The reading for this brief sampling is from the Robert Fagles translation.
For more on the Iliad and the conflict of honor and hierarchy read Sorrow-of-the-People. The name for my review of Ms. Alexander’s book The War That Killed Achilles is based on the meaning of his name, which is Sorrow-of-the-people. This name itself could have many connotations concerning the effect of his actions, the brutality of his actions, and his sorrowful plight as representative of the plight of men. Suffice it to say that Achilles is a man of such ability and powerful rage that pissing him off costs dearly, even for his master and commander.
The Rage of Achilles
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.
This is the most unique opening passage in literature, verse or prose. The rest of Book One goes on to detail the sins of Agamemnon, who represents the hierarchy and its claim to ultimate honors, and the consequent rage of Achilles, who represents the primal man, the man who heads the war band; but now does so in an age when the war band is nothing but a component of an army. Achilles is the socially supplanted man.
Agamemnon has pulled rank on Achilles and taken Briseis, his ‘prize’ his trophy girl taken from the Trojans. The debate rages back and forth between the trophy-based, society-based, autonomous notion of honor represented by Achilles, who feels no animus toward the Trojans, and the economic-based, ethnicity-based, hierarchal honor complex represented by Agamemnon.
We, the postmodern reader, clearly reside in the world of Agamemnon.
Achilles is primal man as he was for tens of thousands of years.
Agamemnon is the scheming ‘wine sack’ that has achieved manipulative mastery over this man, who sends him off to kill and die in wars that strengthen the ties that bind him to the unjust order of things.
In the 24 books of the Iliad civilized man constantly wrestles with primal man. In the Shield of Achilles one sees the idyllic promised plight of man under civilization. In Achilles Fights the River [my favorite book] we see man against nature, man against god, and the savage underpinning of his ascent. In the Death of Hector Achilles experiences the sorrow that his actions bring to the world when he slew his counterpart.
In the Funeral Games for Patrocles the interplay of trophy-based and autonomous honor with society is shown as symbiotic, functional in a temporary collective setting that is not utterly materialistic.
Book 24: Achilles and Priam
Priam the father of Hector, whose body Achilles keeps as a trophy, yet whose soul he mourns in his tent, comes clandestinely to the warrior’s tent to beg his son’s conqueror for the body; the vessel of his vanished hope. Significantly, it is known by the reader that neither Achilles nor Priam will survive this savage war. This penultimate moment in the story—a story told by an author too bored with the burning of a city, the fall of a dynasty and the triumph of a king to bother recording record it—is concerned with the shared society of men; one weary and old, one raging in his prime.
Priam closes his plea with two of the best lines in the Iliad:
I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before—
I put to me lips the hands of the man who killed my son.
Less well known is Achilles’ extensive reply, which, among two pages of alternately weeping and raging verse, contains these lines:
When Zeus dispenses gifts from the jar of sorrows only,
he makes a man an outcast—brutal, ravenous hunger
drives him down the face of the shining earth,
stalking far and wide, cursed by gods and men.
If a reader among the postmodern remnant of men, feels like that passage above says something about his plight, consider that the man who wrote most extensively about your sense of rage and doom, lived about 2,800 years ago, was said to be blind, is thought to have gone by the name of Homer, and finished his poem about the rage of Achilles with a line in honor of his most prominent victim:
And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses.
If something about living this life, seemingly contrived to ensnare the worst in us, bothers you, I strongly suggest reading the Iliad, and taking your time.
*’Thunder-chief’, hierarch of the gods, representing the logic of human hierarchy
