

Achilles, son of skillful Peleus, I need to tell you disastrous news. I wish it had not happened. Dead lies Patroclus and the armies fight 20 around his corpse, stripped of your arms and weapons, which Hector in his flashing helmet wears.

When Achilles heard this he sank into the black depths of despair. He picked up the dark dust in both his hands and poured it on his head...he cast himself down on the earth and lay there like a fallen giant, fouling his hair and tearing it out with his own hands...[the maidservants] beat their breasts with their hands and sank to the ground beside their royal master.

Riusciremo, prima o poi, a portar via Achille da quella micidiale guerra. E non saranno la paura né l’orrore a riportarlo a casa. Sarà una qualche, diversa, bellezza, più accecante della sua, e infinitamente più mite. (Postilla di "Omero, Iliade")

And let Apollo drive Prince Hector back to battle, breathe power back in his lungs, make him forget the pain that racks his heart. Let him whip the Achaeans in headlong panic rout and roll them back once more, tumbling back on the oar-swept ships of Peleus' son Achilles. And he, will launch his comrade Patroclus into action and glorious Hector will cut him down with a spear in front of Troy, once Patroclus has slaughtered whole battalions of strong young fighting men and among them all, my shining son Sarpedon. But then - enraged for Patroclus - brilliant Achilles will bring Prince Hector down. And then, from that day on, I'll turn the tide of war: back the fighting goes, no stopping it, ever.

No other deathless god will be allowed to help the Greeks until I have fulfilled 100 the wishes of the son of Peleus, Achilles, as I promised I would do, and nodded with my head to make it certain, the day the goddess Thetis touched my knees imploring me to glorify Achilles, the city-sacker.

The Greeks have often spoken to me about the things I said and blamed me for them. It was not my fault! The ones to blame are Destiny and Zeus and the avenging night-walker, the Fury, who set a wild delusion in my mind during the council meeting on the day when I removed the trophy from Achilles.

The Trojans triumph. And the very best of all the Greeks has now been killed—Patroclus. 690 The Greeks are devastated by his loss. So run down to the ships and tell Achilles, and he may come in time to save the body, although it is too late to save the armor, which Hector, in his flashing helmet, wears.

That day, Zeus stretched the painful work of war for men and horses, struggling for Patroclus. But all the while, godlike Achilles still knew nothing of his death, because the battle 520 was very far away from the swift ships, beneath the wall of Troy, and he had not expected in his heart his friend would die.

Hector...boast while you may. The victory is yours, a gift from Zeus the Son of Cronos and Apollo. They conquered me...Listen to this and ponder it well. You too, I swear it, have not long to live. Already sovran Destiny and Death are very close to you, death at the hands of Achilles, the peerless son of Peleus

The beautiful word minunthadios, “short-lived,” is used of both Achilles and Hector, and applies to all of us. We die too soon, and there is no adequate recompense for the terrible, inevitable loss of life. Yet through poetry, the words, actions, and feelings of some long-ago brief lives may be remembered even three thousand years later.

Through the will of Zeus your earlier request has been fulfilled. With arms raised high you prayed that all the Greeks, confined beside the ships’ sterns, would endure terrible suffering and mortal danger and yearn for you. So it has been fulfilled.” Swift-footed Lord Achilles, groaning, answered, “Yes, Mother, Zeus has granted me that prayer.

His gaze, which had been following the circling fruit, flickered to mine. I did not have time to look away before he said, softly but distinctly, “Catch.” A fig leapt from the pattern in a graceful arc towards me. It fell into the cup of my palms, soft and slightly warm. I was aware of the boys cheering. One by one, Achilles caught the remaining fruits, returned them to the table with a performer’s flourish. Except for the last, which he ate, the dark flesh parting to pink seeds under his teeth. The fruit was perfectly ripe, the juice brimming. Without thinking, I brought the one he had thrown me to my lips. Its burst of grainy sweetness filled my mouth; the skin was downy on my tongue. I had loved figs, once.

Pallas Athena was already bringing his day of death beneath Achilles’ hands.

And meanwhile, Achilles does not take care of us or pity us, despite his strength and skillfulness in war.

So the immortals spun our lives that we, we wretched men live on to bear such torments - the gods live free of sorrows. -Achilles to Priam

(Phoenix to Achilles:) For this cause sent he me to instruct thee in all these things, to be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds. (IX, 443)

I can characterise Achilles! *Aggressively insults him* My friend Mary, iliad class

Nestor is the spokesman for the status quo, for the tradition-hallowed belief that institutional power equates with unquestioned authority.

He must lay siege against Briseis' walls and conquer her. Love would be his sword and he would break all her chains.

I don't understand what the big deal with Achilles is. Diomedes is the one running around murdering everybody.

Draw closer to me, let us once more throw our arms around one another, and find sad comfort in the sharing of our sorrows.

Do not in this way, skilled though you be, godlike Achilles, try to trick me,

The iron din reached through the barren air up to the sky of bronze. And far away from where they fought, the horses of Achilles wept.

But when Achilles saw the arms and armor, he was possessed by even greater rage.

