Achilles’ character as an internal critique of warmongering ideals in the Iliad

To illustrate the fact that the Iliad contains an internal criticism of war aggression, I examine the character of Achilles and argue that in him we find reflected or symbolized the insidious nature of ideals that glorify war. Achilles draws to himself powerful poetic images of extraordinary military prowess, victory, and valor. However, the Iliad problematizes these very same images and the ideals they hold up for human beings.1 In my analysis, I emphasize the inhumanity of Achilles – his unhinged rage, his exceptionalism, and his egotistical self-love – in order to show how these elements of his character reflect the Iliad’s critique of the life-negating power of warmongering ideals.

In Part 2, I offer a critique of Achilles’ rage (μῆνις), which both guides his actions and accompanies his desire for victory and undying fame (κλέος ἄφθιτον, 9.413).2

Achilles fulfills this desire despite having been warned about the consequences that the satisfaction of the said desire would have for his life (9.410-15). The annihilation that Achilles’ rage sows in its wake represents the destruction that humans suffer when their lives become captive to perilous ideals.3

In Part 3, I argue that Achilles’ megalomaniacal rage covers over the fact that he is an internally divided character. Achilles’ extraordinary prowess places him in-commensurably above his fellow comrades, and it instills in Achilles a feeling of his superiority. However, this same feeling stands in the way of Achilles’ acceptance of the military rank and conventional chain of command, and in the words of Dean Hammer, turns him into a “vagabond.”4 I also explain how Achilles’ outcast status causes him to embody certain militaristic ideals, which if they are taken to the extreme, place the exemplary warrior outside of the very community on behalf of which he is meant to fight.

In Part 4, I show that even Achilles’ love for Patroclus is a destructive passion, because in the end, Achilles sees in Patroclus a reflection of himself or more precisely of his own egotistical self-love. For the sake of precision, in this essay, I will focus on Achilles. However, by way of a brief, but indicative comparison, Achilles’ egotistic passion can be seen as a fantastical desire that Helen (if not the woman and person Helen, then “Helen” understood as a symbol of the erotic passion that men have for war) symbolizes and which she herself presents in a negative light.5 Helen, seen as the eroticized muse of war, embodies the war-mongering ἔρως.6 This passion is egotistical in so far as it seeks to glorify and elevate the attacking warriors through conquest (not through a war of self-defense) and at the expense of annihilation of human communities.7 Likewise, Achilles’ passion for Patroclus turns out to be Achilles’ rageful, menacing desire for himself – or for the glory and immortal fame of his own superhuman person. In this paper, my goal is not to portray Achilles as a despicable person. Instead, I aim to offer an analysis of his character that will serve as a lens through which we can see the Iliad’s internal criticism of the life-undermining character of warmongering ideals. To build my case in a focused manner, I engage with the literature that presents Achilles in the anti-heroic light in the body of the paper. However, in order to offer a balanced assessment, in the notes I also discuss authors whose analysis of Achilles runs counter to my view.

2.    Achilles’ Rage

In this section, I provide an analysis of the aggressive elements of Achilles’ character and show how Achilles’ wrath informs the meaning of the militaristic, gloryseeking ideals in the epic. It is readily apparent that the Iliad has to do with rage. The rhapsode proclaims,” “[t]he rage of Achilles, Peleus’ son, sing o Goddess” ( Μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος, 1.1), and thus μῆνις – rage – looms large as the first word of the war epic. By the time that the events of the Iliad are all but said and done, Homer tells us that “Achilles has destroyed pity, and he cannot experience any shame [or awe - αἰδὼς]; which harms men greatly but profits them also” (Ἀχιλεὺς ἔλεον μὲν ἀπώλεσεν, οὐδέ οἱ αἰδὼς γίγνεται, ἥ τ᾽ ἄνδρας μέγα σίνεται ἠδ᾽

