The Iliad begins with a quarrel over a girl. Two female prisoners have been awarded, by the consent of the full Greek army, one to Agamemnon, king and commander-in-chief, and one to the supreme warrior Achilles, as part of the prize due to each for their exploits in the war. The girl given to Agamemnon is the daughter of a priest of Apollo. The angry god retaliates by sending down a plague. An assembly is called. Reluctantly Agamemnon agrees to return the girl to her father, but demands compensation. If he cannot keep his own prize he will take someone else’s. Achilles, who is not only the paragon of warriors but also the scrupulous guardian of the warriors’ code of honor, protests that to do so would be disgraceful. Agamemnon is defiant. He is the overlord: he will have his way regardless of another’s opinion: “Let that man I go visit choke with rage.” Achilles, beside himself, declares that he will sail for home if Agamemnon perpetrates such an outrage against the code of conduct they all observe. Agamemnon rounds on him and declares his intention of taking Achilles’ own prize, the girl Briseis. For a moment Achilles is ready to kill him, but he is restrained by the voice of wisdom, Pallas Athena. Instead he swears a great oath that he will not fight again in the quarrels of the house of Atreus. Leaving the assembly he goes to his tent, way out at the end of the Greek lines, and there he stays. The rage of Achilles, the passion which is at once so disastrous and so magnificent, and which has earned his immortality, is not the savage bloodthirst which drives him on the battlefield, but the principled fury which keeps him off it.
This argument is far more than a squabble over possession of a slave. It is a dispute over the nature of superiority. Agamemnon tells Achilles he will take his girl “so you can learn just how much greater I am than you.” But is a man’s worth dependent on his power, or on his talent? Is it a function of his social and political relationships, or can an individual possess a value independent of his place in the community? Is Agamemnon, as old Nestor says, the more to be honored “because he rules more men”? Or might Achilles, whose claim to supremacy lies entirely in himself, in his own particular, unsurpassed brilliance, be the greater man? These questions are fundamental. Their answers must affect the conduct both of individuals and of states, determining the relationship between political institutions and the people of whom they are constituted.
Achilles is a divinely created aristocrat, a living demonstration that men are not born equal. The son of a goddess and repeatedly described by Homer as being himself “godlike,” he is innately superior to his fellows. Pindar, the fifth-century BC poet who was classical Athens’ most eloquent upholder of the class system, celebrated his prowess, his “hands like Ares’, his feet like lightning.” In the Iliad he is physically magnificent. When he loses his armor he cannot borrow more from any of his fellow Greeks, for none of them, with the possible exception of Ajax, is as tall as he. The perfection of his body is sublime, the loveliness of his features flawless. His beauty, potently erotic, marks him, like Helen, as a superhuman being. He is “brilliant,” literally: in armor he shines like the sun. He is faster than any of his peers and therefore more deadly in battle. When he chases Hector three times round the walls of Troy, hunting him as a hawk hunts a terrified dove, it is his speed as much as his courage and his strength which makes him invincible. Destined never to grow old, he has a young man’s splendor and a young man’s energy. His emotions are extreme, his responses passionate, his actions devastating. For all these reasons he is unique among the Homeric warriors. Nestor may be wiser, Odysseus more astute and articulate, Ajax stronger in a hand-to-hand fight, but Achilles is, by common consent, the “best of the Achaeans.” Only Agamemnon disputes his right to that title, and he does so on political grounds. He doesn’t claim that he is a greater individual than Achilles. He bases his challenge on the assumption that no individual can count for as much as a community, and that therefore the ruler of that community is, by definition and regardless of his or anybody else’s personal qualities, the greatest person in it. Extraordinary as Achilles’ gifts may be, they are easily outweighed, in Agamemnon’s view, by the latter’s authority as overlord. Agamemnon tells him, “You are nothing to me!”