This, the only occasion in the Iliad when furious Achilles smiles serves as a bittersweet reminder of the difference real leadership could have made to the events of the Iliad. Agamemnon's panicked prize-grabbing in Book One and even Nestor's rambling "authority" pale beside Achilles' instinctive and absolute command of himself and the dangers of this occasion.

At this, a black cloud of despair engulfed Achilles. With both hands he scooped up fistfuls of soot and dust and poured it on his head, 30 and rubbed the dirt across his handsome face.

Menis. There’s no real equivalent in English. You remember, Homer begins The Iliad with ‘μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος’—‘Sing to me, O goddess, of the menis of Achilles.’” “Ah. What does it mean, exactly?” Clarissa mused for a second. “I suppose the closest translation is a kind of uncontrollable anger—terrifying rage—a frenzy.” Mariana nodded. “A frenzy, yes … It was frenzied.

Look north. Achilles on the rampart by the ditch: He lifts his face to 90; draws his breath; And from the bottom of his heart emits So long and loud and terrible a scream, The icy scabs at either end of earth Winced in their sleep; and in the heads that fought It seemed as if, and through his voice alone, The whole world's woe could be abandoned to the sky. An in that instant all the fighting glassed.

Epic art is founded on action, and the model of a society in which action could play out in greatest freedom was that of the heroic Greek period; so said Hegel, and he demonstrated it with The Iliad: even though Agamemnon was the prime king, other kings and princes chose freely to join him and, like Achilles, they were free to withdraw from the battle. Similarly the people joined with their princes of their own free will; there was no law that could force them; behavior was determined only by personal motives, the sense of honor, respect, humility before a more powerful figure, fascination with a hero's courage, and so on. The freedom to participate in the struggle and the freedom to desert it guaranteed every man his independence. In this way did action retain a personal quality and thus its poetic form. Against this archaic world, the cradle of the epic, Hegel contrasts the society of his own period: organized into the state, equipped with a constitution, laws, a justice system, an omnipotent administration, ministries, a police force, and so on. The society imposes its moral principles on the individual, whose behavior is thus determined by far more anonymous wishes coming from the outside than by his own personality. And it is in such a world that the novel was born.

And Patroclus, Shaking the voice out of his body, says: ‘Big mouth. Remember it took three of you to kill me. A god, a boy, and, last and least, a prince. I can hear Death pronounce my name, and yet Somehow it sounds like Hector. And as I close my eyes I see Achilles’ face With Death’s voice coming out of it.’ Saying these things Patroclus died. And as his soul went through the sand Hector withdrew his spear and said: ‘Perhaps.

...in his wild grief Achilles cried aloud, and his mother Thetis heard him...Immediately she rose up through the water...after her came her sisters...and each one's wailing was the thin sound of the wind upon the waves.

Surely, by all convention, the Iliad will end here, with the triumphant return of its vindicated hero. But the Iliad is not a conventional epic, and at the very moment of its hero's greatest military triumph, Homer diverts his focus from Achilles to the epic's two most important casualties, Patroklos and Hektor: it is to the consequences of their deaths, especially to the victor, that all action of the Iliad has been inexorably leading.

For once, Achilles, who is addicted to rage--as so many of us are, really, when it comes right down to it--this fighting man feels the rage well up in his heart . . . and he makes it disappear. He just--how did he do that?

His mother then, Wailing, sobbing, laid open her bosom And holding out a breast spoke through her tears: "Hector, my child, if ever I've soothed you With this breast, remember it now, son, and Have pity on me. Don't pit yourself Against that madman. Come inside the wall. If Achilles kills you I will never Get to mourn you laid out on a bier, O My sweet blossom, nor will Andromache, Your beautiful wife, but far from us both Dogs will eat your body by the Greek ships.

My son, Achilles is of nobler birth than you and he is also by far the stronger man. But you are older than he is. It is for you to give him sound advice, make suggestions and give him a lead which he will follow to his own advantage.’’ Nestor

n tutto quel fragore io sentii il suono della punta di bronzo che cadeva sul legno della tolda. E Aiace capì. Che quello era il mio giorno, e che gli dei erano con me. Indietreggiò, finalmente, lo fece, indietreggiò. E io salii su quella nave. E le diedi fuoco. E' in quelle fiamme che mi dovete ricordare. Ettore, lo sconfitto, lo dovete ricordare in piedi, sulla poppa di quella nave, circondato dal fuoco. Ettore, il morto trascinato da Achille per tre volte intorno alle mura della sua città, lo dovete ricordare vivo, e vittorioso, e splendente nelle sue armi d'argento e di bronzo. Ho imparato da una regina le parole che adesso mi sono rimaste e che voglio dire a voi: ricordatevi di me, ricordatevi di me, e dimenticate il mio destino. (Ettore, "Omero, Iliade")

And he, he will launch his comrade Patroclus into action and glorious Hector will cut him down with a spear in front of Troy, once Patroclus has slaughtered whole battalions of strong young fighting men and among them all, my shining son Sarpedon. But then—enraged for Patroctus— brilliant Achilles will bring Prince Hector down. And then, from that day on, I’ll turn the tide of war: back the fighting goes, no stopping it, ever, all the way till Achaean armies seize the beetling heights of Troy through Athena’s grand design.