ὀνίνησι, 24.44-45).8 Pity belongs to human beings, but Achilles being a son of a nereid, Thetis, and a grand-grandson of Zeus,9 was not entirely a mortal man. Although, as we see, for example, in his interactions with Patroclus (“seeing him, he – Achilles, felt pity,” τὸν δὲ ἰδὼν ᾤκτιρε 16.5), Achilles was not altogether incapable of pity. Nonetheless, he is more readily described in terms that express his heartless-ness.10 Patroclus puts the incontrovertibleness of Achilles’ inhuman resolve in accusatory terms when commenting on Achilles’ indifference to the suffering of the Greeks. Patroclus calls Achilles “ruthless” (νηλεές 16.33) and says that Achilles’ “father was not Peleus, the driver of horses, or his mother, Thetis. Rather [he] … was a child of the gleaming sea and of the towering rocks. Such is [his] … mind –un-bending” (οὐκ ἄρα σοί γε πατὴρ ἦν ἱππότα Πηλεύς, οὐδὲ Θέτις μήτηρ:

γλαυκὴ δέ σε τίκτε θάλασσα, πέτραι τ᾽ ἠλίβατοι, ὅτι τοι νόος ἐστὶν ἀπηνής 16.33-35). In his longing for Patroclus, his dead companion, Homer tells us that Achilles was “like a lion who … goes among the flocks of men, to devour them” (24.41, 43). This line about the effects of Achilles’ wrath – about the unfulfilled or perhaps implacable desire for revenge – is telling.11 Achilles is inconsolable because the Fates “put in mortal men the heart of endurance” (τλητὸν γὰρ Μοῖραι θυμὸν θέσαν ἀνθρώποισιν, 24.49), but Achilles’ heart does not grow gentler with suffering that weds the common mortals to their lot. Even (or perhaps especially) after the death of Patroclus, and as Max Pohlenz puts it, “Achilles is filled only with the drive for revenge, which snuffs out all pity.”12 The closing moments of Homer’s epic portray the monstrous wastefulness of such a callous heart when Achilles’ slaughter of the twelve Trojan youths for Patroclus’ funeral pyre (23.15) stands as a poetic counterpoint to the slaughter of the sacrificial animals whose flesh will then be eaten by the Achaeans (23.30). Although Achilles is nearly megalo-maniacal in his single-minded desire for revenge, his character, nonetheless, presents a consciousness plagued by division.

3.    Achilles as an Outsider

Achilles is the greatest warrior and yet he refuses to fight. He is more than just human but he is supposed to act as a subordinate to a human chieftain, Agamemnon. In his choice of everlasting glory, Achilles exchanges the very condition of earning it – his life – for the shadows of Hades. Achilles’ character represents an opposition between ideals and actuality. That which we long for, that which we idealize may guide and shape our lives, but these ideals cannot be brough into life unproblematically. The inner dividedness of Achilles’ character represents this problematic relationship between idealized visions of reality (be they glorified prowess of an extraordinary warrior, or the magnificent fame earned through this prowess) and life.

Hammer’s study of Achilles points in the direction of a schism that Achilles rep-resents.13 Hammer works against the tradition of scholarship that he claims tends to take “one of two positions: Achilles either remains a part of the Achaian warrior culture, even as he refuses to participate in it, or he is seen as rejecting Achaian culture and entering some non-cultural, unearthly realm, even as he continues to occupy earthly space and interact with others.”14 Instead, as Hammer sees it, in Achilles “Homer presents a challenge to the prevailing conceptions of warrior society by inverting best and worst. To Achilles, the best of the Achaians, Homer gives the voice of the vagabond, a person normally of broken descent without standing in the community.”15 To a large extent, Achilles’ isolation from the community of his comrades is self-imposed. Achilles refuses to be placated because of how deeply he is insulted by the treatment he receives when Agamemnon claims Briseis for his own.16 Even after Achilles is promised to have her back (9.274) along with many other precious gifts from Agamemnon, he remains steadfast in his choice not to join the ranks of those who fight against the Trojans. As James A. Arieti observes, it is “[a]t the assembly [or], in that most civic of Greek contexts [that], Agamemnon humiliates him; he not only threatens to take away Achilles' prize, but also he scorns him, and treats him with contempt. In short, he does not treat him like a fellow citizen, like a member of their society.”17 Having been excluded in this way, Achilles does not wish to accept Agamemnon’s word or his superiority as a kingly chieftain. Achilles does not want to be made subject to the same structure of military rank and subordination as the rest of the warriors. Meanwhile, his extraordinary capacity in battle and his partially divine origin already set him apart.18 Thus, when responding to Odysseus’ request that he resume fighting, Achilles puts his refusal to do so in terms that question the validity of convention and of his own place in the chain of command.