That would be enough to enrage Achilles, but there is more. Beyond the competition between Agamemnon the king and Achilles the hero—embodiments respectively of the power of the collective and the brilliance of the individual—lies the question of the legitimacy or otherwise of the war in which they are engaged. The disputed women are prizes, not booty. (They are also, of course, human beings whose rights, judged by modern standards, are being grossly violated—but let that be.) They have been awarded to the two men as marks of honor. They are not mere chattels to be passed from tent to tent, any more than a medal awarded for valor is only a coin on a ribbon, or an athlete’s gold cup just an expensive drinking vessel. A prize which has been awarded to one cannot be appropriated by another without its meaning being erased and the symbolic code within which it existed being called into question. In demanding Briseis Agamemnon is acting not like a warrior eager for glory, but like a bandit greedy for loot. In doing so he shames not only himself, but the whole Greek army. In the gruesome setting of the battlefield, a situation where men are all too easily reduced to the level of beasts of prey, or to carrion, it is essential to hold fast to the elusive concept of honor as a talisman against horror and despair. Achilles came to Troy to avenge the insult done to Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus when the Trojan prince Paris abducted Helen, Menelaus’s wife—to protect their honor. But if Agamemnon seizes Briseis then he is an abductor, just as Paris is. The Greeks’ invasion of Priam’s kingdom is revealed to be no more than a predatory attack on a wealthy victim and Achilles is no longer a warrior in a noble cause but the underling of an unprincipled looter. If he dies he will do so ignominiously, in the prosecution of a stupid, brutal war, and the eternal fame for which he hoped will be denied him. As he later tells those who come to implore him to return to the field, there is no point in doing so once Agamemnon has robbed fighting of its meaning. The king’s rapacity has leveled all value, trivialized all achievement. In a world in which the distinction between the noble warrior and the thug has been erased, “the same honour waits for the coward and the brave. They both go down to death.”
When it becomes clear that the Greeks will continue to obey Agamemnon, Achilles turns his back on them, becoming, like so many subsequent heroes, a voluntary outcast from a society he despises. Self-exiled, he is isolated. His only companion is Patroclus, the beloved friend who has followed him to Troy. Always exceptional, he is now unassimilable. He respects no human jurisdiction. He defers to no one; he fears no one. In Homer’s telling of his story he is the champion of individualism against the compromising demands of the community, the defender of the loner’s purity against the complex imperfections of the group. In that role he is superb, but potentially lethal to any ordered state. When an embassy comes to him from Agamemnon, imploring him to rejoin the fighting, promising him splendid gifts and the restoration of his honor, he rejects the offer: “I say my honour lies in the great decree of Zeus.” He asks nothing of his fellows now, nor does he acknowledge any claim they might make on him. In a ferociously apocalyptic vision he prays that Greeks and Trojans alike may cut each other to pieces, leaving no one at all alive but Patroclus and himself, so that the two of them might, alone, bring Troy’s towers toppling down. In his tent he plays the lyre and sings to himself of “the famous deeds of fighting heroes.” He acknowledges allegiance now not to any living society, but only to his dead peers, each one exceptional, brilliant mavericks like himself.
While Achilles broods, his fellow Greeks fight on. Slowly, inexorably, over several days, the Trojans, led by Hector, force them back across the coastal plain. Their leaders—Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus—are all wounded. They throw up a rampart of rocks and clay to protect their ships. The Trojans breach the rampart. The two armies are fighting hand to hand on and around the ships, the beach is black with blood and the air full of the sco
rching heat and ferocious crackle of the firebrands when Patroclus comes weeping to Achilles, begging his friend to relent, to save the Greeks from defeat and from the horror of being marooned in a hostile land, their ships burned, to be massacred or enslaved. Achilles is moved, but he has sworn he will not join the battle unless the Trojans menace his own ships, still secure at the furthest end of the Greek lines. He will hold to his vow. He will not fight in person. But he agrees to a compromise: he will lend Patroclus his armor and send him out to battle in his stead.