A significant number of human cultures have viewed homosexual relations as not only legitimate but even socially constructive, ancient Greece being the most notable example. The Iliad does not mention that Thetis had any objection to her son Achilles’ relations with Patroclus. Queen Olympias of Macedon was one of the most temperamental and forceful women of the ancient world, and even had her own husband, King Philip, assassinated. Yet she didn’t have a fit when her son, Alexander the Great, brought his lover Hephaestion home for dinner.

And overpowered by memory Both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely For man - killing Hector, throbbing, crouching Before Achilles' feet as Achilles wept himself, Now for his father, now for Patroclus once again And their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.” ― Homer, The Iliad

Hecuba, the most powerful mortal woman in the poem, is exceptional in her ability to articulate her incandescent rage. She longs, like Hera, to destroy and even devour those who have wronged her, declaring of Achilles, “I wish I could latch my teeth into the center of his liver and eat it!”​(

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian’s. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles–overjoyed at the sight of the apparition—tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that’s the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star …

Briseis blinked, shaking her head in disbelief. 'You have taken everything from me. My husband. My brothers. My father. You have given me no word of my mother. There is nowhere else for me to go.' 'I expect too much,' he stated. 'Their faces fade from my memory,' Briseis said, quietly. 'Without them, I have nothing.

There is a guard standing behind me. And then I hear footsteps. “Nicki,” I say. She’s wearing a white shirt and a navy blue skirt. Her Nike 130s are white with a blue Swoosh. “Carrie.” “You feeling all right?” I say. “How’s your ankle? How’s your back? Any injuries I should exploit?” Nicki laughs. “Unfortunately for you, I’m feeling one hundred percent.” “Good,” I say. “The win will be sweeter.” Nicki shakes her head. “I read an interview with you years ago, when I was still a kid,” she says. “Where you said your father called you ‘Achilles.’ ” “Yeah,” I say. “The greatest of the Greeks.” “I was always jealous of that. That sense of destiny you seemed to have. Do you remember what Achilles said to Hector after Hector killed Patroclus?” It has been a long time since I’ve actually read The Iliad. I shake my head. She smiles. “He says, ‘There can be no pacts between men and lions. I will make you pay in full for the grief you have caused me.’ 

Wrath, goddess, sing of Achilles Pēleus’s son’s calamitous wrath, which hit the Achaians with countless ills— many the valiant souls it saw off down to Hādēs, souls of heroes, their selves left as carrion for dogs and all birds of prey, and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled — from the first moment those two men parted in fury, Atreus’s son, king of men, and the godlike Achilles.

Achilles groaned and answered, "Mother, Olympian Jove has indeed vouchsafed me the fulfilment of my prayer, but what boots it to me, seeing that my dear comrade Patroclus has fallen- he whom I valued more than all others, and loved as dearly as my own life? I have lost him; aye, and Hector when he had killed him stripped the wondrous armour, so glorious to behold, which the gods gave to Peleus when they laid you in the couch of a mortal man. Would that you were still dwelling among the immortal sea-nymphs, and that Peleus had taken to himself some mortal bride. For now you shall have grief infinite by reason of the death of that son whom you can never welcome home- nay, I will not live nor go about among mankind unless Hector fall by my spear, and thus pay me for having slain Patroclus son of Menoetius.

Homer's epic does not tell of such seemingly essential events as the abduction of Helen, for example, nor of the mustering and sailing of the Greek fleet, the first hostilities of the war, the Trojan Horse, and the sacking and burning of Troy. Instead, the 15,693 lines of Homer's Iliad describe the occurrences of a roughly two-week period in the tenth and final year of what had become a stalemated siege of Troy.

Let Hector turn the Greeks around again and make them panic, lose their will to fight, and run away until at last they fall amid the mighty galleys of Achilles, the son of Peleus. He will send forth his friend Patroclus, who will slaughter many, including my own noble son, Sarpedon. Then glorious Hector, out in front of Troy, 90 will kill Patroclus with his spear, and then, enraged at this, Achilles will kill Hector.

It re-enters the world of the Iliad to recount the story of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector, and, in a very different version from the original, Priam’s journey to the Greek camp. But its primary interest is in storytelling itself – why stories are told and why we need to hear them, how stories get changed in the telling – and much of what it has to tell are ‘untold tales’ found only in the margins of earlier writers.

The limitless wrath of Achilles can end only once he recognizes that no absolute, permanent victory is ever possible. Everyone must bear unbearable losses, for which no compensation could ever be enough. In the end, we all lose. Our best hope is to accept partial, temporary limits on conflict, accepting human companionship and community as our only, always inadequate compensation, for the pervasive experience of loss.

New Age spirituality purports to promote change – its mantra is ‘transformation’ – but, in reality, it endorses the status quo. It preaches changing oneself to accept the world as it is. New Agers are too busy with their affirmations and introspections to do anything like take direct action. Indeed, in some books the advice to unleash one’s inner goddess turns out to be little more than to bring back the old ‘domestic goddess’. Using myth as one’s personal charter is nothing new (as we saw in Chapter 3), but when Alexander the Great chose Achilles, the psychopathic hero of Homer’s Iliad, to revere and emulate, he did so with action in mind. Alexander used classical myth as his ‘life coach’ and changed the world. New Agers use classical myth to ensure that the spirit is soothed, the horoscope reassuring, and the house clean, but the world stays the same.