I will not persuade Agamemnon, nor you the other Danaans, for there is no grace in fighting battles constantly against men. For the same fortune meets the one who stays put and the one who would wage great war. And both the bad and the good are honored. Likewise, both the idle and the man of many deeds perish.

οὔτ᾽ ἔμεγ᾽ Ἀτρεΐδην Ἀγαμέμνονα πεισέμεν οἴω

οὔτ᾽ ἄλλους Δαναούς, ἐπεὶ οὐκ ἄρα τις χάρις ἦεν

μάρνασθαι δηΐοισιν ἐπ᾽ ἀνδράσι νωλεμὲς αἰεί.

ἴση μοῖρα μένοντι καὶ εἰ μάλα τις πολεμίζοι:

ἐν δὲ ἰῇ τιμῇ ἠμὲν κακὸς ἠδὲ καὶ ἐσθλός:

κάτθαν᾽ ὁμῶς ὅ τ᾽ ἀεργὸς ἀνὴρ ὅ τε πολλὰ ἐοργώς.

οὐδέ τί μοι περίκειται, ἐπεὶ πάθον ἄλγεα θυμῷ (9.315-20).

From the absolute point of view – in the fulness of all time – Achilles’ statement makes sense. In other words, both human actions and human inaction are vastly insignificant in the face of eternity. However, human life is finite. It is, precisely, not absolute and not eternal. Therefore, those things which Achilles equates as indifferent (waging war or refraining from going into battle; the good and the bad; idleness and action) make all the difference. In Achilles’ position, we get a glimpse of the inhuman nature of ideals that outstrip a merely mortal human life and that beckon with eternal glory. The call and the draw of such ideals may be powerful, but it is impossible to manifest them in one’s own life. Thus, even Achilles must die in order to “live up” to them.

This irresolvable opposition at the heart of Achilles’ character manifests as a force of destruction; as a power that stamps out human life and disrupts the possibility of its continuation. Hammer also argues that Achilles represents a disruptive figure within the community of warriors and opposing cultures that the epic portrays. He casts this disruptive power in a more positive light than I do and claims, that “we can identify in Achilles' words and actions in Book 9 … a cultural bias of autonomy, a set of values that is in reaction to and ultimately destabilizing of the hierarchical culture of Achaian society as portrayed by Homer.”19 However, on my view, these contradicting characteristics (i.e., of being an outsider to the ideals of the militaristic culture, on the one hand, but also being a paragon warrior or even an embodiment of the very ideals and structures he rejects, on the other) indicate an insidious duality within Achilles.

Achilles as a warrior – paradoxically – is someone who is infinitely better than the rest of the Achaeans, and at the same time, he is someone who cannot be un-problematically included as a rightful member of the community. This feature of

Achilles’ character highlights the issue with idealizing militaristic prowess, which if it comes into its own and to fruition, places the one to whom it belongs outside of the very community that ostensibly is meant to be protected, benefited, and saved by the exceptional warrior. Or to take it a step further, the idealized, or extraordinary warrior has to commit such actions and be possessed of such a nature, passions, and views that place this warrior outside of the human community altogether. Thus, the ideals that glorify war and fame that comes with victory in conquest hold a vision of life that, in the final analysis, undermines human life.20

In taking this position, I do not seek to impose a pacifist interpretation upon Homer’s epic. However, I aim to problematize the outright, unexamined, and simplistic acceptance of those ideals, which seek to venerate military conquest, prowess, and the alleged benefits of war. Although the said ideals beckon with all of the power of poetic genius, this does not mean that the Iliad lacks self-awareness, and is not critical of the life-negating power of the very ideals it so aptly portrays. The epic lends itself to being read as a work that shows the terrible beauty of warmongering ideals, and that – simultaneously – plays up their problematic nature. Beneath the valorizing and self-aggrandizing veneer, these ideals contain the kind of wrathful passion that ends up destroying life – not only the lives of those who are considered to be one’s “enemies,” but also and perhaps even more readily, the lives of those who hold such ideals dear. Achilles’ character embodies the ruinous, and yet powerfully seductive, nature of such ideals.