Encased in the magnificent star-emblazoned, silver-studded bronze armor which is immediately identifiable to Greek and Trojan alike as that of the terrible Achilles, with a great crest of horsehair tossing on his helmet’s crest, Patroclus leads out the Myrmidons, “hungry as wolves that rend and bolt raw flesh, / hearts filled with battle-frenzy that never dies.” Seeing him, the Trojans quake, their columns waver. Achilles appears to have returned, bearing with him “sudden, plunging death.” Shrieking, wild as storm clouds driven by a cyclone, the Trojan army stampedes back and away from the Greek ships, back toward the safety of their own walls.
In the fighting that follows, Hector kills Patroclus, and strips from his corpse the armor of Achilles. When the news is brought to Achilles he lays aside his quarrel with Agamemnon. In the frenzy of his mourning all scruples about propriety, about honor, about the sanctity of vows, are forgotten. He resolves to fight the next day, but first he displays himself to his enemy. As twilight descends he climbs alone and unarmed onto the rampart before the Greek ships. Pallas Athena, whose favorite he is, crowns him with a diadem of fire which blazes from his head to the sky, and slings around him a shield of flaring storm. Furious with grief for his slaughtered friend, he lets loose three times a war cry so piercing and terrible that the Trojans whirl round in panic. “Twelve of their finest fighters died then and there, crushed by chariots, impaled on their own spears,” killed by the mere sight and sound of the awful Achilles.
“The man who is incapable of working in common, or who in his self-sufficiency has no need of others, is no part of the community,” wrote Aristotle. Such a man is “like an animal or a god.” Achilles, who has divorced himself from the fellowship of the army, who looks to Zeus alone for the validation of his claim to honor, has made himself independent of his fellow men. He reenters the battle not to save his compatriots but in pursuit of a private revenge. In the cataclysmic battle that follows he is both subhuman and superhuman, both bestial and divine. He is likened to a forest fire, to a massive ox threshing barley, to a lion (repeatedly), to the Dog Star that rains down pestilence, to the frenzied god of war. He kills and kills and kills until the earth is drenched with blood and the river that flows before the walls of Troy is choked with corpses. His rampage is outrageous, so transgressive in the extremity of its violence that earth and heaven alike are angered by it. The river rises up against the desecration of its waters: a tremendous tidal wave threatens to engulf Achilles and sweep him away. Hephaestus, to protect him, hurls a great fireball down from heaven. The blaze races across the plain, blasting trees and corpses and scorching the river banks until the river is all but dried. The conflict is elemental, apocalyptic, and at its center Homer places Achilles, a figure from a nightmare, trumpet-tongued, gigantic, shrieking out his rage, his sharp-hoofed stallions trampling on corpses, sending up sprays of blood, blood on his wheels, blood on his chariot’s handrail, “bloody filth splattering both his invincible arms.”
In this war the Trojans are at home. At night they retire from the battlefield to well-built halls, to wives and children. They belong to a polity. Even the bravest warrior among them must defer to the civil authority, King Priam. They have temples and priests. The landscape in which they do battle with the Greeks is one they have tamed and made productive. Their horses have grazed the earth now slippery with blood. The spring past which Achilles chases Hector has been their washing place. Their babies wave to them as they advance through the Scaean gates. Their parents and elders line the city walls, watching the fighting from a position of security. Hector is husband, father, son, and brother, as well as being the protector of his home and his fellow citizens. In the frenzy of battle he may become, as Achilles does, as fierce as a wild beast, but he is essentially domestic. On the day of his death his wife Andromache sits weaving as she waits for him, within earshot of the fight, and her women have the water heated ready for his bath.
The Greeks, by contrast, are far from home, from family, from women, from the sources of their culture. They may have come from a civilization, but they are no longer part of it. For nine years and more they have been encamped on the windy plain with the gray sea behind them. They are cut off from parents and children, isolated from the continuum of generation. All male, all adult, only a few of them old, they form, as any army does, a pathologically unbalanced community. They are raiders, cattle rustlers; they neither grow nor produce anything. Homeless and predatory, they circle the walls of Troy like hungry wolves.