For nothing, as I now see it, equals the value of life - not the wealth they say prosperous Ilium possessed in earlier days, when there was peace, before the coming of the Greeks, nor all the treasure pilled up behind the stone threshold of Phoebus Apollo in rocky Delphi. Cattle and fat sheep can be lifted. Tripods and chestnut horses can be procured. But you cannot lift or procure a man's life, when once the breath has left his lips.

The ultimate form of love is to see no difference between the self and the beloved. Patroclus' journey into battle wearing the armor of Achilles transforms him into his friend, in the eyes of the Trojans. ... Once Patroclus is dead, Achilles tries to transform himself into his dead friend, by rolling in the dust ... He anticipates joining Patroclus again, and becoming indistinguishable from him in death, when their bones are together in one jar.

With this, great Hector in his flashing helmet 190 ran from the battlefield on nimble feet after his comrades, who were carrying the armor of Achilles back to Troy. He soon caught up—they had not gone too far— and standing at a distance from the fighting, the source of tears, he changed into this armor. He gave his own equipment to the Trojans to carry back with them to holy Troy, 250 and armed himself in the immortal armor of great Achilles, son of Peleus.

And he, Achilles, will rouse his companion Patroclus, whom shining Hector with his spear will kill in front of Ilion, after Patroclus has destroyed a multitude of other young men, among them my own son, godlike Sarpedon; and enraged at Patroclus dying, godlike Achilles will kill Hector. And from that point, then, without respite, I will effect a retreat from the ships, all the way until that time the Achaeans​70 capture steep Ilion through the designs of Athena.

Dawn veiled in saffron rose from the streams of Ocean, to carry light to the immortals and to mortal men, and Thetis arrived at the ships carrying the gifts from Hephaestus. She found her beloved son lying with his arms around Patroclus, keening, and his many companions about him dissolved in tears; and she stood among them, the shining among goddesses, and clasped his hand, and spoke to him and said his name: "My child, grieved though we be, we must leave this one lie, since by the will of the gods he has been broken once for all; you now take the splendid armor from Hephaestus, exceeding in beauty, such as a mortal man has never worn upon his shoulders." Then so speaking the goddess laid the armor down before Achilles; and it clashed loud, all that was elaborately wrought. And trembling took all the Myrmidons, nor did any dare to look upon it straight, and they shrank afraid; but Achilles as he gazed upon it, so anger entered him all the more, and his eyes terribly shone out beneath his lids like fire flare; and he rejoiced as he held in his hands the glorious gifts of the god.

Éris—strife—between heroes, it will be recalled, was a favorite theme of epic. Looked at coldly, stripped of the dignity of their noble epic contexts, these quarrels are almost always petty. In the Cypria, "Achilles quarrels with Agamemnon because he received a late invitation" to a feast; in the Aethiopis, "a quarrel arises between Odysseus and Aias over the armor of Achilles"; the Odyssey tells of a quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus at a festival, not to mention the Iliad's own dramatic action arising from the "quarrel" between Achilles and Agamemnon.

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…

So they fought to the death around that benched beaked ship as Patroclus reached Achilles, his great commander, and wept warm tears like a dark spring running down some desolate rock face, its shaded currents flowing. And the brilliant runner Achilles saw him coming, filled with pity and spoke out winging words: "Why in tears, Patroclus? Like a girl, a baby running after her mother, begging to be picked up, and she tugs at her skirts, holding her back as she tries to hurry off-all tears, fawning up at her till she takes her into her arms... That's how you look, Patroclus, streaming live tears.

In the modern era, teachers and scholarship have traditionally laid strenuous emphasis on the fact that Briseis, the woman taken from Achilles in Book One, was his géras, his war prize, the implication being that her loss for Achilles meant only loss of honor, an emphasis that may be a legacy of the homoerotic culture in which the classics and the Iliad were so strenuously taught—namely, the British public-school system: handsome and glamorous Achilles didn’t really like women, he was only upset because he’d lost his prize! Homer’s Achilles, however, above all else, is spectacularly adept at articulating his own feelings, and in the Embassy he says, “‘Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, / loves her who is his own and cares for her, even as I now / loved this one from my heart, though it was my spear that won her’ ” (9.340ff.). The Iliad ’s depiction of both Achilles and Patroklos is nonchalantly heterosexual. At the conclusion of the Embassy, when Agamemnon’s ambassadors have departed, “Achilles slept in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and a woman lay beside him, one he had taken from Lesbos, / Phorbas’ daughter, Diomede of the fair colouring. / In the other corner Patroklos went to bed; with him also / was a girl, Iphis the fair-girdled, whom brilliant Achilles / gave him, when he took sheer Skyros” (9.663ff.). The nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos played an unlikely role in a lawsuit of the mid-fourth century B.C., brought by the orator Aeschines against one Timarchus, a prominent politician in Athens who had charged him with treason. Hoping to discredit Timarchus prior to the treason trial, Aeschines attacked Timarchus’ morality, charging him with pederasty. Since the same charge could have been brought against Aeschines, the orator takes pains to differentiate between his impulses and those of the plaintiff: “The distinction which I draw is this—to be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste is the experience of a kind-hearted and generous soul”; Aeschines, Contra Timarchus 137, in C. D. Adams, trans., The Speeches of Aeschines (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 111. For proof of such love, Aeschines cited the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos; his citation is of great interest for representing the longest extant quotation of Homer by an ancient author. 32