4.    Achilles’ Desire for Patroclus as Achilles’ Egotistical Self-Love

As a representation of our longing for idealized images beneath which lies the gruesome reality of war, Achilles longs for and loves himself. As I will argue in this section, even Patroclus, whose death unleashes Achilles’ fury, turns out to be only an occasion for Achilles to achieve his own immortal glory. The path to this fate, which the gods foretell (18.95-96), ends up being woven out of awful pain, which Achilles’ anger sows in its wake.21 In the aftermath of Hector’s slaying of Patroclus, Achilles’ rage feeds on the fear and suffering of those he murders or causes to feel pain. His wrath does not subside but grows deeper and more terrible. Seth Benardete paints a stark picture of Achilles isolated by his all-consuming rage, when he writes that “he becomes his sole object. He no longer has anything beyond himself, on which he can vent his fury, but must always be reminded, and yet remain always unsated, by the past. … He can never escape from his own hell.”22 In book 24, we really have a hellish vision of Achilles tormented by the pangs of his furious, ghoulish rage. He can’t stop at taking Hector’s life, but he must inflict further punishment upon Hector’s body. The scene in which Achilles can’t find peace in sleep describes him thinking of Patroclus but lashing out against and desecrating the body of Hector.

Remembering [Patroclus]…, Achilles cried mightily. Lying down now on his side, now on his back, now with his face down, now springing upright and deeply unsettled he wondered along the seashore. Neither did the shining dawn escape his notice as she appeared over the shore. But he yoked his speedy horses and bound Hector to the chariot and dragged him about tied behind. When he passed the mound of Menoetius’ dead son thrice, he would take pause in his tent, but he would suffer Hector to be stretched out with his face down in the dust.

τῶν μιμνησκόμενος θαλερὸν κατὰ δάκρυον εἶβεν,

10ἄλλοτ᾽ ἐπὶ πλευρὰς κατακείμενος, ἄλλοτε δ᾽ αὖτε

ὕπτιος, ἄλλοτε δὲ πρηνής: τοτὲ δ᾽ ὀρθὸς ἀναστὰς

δινεύεσκ᾽ ἀλύων παρὰ θῖν᾽ ἁλός: οὐδέ μιν ἠὼς

φαινομένη λήθεσκεν ὑπεὶρ ἅλα τ᾽ ἠϊόνας τε.

ἀλλ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐπεὶ ζεύξειεν ὑφ᾽ ἅρμασιν ὠκέας ἵππους,

15Ἕκτορα δ᾽ ἕλκεσθαι δησάσκετο δίφρου ὄπισθεν,

τρὶς δ᾽ ἐρύσας περὶ σῆμα Μενοιτιάδαο θανόντος (24.9-18)

This is the image of Achilles unhinged by his desire for revenge, which Achilles could not satiate even after he took countless lives and the life of the man who unbeknownst to himself slew Patroclus. This is an image of implacable fury that consumes the one who feels it, tightening the solipsistic circle in which Achilles finds himself to start. Bernard Knox sees Achilles’ character in similar terms. Comparing Helen and Achilles, Knox writes that “[a]t 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 wrath, his imprisonment in a godlike, lonely, heroic fury from which all the rest of the world is excluded.”23 The Iliad shows the aftermath of Achilles’ murderous rage, unmitigated by the abiding spirit of humanity.24 The first word of the Iliad that invokes Achilles’ μῆνις, and sets the stage for the affective tenor of the epos, also inscribes an inhuman passion into the fabric of all of the events that transpire at Ilium. The Iliad, as much as it is about war, that is, about something that humans pursue ubiquitously, raises sharply the question of inhumanity. Achilles’ implacable rage is the ground from which this question springs up in the Iliad – the question of the proximity between the human and the inhumane.25

