Achilles

A childhood on Pelion and Skyros

Achilles is the son of Thetis, a goddess of the sea, and Peleus, a mortal man. Homer, the poet of the Iliad, begins his story with Achilles already at Troy. The years before the war come from a later writer, Apollodorus, who retold the Greek myths in a book called the Library.

In his account, Peleus takes the baby to Mount Pelion and gives him to Chiron. Chiron is a centaur, one of the half-human, half-horse beings of Greek myth. He feeds the boy on the flesh of lions, wild boars and bears. He also changes the child’s first name, Ligyron, to Achilles.

Then the seer Calchas, a man who could foretell the future, declares that Troy cannot be taken without Achilles. Thetis tries to keep her son out of the war. She dresses the nine-year-old as a girl and hides him among the daughters of Lycomedes on Skyros. There Achilles fathers a son, Neoptolemus, with Deidamia.

Odysseus finds him. He sounds a trumpet at the court, and Achilles reaches for weapons and gives himself away.

The quarrel with Agamemnon

At Troy, Achilles leads his own men, the Myrmidons. Homer calls the Greek army the Achaeans, and Agamemnon is their commander.

The Iliad opens with a quarrel. Agamemnon takes Briseis, a captive woman, from Achilles in front of the whole army. She is treated as a prize. Taking her shows every soldier that their best fighter cannot protect his honour from their commander. Achilles does not strike Agamemnon. Instead he pulls his Myrmidons out of the fighting. He asks his mother, Thetis, to persuade Zeus to let the Greeks suffer without him.

The poem never makes his position simple. In Book 9 the army sends messengers to bring him back. Achilles tells them that Thetis has revealed two possible deaths for him. If he stays at Troy, he will never return home, but his fame will never die. If he sails away, the fame is lost, but he will live a long life. He knows the price before he chooses.

The death of Patroclus

Patroclus, the companion of Achilles, cannot bear to watch the Greeks fall. He asks to wear Achilles’s armour, so the Trojans will think the leader of the Myrmidons has come back. Achilles agrees. He orders Patroclus to drive the enemy away from the Greek ships and then return. Patroclus pushes on towards Troy instead. The god Apollo strikes him, a Trojan named Euphorbus wounds him, and Hector, a son of Priam, the king of Troy, kills him.

The news reaches Achilles in Book 18. He pours dust over his head, tears his hair and lies flat on the ground. Antilochus, a Greek fighter, holds his hands, afraid that Achilles will cut his own throat. Thetis rises from the sea to meet her son. Achilles tells her that Zeus gave him the honour he asked for, but that it is worth nothing now that Patroclus is dead.

Here the two possible lives become one. Achilles decides to kill Hector, even after Thetis warns that his own death will soon follow. His refusal to fight helped bring about his friend’s death, and he cannot undo it. He can only accept the fate he once thought of leaving behind.

Priam in the tent of Achilles

Achilles kills Hector and refuses the body its proper treatment. He ties it behind his chariot, drags it around the tomb of Patroclus and leaves it lying in the open beside the ships. His rage is now aimed at a dead man who cannot answer.

Then Priam comes into the enemy camp at night. He kneels before Achilles and kisses the hands that killed his sons. He asks Achilles to remember his own father, Peleus. This plea changes the scene, because Achilles thinks of the father he will never see again. The two men weep together, Priam for Hector and Achilles for Patroclus and Peleus.

Achilles orders that Hector’s body be washed and wrapped out of Priam’s sight. He does not want the king to see the wounds and stir his anger again. He also allows time for the funeral before the fighting starts again. The Iliad does not end with the death of Achilles. It ends after his anger has given way to another man’s grief.

Two accounts of one choice

Homer and Apollodorus tell different parts of the life, and they fit together around a single choice.

In the later account, Thetis hides her son on Skyros to keep him from the decision that Homer’s poem later puts before him. On Skyros the decision is made in a moment, when the boy reaches for weapons at the sound of a trumpet. In the Iliad, the same decision takes up most of the poem, through the quarrel, the refusal, the loss of Patroclus and the return to battle.

Both accounts bring Achilles to the same place. He knows enough about the danger, and he goes to Troy anyway.