Apollo, outraged at the treatment of his friend Hektor, practically describes Achilleus as a brute and a barbarian. He is not. He is a man of culture and intelligence; he knows how to respect heralds, how to entertain estranged friends. He presides over the games with extraordinary courtesy and tact. He is not only a great fighter but a great gentleman, and if he lacks the chivalry of Roland, Lancelot, or Beowulf, that is because theirs is a chivalry coloured with Christian humility which has no certain place in the gallery of Homeric virtues. Above all, Achilleus is a real man, mortal and fallible, but noble enough to make his own tragedy a great one.

Mother Nature does not mind if men are sexually attracted to one another. It’s only human mothers and fathers steeped in particular cultures who make a scene if their son has a fling with the boy next door. The mother’s tantrums are not a biological imperative. A significant number of human cultures have viewed homosexual relations as not only legitimate but even socially constructive, ancient Greece being the most notable example. The Iliad does not mention that Thetis had any objection to her son Achilles’ relations with Patroclus. Queen Olympias of Macedon was one of the most temperamental and forceful women of the ancient world, and even had her own husband, King Philip, assassinated. Yet she didn’t have a fit when her son, Alexander the Great, brought his lover Hephaestion home for dinner.

A dark cloud of grief fell upon Achilles as he listened. He filled both hands with dust from off the ground, and poured it over his head, disfiguring his comely face, and letting the refuse settle over his shirt so fair and new. He flung himself down all huge and hugely at full length, and tore his hair with his hands. The bondswomen whom Achilles and Patroclus had taken captive screamed aloud for grief, beating their breasts, and with their limbs failing them for sorrow. Antilochus bent over him the while, weeping and holding both his hands as he lay groaning for he feared that he might plunge a knife into his own throat. Then Achilles gave a loud cry and his mother heard him as she was sitting in the depths of the sea by the old man her father, whereon she screamed, and all the goddesses daughters of Nereus that dwelt at the bottom of the sea, came gathering round her.

To development belongs fulfilment — every evolution has a beginning, and every fulfilment is an end. To youth belongs age; to arising, passing; to life, death. For the animal, tied in the nature of its thinking to the present, death is known or scented as something in the future, something that does not threaten it. It only knows the fear of death in the moment of being killed. But man, whose thought is emancipated from the fetters of here and now, yesterday and tomorrow, boldly investigates the “once” of past and future, and it depends on the depth or shallowness of his nature whether he triumphs over this fear of the end or not. An old Greek legend — without which the Iliad could not have been — tells how his mother put before Achilles the choice between a long life or a short life full of deeds and fame, and how he chose the second. Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in rose-coloured progress-optimism, he heaps upon it the flowers of literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But impermanence, the birth and the passing, is the form of all that is actual — from the stars, whose destiny is for us incalculable, right down to the ephemeral concourses on our planet. The life of the individual — whether this be animal or plant or man — is as perishable as that of peoples of Cultures. Every creation is fore-doomed to decay, every thought, every discovery, every deed to oblivion. Here, there, and everywhere we are sensible of grandly fated courses of history that have vanished. Ruins of the “have-been” works of dead Cultures lie all about us. The hubris of Prometheus, who thrust his hand into the heavens in order to make the divine powers subject to man, carries with it his fall. What, then, becomes of the chatter about “undying achievements”?

And the old man groaned, and beat his head With his hands, and stretched out his arms To his beloved son, Hector, who had Taken his stand before the Western Gate, Determined to meet Achilles in combat. Priam's voice cracked as he pleaded: "Hector, my boy, you can't face Achilles Alone like that, without any support— You'll go down in a minute. He's too much For you, son, he won't stop at anything! O, if only the gods loved him as I do: Vultures and dogs would be gnawing his corpse. Then some grief might pass from my heart. So many fine sons he's taken from me, Killed or sold them as slaves in the islands. Two of them now, Lycaon and Polydorus, I can't see with the Trojans safe in town, Laothoë's boys. If the Greeks have them We'll ransom them with the gold and silver Old Altes gave us. But if they're dead And gone down to Hades, there will be grief For myself and the mother who bore them. The rest of the people won't mourn so much Unless you go down at Achilles' hands. So come inside the wall, my boy. Live to save the men and women of Troy. Don't just hand Achilles the glory And throw your life away. Show some pity for me Before I go out of my mind with grief And Zeus finally destroys me in my old age, After I have seen all the horrors of war— My sons butchered, my daughters dragged off, Raped, bedchambers plundered, infants Dashed to the ground in this terrible war, My sons' wives abused by murderous Greeks. And one day some Greek soldier will stick me With cold bronze and draw the life from my limbs, And the dogs that I fed at my table, My watchdogs, will drag me outside and eat My flesh raw, crouched in my doorway, lapping My blood. When a young man is killed in war, Even though his body is slashed with bronze, He lies there beautiful in death, noble. But when the dogs maraud an old man's head, Griming his white hair and beard and private parts, There's no human fate more pitiable." And the old man pulled the white hair from his head, But did not persuade Hector.