Just as Achilles’ fury, also his erotic desire, is totalizing in a sense of being solip-sistic. Achilles’ eros closes the world of genuine relationships off for him, instead of opening it up. As Knox argues, with Achilles, it has never really been about Patroclus. It has always only been about Achilles. As Knox sees it, “[c]learly what he [Achilles] really wishes for is a world containing nothing but himself and his own glory, for Patroclus, whom he now sends out in his own armor, he regards as a part of himself. This solipsistic dream of glory” is what defines Achilles’ character and propels his actions.26 Patroclus’ death is an occasion for Achilles to fulfill his wish, which Benardete says is a desire “to be absolute.”27 Furthermore, Benardete continues, “the loneliness of Achilles’ guilt and the vastness of his grief, … has nothing to do with the everyday world, but corresponds to the fantasy he himself has made.”28 Especially, when he learns of the death of Patroclus, Achilles exemplifies this description of being encircled within a self-made, fantastical vision of the world. The following lines express the self-enclosing character of Achilles’ relationship to the other – his dearest other – which ends up being just the same as himself:

I held Patroclus above all other comrades and even as dear as my own self. He is the one I lost. Hector chanced to kill him and strip this mighty, beautiful armor, wondrous to behold, that the gods gave as splendid gifts to the son of Peleus.

Πάτροκλος, τὸν ἐγὼ περὶ πάντων τῖον ἑταίρων ἶσον ἐμῇ κεφαλῇ; τὸν

ἀπώλεσα, τεύχεα δ᾽ Ἕκτωρ δῃώσας ἀπέδυσε πελώρια θαῦμα ἰδέσθαι καλά:

τὰ μὲν Πηλῆϊ θεοὶ δόσαν ἀγλαὰ δῶρα, 81-85.

Thus, letting Patroclus wear his armor and fight in his stead, Achilles has not only condemned Patroclus to death (as the rhapsode tells us in line 16.47), but he also made a choice to die; he already has let go of that person he loved most, that is, Achilles himself.29

The poetic, imagistic form of the Iliad matches the flight of fantastical passion. The passion that Achilles represents is a furious, rage-filled desire to outstrip one’s life and to become larger than life; to substitute one’s mortal self for a self that has attained to immortal glory. A life in a community with others, a life shared with friends, a prudent, thoughtful life gives way to a ruinous quest for immortality. Achilles is an embodiment of this idealized image of conquest-seeking war. It beckons with extraordinary hubris. It promises undying fame, but for mortals to fall prey to this idealized vision of war, means to substitute life for a phantom; it means to agree to take lives and to lay down one’s life for the sake of an egomaniacal fantasy.³⁰

5.    Conclusion

Achilles’ fantastical vision of the world and of himself as well as his rage are the images that help us see the Iliad’s internal criticism of military ideals that propel aggressive, conquest-oriented war. When stripped of their allure, these ideals loosen their hold on our imaginations. We begin to see that not only are they less than deserving of admiration, but also that while we are enraptured by them, we are flirting with inhumanity – be it expressed as adoration of eternal glory or as blind worship of extraordinary military power.³¹ The Iliad contains this critique of perilous ideals, while also presenting us with overpoweringly beautiful images that poeticize war. The epic does not offer a pacifist critique of war. However, it raises questions about the human propensity to be swayed and inspired by ideals that, in the final analysis and in earnest, undermine human life. The retribution for the actions committed in accordance with and for the sake of these ravenous ideals, as Weil puts it, “has a geometrical rigor, which operates automatically to penalize the abuse of force.”³² The relationship between retribution and the hubristic exercise of power was “the main subject of Greek thought” and “[i]t is the soul of the epic.”³³

The truth of the warmongering ideals is that if pursued, they lead to terrible suffering, gruesome violence, and senseless annihilation of life. The idealized, terrible attractiveness of war – in reality – has an ugly side, which the Iliad expresses in Achilles’ solipsism and his choice to destroy himself through the destruction of countless others, including the other who he claims to love as himself. The others, for Achilles, are merely an occasion to exit this life in order to become larger than life. Likewise, military ideals that celebrate and promote the love of glory earned through conquest devalue human life. If we act according to these ideals, then we turn human life into a means of self-aggrandizement and we do so not for the sake but at the expense of life.