Achilles

The choice inside Achilles’s anger

Agamemnon takes Briseis from Achilles in front of the assembled army. The captive woman is treated as a prize, and the seizure tells the Achaeans that their best fighter cannot defend his own honour from their commander. Achilles does not strike Agamemnon. He withdraws his Myrmidons and asks Thetis to persuade Zeus to let the Greeks suffer without him.

The Iliad turns on that refusal, but it never makes Achilles’s position easy. In Book 9 he tells the envoys sent to recover him that Thetis has revealed two possible deaths. If he stays at Troy, he loses his return home and wins undying fame. If he sails away, the fame disappears and his life lasts. Achilles knows the price before he chooses it.

What changed when Patroclus entered the fighting?

Patroclus cannot watch the Achaeans fall. He asks to wear Achilles’s armour so the Trojans will believe that the Myrmidons’ leader has returned. Achilles agrees, but orders him to drive the enemy from the ships and come back. Patroclus continues towards Troy, Apollo strikes him, Euphorbus wounds him and Hector delivers the final blow.

The news reaches Achilles in Book 18. He pours dust over his head, tears his hair and lies full length on the ground while Antilochus holds his hands in fear that he will cut his own throat. Thetis rises from the sea to meet him. Achilles tells her that Zeus granted the honour he had requested, but that it is worthless because Patroclus is dead.

This is the point at which the two possible lives become one. Achilles decides to kill Hector even after Thetis warns that his own death will follow soon afterwards. He cannot recover the friend whose death his withdrawal helped to make possible. He can only accept the fate he had once considered leaving.

Why did Priam leave Achilles’s shelter alive?

Achilles kills Hector and refuses the ordinary treatment of the body. He fastens it behind his chariot, drags it around Patroclus’s tomb and leaves it exposed beside the ships. The violence has moved past the man who killed Patroclus to the corpse that cannot answer him.

Priam then enters the enemy camp at night. He kneels before Achilles, kisses the hands that killed his sons and asks him to remember Peleus. The appeal changes the scene because Achilles can picture the father he will not see again. The two men weep together, Priam for Hector and Achilles for Patroclus and Peleus.

Achilles orders Hector’s body washed and wrapped out of Priam’s sight, so the king will not see the wounds and provoke fresh anger. He also grants time for the funeral before the fighting resumes. The Iliad does not end with Achilles’s death. It ends after his anger has made room for another man’s grief.

How Skyros and Pelion complete the life Homer leaves open

Homer begins with Achilles already at Troy. Apollodorus supplies a later account of the years before the war. On Pelion, Peleus gives the infant to Chiron, who feeds him the flesh of lions, wild boars and bears and replaces his first name, Ligyron, with Achilles.

When the seer Calchas declares that Troy cannot be taken without him, Thetis tries to keep her son from the choice Homer later gives him. She dresses the nine-year-old as a girl and places him among the daughters of Lycomedes on Skyros. There he fathers Neoptolemus with Deidamia.

Odysseus finds the hidden boy by sounding a trumpet at the court. Achilles reaches for weapons and exposes himself. On Skyros, the movement is immediate; in the Iliad, the decision takes most of the poem. Both accounts bring him to the same place, knowing enough about the danger to go.