The 21st century has certainly seen the rape of women in wartime, but it has long been treated as an atrocious war crime, which most armies try to prevent and the rest deny and conceal. But for the heroes of the Iliad, female flesh was a legitimate spoil of war: women were to be enjoyed, monopolized, and disposed of at their pleasure. Menelaus launches the Trojan War when his wife, Helen, is abducted. Agamemnon brings disaster to the Greeks by refusing to return a sex slave to her father, and when he relents, he appropriates one belonging to Achilles, later compensating him with twenty-eight replacements. Achilles, for his part, offers this pithy description of his career: “I have spent many sleepless nights and bloody days in battle, fighting men for their women.”11 When Odysseus returns to his wife after twenty years away, he murders the men who courted her while everyone thought he was dead, and when he discovers that the men had consorted with the concubines of his household, he has his son execute the concubines too.

The word wine appears fifteen times in Fitzgerald's translation of the Iliad, sometimes as figure of speech but most often ti refer to part of a meal or a libation. It was clearly available in quantity on the Greek beachhead at Troy. To be sure, wine played a role in the Homeric rituals of mourning -- to quench the embers of the funeral pyre (e.g. 23:274, 24:947). At no point do we see a soldier drowning his grief in wine, nor do we need to hear it mentioned. It is hard to imagine that there was no wine at the funeral feast that Achilles made for the Myrmidons (23:36ff), yet wine is not mentioned. Nor is it mentioned in the brief notice of the funeral feast made by Priam for Hektor. (24:959) This is a startling piece of cultural pharmacology; we unthinkingly assume that "drowning one's sorrows" is somehow natural and not culturally constructed.

The word wine appears fifteen times in Fitzgerald's translation of the Iliad, sometimes as figure of speech but most often ti refer to part of a meal or a libation. It was clearly available in quantity on the Greek beachhead at Troy. To be sure, wine played a role in the Homeric rituals of mourning -- to quench the embers of the funeral pyre (e.g. 23:274, 24:947). At no point do we see a soldier drowning his grief in wine, nor do we need to hear it mentioned. It is hard to imagine that there was no wine at the funeral feast that Achilles made for the Myrmidons (23:36ff), yet wine is not mentioned. Nor is it mentioned in the brief notice of the funeral feast made by Priam for Hektor. (24:959) This is a startling piece of cultural pharmacology; we unthinkingly assume that "drowning one's sorrows" is somehow natural and not culturally constructed. Mind-altering substances of all sorts seem to have been the main shrines to which American soldiers brought their grief.

I count eight separate deaths to which soldiers in the Iliad responded with tears, Several of these are quoted in the course of this chapter and need not to be repeated. The general answer to the question of who is wept is: everyone. American military culture in Vietnam regarded tears as dangerous but above all as demeaning, the sigh of a weakling, a loser. To weep was to lose one's dignity among American soldiers in Vietnam.

It became sport, which is itself a form of sacrifice,” writes Sansone. “For only if sport is a form of sacrifice can we explain its ritual associations. There is no other plausible reason to account for the fact that the Hurons played a game of lacrosse in order to influence the weather for the benefit of their crops. It is only because they engaged in ritual sacrifice that natives of the Sudan hold wrestling matches at the time of sowing and harvesting. In Homer’s Iliad the hero Achilles honors the death of his companion Patroclus with an elaborate funeral that consists of various kinds of sacrifice: hair offering; holocausts of sheep and cattle; libations of oil, honey, and wine; slaughter of horses and dogs; human sacrifice and athletic contests.”3 Once the ritual expenditure of energy was decoupled from the hunt, it didn’t especially matter how that energy was squandered. The rules and forms could proliferate a thousand ways, to accommodate the terrain and the materials at hand. The rules and conventions could morph and become subject to contention, debate, wagering, and technical innovation

For this Hektor, Homer's Hektor, who brags outrageously, who sometimes hangs back when the going is worst, who bolts from Achilleus, is still the hero who forever captures the affection and admiration of the modern reader, far more strongly than his conqueror has ever done. Such are the accidental triumphs of Homer.

he questioned the book’s basic premise: that the women who survive (or don’t survive) a war are equally heroic as their menfolk. The men go and fight, the women don’t, was his essential argument. Except that women do fight (not least Penthesilea and her Amazons), even if the poems heralding their great deeds have been lost. And men don’t always: Achilles doesn’t fight until book eighteen of the twenty-four-book Iliad. He spends the first seventeen books arguing, sulking, asking his mother for help, sulking some more, letting his friend fight in his stead, offering advice and refusing apologies. But not fighting. In other words, he spends almost three-quarters of the poem in a quasi-domestic setting, away from the battlefield. Yet we never question that he is a hero.

