As personalities (and that is how Homer and the Greeks always saw them), they are very different from one another, but they have, besides immortality, one other thing in common—a furious self-absorption. Each one is a separate force which, never questioning or examining the nature of its own existence, moves blindly, ferociously, to the affirmation of its will in action. The Homeric god recognizes no authority outside itself—except superior force. How are arguments settled in heaven? Like this: “Obey my orders,” says Zeus to Hera,
“for fear the gods, however many Olympus holds,
are powerless to protect you when I come
to throttle you with my irresistible hands. ” (1.681-83)
The other gods do not argue with Zeus, though they may try to trick him, as Hera does successfully (14.187-421), and he does not explain his will to them, he threatens and enforces. There are no moral questions involved, only the clash of wills, intent on manifesting their existence—whether by bringing Troy to destruction or by driving Helen back into bed with Paris, as in the strange scene where Aphrodite, in the shape of an old woman, acts the procuress. “Quickly—Paris is calling for you, come back home! / There he is in the bedroom, the bed with inlaid rings ... ” (3.450-51). Helen recognizes the goddess and resists her temptation: “Maddening one, my Goddess, oh what now? / Lusting to lure me to my ruin yet again?” (3.460-61). “Lusting” is not too strong a word; the mating of male and female is Aphrodite’s very existence; that is why she is so stubborn to procure it. And she flares up in anger:
“Don’t provoke me-wretched, headstrong girl!
Or in my immortal rage I may just toss you over,
hate you as I adore you now—with a vengeance ...”
So she threatened
and Helen the daughter of mighty Zeus was terrified. (3.480-86)
And well she might be. Helen has nothing but her beauty and the charm it casts on all men; without Aphrodite she would be nothing. And Aphrodite plays the same role on Olympus as on earth. She gives Hera, who wants to divert Zeus’s attention from the battle so Poseidon can help the Achaeans,
the breastband,
pierced and alluring, with every kind of enchantment
woven through it ... There is the heat of Love,
the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper,
irresistible—madness to make the sanest man go mad. (14.257-61)
Zeus in his sphere of power, Aphrodite in hers, are irresistible. To be a god is to be totally absorbed in the exercise of one’s own power, the fulfillment of one’s own nature, unchecked by any thought of others except as obstacles to be overcome; it is to be incapable of self-questioning or self-criticism. But there are human beings who are like this. Preeminent in their particular sphere of power, they impose their will on others with the confidence, the unquestioning certainty of their own right and worth that is characteristic of gods. Such people the Greeks called “heroes”; they recognized the fact that they transcended the norms of humanity by according them worship at their tombs after death. Heroes might be, usually were, violent, antisocial, destructive, but they offered an assurance that in some chosen vessels humanity is capable of superhuman greatness, that there are some human beings who can deny the imperatives which others obey in order to live.
The heroes are godlike in their passionate self-esteem. But they are not gods, not immortal. They are subject, like the rest of us, to failure, above all to the irremediable failure of death. And sooner or later, in suffering, in disaster, they come to realize their limits, accept mortality and establish (or reestablish) a human relationship with their fellowmen. This pattern, recurrent in the myths of the Greeks and later to be the model for some of the greatest Athenian tragedies, is first given artistic form in the Iliad.
ACHILLES
There are in the poem two human beings who are godlike, Achilles and Helen. One of them, Helen, the cause of the war, is so preeminent in her sphere, so far beyond competition in her beauty, her power to enchant men, that she is a sort of human Aphrodite. In her own element she is irresistible. Every king in Greece was ready to fight for her hand in marriage, but she chose Menelaus, king of Sparta. When Paris, the prince of Troy, came to visit, she ran off with him, leaving husband and daughter, without a thought of the consequences for others. Her willful action is the cause of all the deaths at Troy, those past and those to come. When she left with Paris she acted like a god, with no thought of anything but the fulfillment of her own desire, the exercise of her own nature. But when the Iliad opens she has already come to realize the meaning for others of her actions, to recognize that she is a human being. She criticizes herself harshly as she speaks to Priam:
“if only death had pleased me then, grim death,
that day I followed your son to Troy, forsaking
my marriage bed, my kinsmen and my child . . .” (3.209-11)
She feels responsible for the human misery she sees all around her, something the gods never do. When Zeus and Hera settle their quarrel about the fate of Troy (4.28-79), Zeus gives way but claims her acquiescence whenever he in his turn may wish to destroy a city. Not only does she accept, she actually offers him three cities, those she loves best: Argos, Sparta and Mycenae. That is how the fate of nations is decided. Human suffering counts for nothing in the settlement of divine differences. The gods feel no responsibility for the human victims of their private wars. But Helen has come at last to a full realization of the suffering she has caused; too late to undo it, but at least she can see herself in the context of humankind and shudder at her own responsibility. “My dear brother,” she says to Hector,
“dear to me, bitch that I am, vicious, scheming—
horror to freeze the heart! Oh how I wish
that first day my mother brought me into the light
some black whirlwind had rushed me out to the mountains
or into the surf where the roaring breakers crash and drag
and the waves had swept me off before all this had happened!” (6.408-13)
This acceptance of responsibility accounts for her resistance when the goddess Aphrodite urged her to go to bed with Paris; in that scene she fell below the level of divine indifference—as from the human point of view she rose above it. She has ceased to be a mere existence, an unchanging blind self. She has become human and can feel the sorrow, the regret, that no human being escapes.
At the beginning of the Iliad Helen has already broken out of the prison of self-absorption, but this is the point at which Achilles enters it. The Iliad shows us the origin, course and consequences of his rage, his imprisonment in a godlike, lonely, heroic fury from which all the rest of the world is excluded, and also his return to human stature. The road to this final release is long and grim, strewn with the corpses of many a Greek and Trojan, and it leads finally to his own death.