The Iliad is a poem that lives and moves and has its being in war, in that world of organized violence in which a man justifies his existence most clearly by killing others. This violence is Achilles’ native element: only in violence are his full powers exerted, his talents fully employed. And he has deliberately chosen this sphere of activity, in which he is invincible, though he knows it will end in his early death.
“Mother tells me,
the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet,
that 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 ...
true, but the life that’s left me will be long . . .” (9.497-504)
And he has chosen glory and death at Troy. The natural consequence of that choice is a fierce devotion to the glory which he has preferred to a long life; any diminution of that glory, any hint that he is not the center of the world of violence, is an intolerable insult. And Agamemnon, in the quarrel that opens the poem, strikes at the roots of his pride, at that self-esteem which he prizes above life itself.
“You are nothing to me—you and your overweening anger!
... I will be there in person at your tents
to take Briseis in all her beauty, your own prize—
so you can learn just how much greater I am than you . . .”
(1.213-19)
This is an unforgivable insult; it denies Achilles any claim to honor at all, it treats him as a man of no worth, in fact as a subject, an inferior.
Achilles starts to draw his sword. For him there can be only one answer to such words: “so you can learn just how much greater I am than you” amounts to a denial of his right to exist. For the honor of Achilles is more important than that of other men; he has already chosen an early death for honor’s sake. His intention was to “thrust through the ranks and kill Agamemnon now” (1.225), and he would have done so if Athena had not intervened. Instead he withdraws to his tents and, through his mother Thetis and her supplication of Zeus, brings about the Trojan resurgence, which will send so many valiant souls of heroes down to Hades. For more than three quarters of the poem Achilles takes no part in the fighting; when at last, with Patroclus dead and the fight raging over his corpse, Achilles is ready to fight, he has no armor—he cannot even help rescue the body of his friend. He goes to the edge of the ditch to show himself to the Trojans and shout an announcement that he will return to the battle. And later, in the new panoply made by Hephaestus and brought by Thetis, he advances for the first time in the poem against the Trojan ranks. We have seen many men fight in the Iliad so far, but not Achilles. We have heard of his fighting in the past, from himself and others, but now Homer must show it to us, give us a picture of the supreme violence, goaded to fury and at the highest pitch of its relentless skill and strength. He does not fail us. The violence of Books 20 and 21 makes what has gone before seem child’s play.
Death is the lot of the Trojans who stand in the way of Achilles as he seeks out Hector, the new object of his rage. One after another he cuts them down and the death blows are hideously, unnecessarily strong. Others he drives into the river Xanthus and plunges in after them, killing in the water. Later he meets one who escaped from the river and, weary and sweating, has thrown his weapons on the ground. It is one of Priam’s sons, Lycaon, who had been Achilles’ prisoner once, had been ransomed and returned to Troy, only to meet his death now. As Achilles raises his spear, Lycaon runs under it, clasps Achilles’ knees and pleads for life. But Achilles will take no prisoners now. Once he did, but now, for the Trojans who killed his friend Patroclus, there is no pity in his heart, none, above all, for the sons of Priam, the brothers of Hector. In a famous and terrifying passage, he formulates the creed of the warrior devoted to death:
“Come, friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so?
Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you.
And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am?
The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life
a deathless goddess. But 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—
flinging a spear perhaps
or whipping a deadly arrow off his bow. ” (21.119—28)
“Friend, you too must die ... ” That macabre word “friend” is sincerely meant; it is a recognition of equality, the equality of men of war, all of whom must face violent death. And Lycaon recognizes his death sentence. He lets go of Achilles’ spear and sinks “back down ... / spreading both arms wide” (21.130-31) in a resigned gesture of relaxation to take the blow of Achilles’ sword. And Achilles turns back to the slaughter. “Die, Trojans die—/ till I butcher all the way to sacred Troy” (21.146- 47). And die they do, all those who cannot get back inside the walls, through the gate where Hector takes his stand to meet, at last, his mighty opposite.
The whole poem has been moving toward this duel between the two champions, but there has never been any doubt about the outcome. The husband and father, the beloved protector of his people, the man who stands for the civilized values of the rich city, its social and religious institutions, will go down to defeat at the hands of this man who has no family, who in a private quarrel has caused the death of many of his own fellow soldiers, who now in a private quarrel thinks only of revenge, though that revenge, as he well knows, is the immediate prelude to his own death. And the death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city. The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cas sandra raped in the temple, Hector’s baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer’s presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.
But Homer’s view of the war is more somber still. From the point of view of the powers that rule his universe, the gods, all the human struggles, the death of heroes, the fall of cities, are only of passing interest, to be forgotten as they are replaced by similar events played out by different actors. Troy will fall now, but so someday will the cities of its conquerors. And the great wars that brought glory and death to the heroes will not even be allowed to leave a mark on the landscape. When Hector was threatening the Greek ships, the Achaeans built a great protective wall around them, with a ditch in front. After the fighting was over Apollo and Poseidon destroyed the wall ...