of cattle, a bringer of dreams,

warrior hero such as Ajax, Hector or Achilles must be willing to fight in hand-to-hand combat day after day. He must be able, physically and psychologically, to plunge a sword into the body of another human being, and to risk having a sword plunged into his own. He must be brutal and ready to risk brutality. At the same time, he must be gentle to his friends and allies, and able to join with them in group activities both military and peaceful. Plato was well aware of the problem these opposing demands create, both in the soul of the warrior and in the society he inhabits: ‘Where,’ he asks, ‘are we to find a character that is both gentle and big-tempered [megalothumon] at the same time? After all, a gentle nature is the opposite of an angry one.’ When, in the opening line of the Iliad, Homer asks the goddess to sing ‘the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles’, a large part of what he is asking her to do is to explore this opposition, its sources and effects.

In the last book of the Iliad (24.602ff.), Achilles urges Priam to eat: even Niobe, he says, after all her children had been slaughtered by the gods, took food eventually. Both Priam and Achilles have been bereaved of their dearest, and yet they gather themselves, and eat, and sleep, and go on living. (...) ...there are two early Lucanian vases with mourners by a grave stele with the same inscription "spoken" by the tomb: "On my back I grow mallow and thick-rooted asphodel: / in my bosom I hold Oedipus, son of Laios." Even Oedipus, the great king of Thebes, archetype of tragedy, experienced a catastrophic fall and descended into the deepest pit of horrors; yet ordinary plants grow on his tomb. We are not so different.

our contemporary ideas about manliness, reflected in action movies and westerns, generally prohibit so-called real men from displaying high emotion, with the exception of anger. John Wayne doesn’t cry. By contrast, Achilles, the epitome of manliness in Homer’s Iliad, weeps openly and at length over the loss of his friend Patroclus.

The scene of the Epic is the ancient kingdom of the Kurus which flourished along the upper course of the Ganges; and the historical fact on which the Epic is based is a great war which took place between the Kurus and a neighbouring tribe, the Panchalas, in the thirteenth or fourteenth century before Christ. According to the Epic, Pandu and Dhrita-rashtra, who was born blind, were brothers. Pandu died early, and Dhrita-rashtra became king of the Kurus, and brought up the five sons of Pandu along with his hundred sons. Yudhishthir, the eldest son of Pandu, was a man of truth and piety; Bhima, the second, was a stalwart fighter; and Arjun, the third son, distinguished himself above all the other princes in arms. The two youngest brothers, Nakula and Sahadeva, were twins. Duryodhan was the eldest son of Dhrita-rashtra and was jealous of his cousins, the sons of Pandu. A tournament was held, and in the course of the day a warrior named Karna, of unknown origin, appeared on the scene and proved himself a worthy rival of Arjun. The rivalry between Arjun and Karna is the leading thought of the Epic, as the rivalry between Achilles and Hector is the leading thought of the Iliad. It is only necessary to add that the sons of Pandu as well as Karna, were, like the heroes of Homer, god-born chiefs. Some god inspired the birth of each. Yudhishthir was the son of Dharma or Virtue, Bhima of Vayu or Wind, Arjun of Indra or Rain-god, the twin youngest were the sons of the Aswin twins, and Karna was the son of Surya the Sun, but was believed by himself and by all others to be the son of a simple chariot-driver. The portion translated in this Book forms Sections cxxxiv. to cxxxvii. of Book i. of the original Epic in Sanscrit (Calcutta edition of 1834).

CONCLUSION The Mexican Revolution was a ten-year Iliad, in which Villa, Zapata, Obregón, Carranza and the others played the roles in fact which were played in myth by Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector and Aeneas. The loss of life was frightful as the ever-widening spirals of bloodshed sucked in more and more people. Historians estimate the death toll at anything between a low of 350,000 and a high of 1,000,000, but this excludes the victims of the 1918 flu epidemic, which adds another 300,000 to the list of fatalities. Civilisation’s thin veneer was never thinner than in the Mexican Revolution, and the moral is surely that even in advanced societies we skate all the time on the thinnest of ice. A seemingly trivial political crisis can open up the ravening maw of an underworld of chaos.

OK, you might be saying, so going on too long isn’t such a great idea. What about leaving an amazing legacy—so at least you won’t be forgotten? This is the “Achilles effect,” from Homer’s Iliad. He had to decide whether to fight in the Trojan War, promising certain physical death but a glorious legacy, or return to his home to live a long and happy life but die in obscurity. As he describes his choice, two fates bear me on to the day of death. If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy, my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies. If I voyage back to the fatherland I love, my pride, my glory dies.”[8]