This existence, the life of a vagrant marauder, of a dangerous and perpetually endangered outsider, is what Achilles chose when he picked the path that would lead to his early and glorious death. The Trojans fight because it is their civic duty to do so, to “form a wall before our loving parents, wives and sons / to defend Troy.” Achilles fights because he has a lust for “the bloody grind of war.” Freud would recognize Hector as a devotee of Eros, the creative deity “whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, in one great unity, the unity of mankind.” In battle he is courageous and terrible, but his fighting is a service performed for the sake of the community. It is a function of the relationships by which he defines himself. Achilles the loner, by contrast, is an agent of Thanatos, the force which divides man from man and which drives its acolytes to seek their own and others’ deaths. He is one of the wild ones, one who has rejected the restrictions as well as the rewards of civilian life, whose readiness to risk his own death has accorded him unlimited license. At large on the plains outside the Trojan walls he is a terrifying apparition, the personification of cruelty and brute force. But he is also, always, even when crazy-eyed and cloaked in others’ blood, dazzlingly beautiful.
Everything about him is exciting, even when (especially when) he is at his most psychotic. He is the first of the lordly delinquents, the charismatic outcasts by whom law-abiding citizens have always been fascinated as well as scared witless. Off the battlefield, arguing in the assembly or in his tent, he exhilarates by his uncompromising integrity and his emotional extremism. In the thick of the fighting he generates a related but darker response. His titanic energy, his lethal skill, his pitilessness ring out like another, harsher, kind of truth telling. “Come friend,” he says to a Trojan prince who clasps his knees, unarmed, abjectly begging for mercy. “You too must die. Why moan about it so? / … Look, you see how handsome and powerful I am? … Even for me I tell you / death and the strong force of fate are waiting. / There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon / when a man will take my life in battle too.” This is the truth. The coolness with which Achilles faces it is connected with the deplorable but intoxicating fury with which he slaughters his fellow men.
Such courage and such rage are not human. “The salt grey sunless ocean gave you birth / and the towering blank rocks,” Patroclus tells him, reproaching him for his indifference to his fellows’ fate. Before their final duel Hector proposes a pact binding the winner to return the victim’s corpse to his own people for decent burial. Hector is dressed in the armor he stripped from Patroclus’s dead body, the armor of Achilles. He looks just like Achilles; he is nearly his equal in arms. He is what Achilles might be if he chose to respect the conventions governing human intercourse and rendering its useful continuance possible. Achilles answers by disowning any connection between his wild self and his civilized double. “Don’t talk to me of pacts. There are no binding oaths between men and lions.” He acknowledges
no obligation now to anyone or to any power other than his own rage. He is ready to shuffle off his humanity altogether, to become completely bestial. He would like to eat Hector’s flesh. He has already consented to his own death, a decision of inhuman bravado which has emancipated him even from what Tacitus called “that hindrance to all mighty enterprises, the desire for survival.” Death may be immortality’s opposite, but it confers a similar invulnerability. Death dealing and bent on dying, Achilles has achieved absolute freedom.
Panic-stricken, the Trojans flee before him, racing for the security of the city. At last only Hector is left outside the walls. The two champions confront each other. Achilles is deadly as the Dog Star, brilliant as the blazing sun. Hector, the noble, all but invincible Hector, loses his nerve and runs. Three times the great runner Achilles chases him round the walls of Troy. Hector is humiliated, pathetic, as feeble as a cringing dove. At last he turns to fight and be killed. With his last breath he foretells Achilles’ own death, but Achilles, as impervious to fear as he is to compassion, taunts him: “Die, die! For my own death, I’ll meet it freely.” As soon as the Trojan is still, the rest of the Greeks run up. In a scene of horrible frenzy each one of them stabs Hector’s corpse, until Achilles calls them off. He, the killer, will also be the prime desecrator of Hector’s body. He pierces the tendons in the Trojan prince’s ankles (the tendons later to be known by his own name) and lashes them to the back of his chariot. As he whips his horses to a gallop and races over the plain back to the Greek camp, Hector’s head, so handsome once, is dragged bouncing in the dust behind him. From the walls of Troy the watchers, Hector’s parents among them, scream out their horror and their despair.
Heroes: A History of Hero Worship Page 3