The pragmatic mood is already visible in the Odyssey. The poem opens with Odysseus living on a remote island ruled by a nymph who offers him immortality if he will remain as her consort. A bit surprisingly to anyone steeped in the orthodox Western religio-philosophical-scientific tradition, he refuses, preferring mortality and a dangerous struggle to regain his position as the king of a small, rocky island and be reunited with his son, aging wife, and old father. He turns down what the orthodox tradition says we should desire above all else, the peace that comes from overcoming the transience and vicissitudes of mortality, whether that peace takes the form of personal immortality or of communing with eternal verities, moral or scientific—in either case ushering us to the still point of the turning world. Odysseus prefers going to arriving, struggle to rest, exploring to achieving—curiosity is one of his most marked traits—and risk to certainty. The Odyssey situates Calypso’s enchanted isle in the far west, the land of the setting sun, and describes the isle in images redolent of death. In contrast, Odysseus’s arrival at his own island, far to the east, a land of the rising sun, is depicted in imagery suggestive of rebirth. Another thing that is odd about the protagonist, and the implicit values, of the Odyssey from the orthodox standpoint is that Odysseus is not a conventional hero, the kind depicted in the Iliad. He is strong, brave, and skillful in fighting, but he is no Achilles (who had a divine mother) or even Ajax; and he relies on guile, trickery, and outright deception to a degree inconsistent with what we have come to think of as heroism or with its depiction in the Iliad. His dominant trait is skill in coping with his environment rather than ability to impose himself upon it by brute force. He is the most intelligent person in the Odyssey but his intelligence is thoroughly practical, adaptive. Unlike Achilles in the Iliad, who is given to reflection, notably about the heroic ethic itself, Odysseus is pragmatic. He is an instrumental reasoner rather than a speculative one. He is also, it is true, distinctly pious, a trait that the Odyssey harps on and modern readers tend to overlook. But piety in Homeric religion is a coping mechanism. Homeric religion is proto-scientific; it is an attempt to understand and control the natural world. The gods personify nature and men manipulate it by “using” the gods in the proper way. One sacrifices to them in order to purchase their intervention in one’s affairs—this is religion as magic, the ancestor of modern technology—and also to obtain clues to what is going to happen next; this is the predictive use of religion and corresponds to modern science. The gods’ own rivalries, mirroring (in Homeric thought, personifying or causing) the violent clash of the forces of nature, prevent human beings from perfecting their control over the environment. By the same token, these rivalries underscore the dynamic and competitive character of human existence and the unrealism of supposing that peace and permanence, a safe and static life, are man’s lot. Odysseus’s piety has nothing to do with loving God as creator or redeemer, or as the name, site, metaphysical underwriter, or repository of the eternal or the unchanging, or of absolutes (such as omniscience and omnipotence) and universals (numbers, words, concepts). Odysseus’s piety is pragmatic because his religion is naturalistic—is simply the most efficacious means known to his society for controlling the environment, just as science and technology are the most efficacious means by which modern people control their environment.

The Greeks had a word for it, you know. For that kind of anger.” Mariana was intrigued. “Did they?” “Menis. There’s no real equivalent in English. You remember, Homer begins The Iliad with ‘μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος’—‘Sing to me, O goddess, of the menis of Achilles.’” “Ah. What does it mean, exactly?” Clarissa mused for a second. “I suppose the closest translation is a kind of uncontrollable anger—terrifying rage—a frenzy.

We have been dreaming of robots since Homer. In Book 18 of the Iliad , Achilles’ mother, the nymph Thetis, wants to order a new suit of armor for her son, and so she pays a visit to the Olympian atelier of the blacksmith-god Hephaestus, whom she finds hard at work on a series of automata: . . . He was crafting twenty tripods to stand along the walls of his well-built manse, affixing golden wheels to the bottom of each one so they might wheel down on their own [automatoi] to the gods’ assembly and then return to his house anon: an amazing sight to see. These are not the only animate household objects to appear in the Homeric epics. In Book 5 of the Iliad we hear that the gates of Olympus swivel on their hinges of their own accord, automatai , to let gods in their chariots in or out, thus anticipating by nearly thirty centuries the automatic garage door. In Book 7 of the Odyssey , Odysseus finds himself the guest of a fabulously wealthy king whose palace includes such conveniences as gold and silver watchdogs, ever alert, never aging. To this class of lifelike but intellectually inert household helpers we might ascribe other automata in the classical tradition. In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, a third-century-BC epic about Jason and the Argonauts, a bronze giant called Talos runs three times around the island of Crete each day, protecting Zeus’s beloved Europa: a primitive home alarm system.

That after the roll of centuries, this same Iliad, whose message had been so clearly grasped by ancient poets and historians, came to be perceived as a martial epic glorifying war is one of the great ironies of literary history. Part of this startling transformation can undoubtedly be attributed to the principal venues where the Iliad was read—the elite schools whose classically based curriculum was dedicated to inculcating into the nation's future manhood the desirability of "dying well" for king and country. Certain favorite outstanding scenes plucked out of context come to define the entire epic: Hektor's ringing refusal to heed the warning omen, for example—" 'One bird sign is best: to fight in defence of our country' "—or his valiant resolution—" 'not die without a struggle and ingloriously.' " Homer's insistent depiction of the war as a pointless catastrophe that blighted all it touched was thus adroitly circumvented.

Rage is properly the title of Homer's poem, and his audience may have known it by that name, not Iliad.

And in a corner of the sturdy tent 870 Achilles slept with pretty Diomede

As when some cruel spite has befallen a man that he should have killed some one in his own country, and must fly to a great man's protection in a land of strangers, and all marvel who see him, even so did Achilles marvel as he beheld Priam.