The Rage of Achilles

The action of the Iliad takes place during a fraction of the 10 year war: it is set over the course of about 40 days in the tenth year of the conflict.
The subject of the poem is announced right away, in its very first word: “Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed…”
The rage here is not Greek rage against Trojan, but Greek against Greek. The conflict at the heart of the Iliad is between Agamemnon, King of Mycenae and commander-in-chief of the Greek forces, and his best warrior Achilles.

The Iliad
The Iliad – sometimes referred to as the Song of Ilion or Song of Ilium) is a Greek epic, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (Ilium) by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles.
Although the story covers only a few weeks in the final year of the war, the Iliad mentions or alludes to many of the Greek legends about the siege; the earlier events, such as the gathering of warriors for the siege, the cause of the war, and related concerns tend to appear near the beginning. Then the epic narrative takes up events prophesied for the future, such as Achilles’ imminent death and the fall of Troy, although the narrative ends before these events take place. However, as these events are prefigured and alluded to more and more vividly, when it reaches an end the poem has told a more or less complete tale of the Trojan War.

Birth of Achilles
The Goddess Thetis tried to make her son immortal, by dipping him in the river Styx that runs through Hades. However, he was left vulnerable at the part of the body by which she held him, his heel.
Achilles was the son of the nymph Thetis and Peleus, the King of the Myrmidons. Zeus and Poseidon had been rivals for the hand of Thetis until Prometheus, the fore-thinker, warned Zeus of a prophecy that Thetis would bear a son greater than his father. For this reason, the two gods withdrew their pursuit, and had her wed Peleus.

Achilles in the Trojan War
According to the Iliad, Achilles arrived at Troy with 50 ships, each carrying 50 Myrmidons. Achilles appointed five leaders (each leader commanding 500 Myrmidons) who were: Menesthius, Eudorus, Peisander, Phoenix and Alcimedon.

Achilles in the Iliad
Homer’s Iliad is the most famous narrative of Achilles’ deeds in the Trojan War. Achilles’ wrath is the central theme of the book. The Homeric epic only covers a few weeks of the war, and does not narrate Achilles’ death. It begins with Achilles’ withdrawal from battle after Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces, dishonours him.
Agamemnon had taken a woman named Chryseis as his slave. Her father Chryses, a priest of Apollo, begged Agamemnon to return her to him. Agamemnon refused and Apollo sent a plague amongst the Greeks. The prophet Calchas correctly determined the source of the troubles but would not speak unless Achilles vowed to protect him. Achilles did so and Calchas declared Chryseis must be returned to her father. Agamemnon consented, but then commanded that Achilles’ battle prize Briseis be brought to replace Chryseis. Angry at the dishonour (and as he says later, because he loved Briseis) and at the urging of his mother Thetis, Achilles refused to fight or lead his troops alongside the other Greek forces. At this same time, burning with rage over Agamemnon’s theft, Achilles prayed to Thetis to convince Zeus to help the Trojans gain ground in the war, so that he may regain his honour.
As the battle turned against the Greeks, thanks to the influence of Zeus, Nestor declared that the Trojans were winning because Agamemnon had angered Achilles, and urged the king to appease the warrior. Agamemnon agreed and sent Odysseus and two other chieftains, Ajax and Phoenix, to Achilles with the offer of the return of Briseis and other gifts. Achilles rejected all Agamemnon offered him, and simply urged the Greeks to sail home as he was planning to do.
The Trojans, led by Hector, subsequently pushed the Greek army back toward the beaches and assaulted their ships. With the Greek forces on the verge of absolute destruction, Achilles very close companion Patroclus led the Myrmidons into battle wearing Achilles’ armour, though Achilles remained at his camp.
Patroclus succeeded in pushing the Trojans back from the beaches, but was killed by Hector before he could lead a proper assault on the city of Troy.

Achilles reaction to the death of Patroclus is monumental, extreme:
‘A black cloud of grief came shrouding over Achilles.
Both hands clawing the ground for soot and filth,
he poured it over his head, fouled his handsome face
and black ashes settled onto his fresh clean war-shirt.
Overpowered in all his power, sprawled in the dust,
Achilles lay there, fallen…’
His mother Thetis came to comfort the distraught Achilles. She persuaded Hephaestus to make new armour for him, in place of the armour that Patroclus had been wearing which was taken by Hector. The new armour included the Shield of Achilles, described in great detail by the poet.
Enraged over the death of Patroclus, Achilles ended his refusal to fight and took the field killing many men in his rage but always seeking out Hector. Achilles even engaged in battle with the river god Scamander who became angry that Achilles was choking his waters with all the men he killed. The god tried to drown Achilles but was stopped by Hera and Hephaestus.
Zeus himself took note of Achilles’ rage and sent the gods to restrain him so that he would not go on to sack Troy itself, seeming to show that the unhindered rage of Achilles could defy fate itself, as Troy was not meant to be destroyed yet.
Finally, Achilles found his prey. Achilles chased Hector around the wall of Troy three times before the goddess Athena, in the form of Hector’s favourite and dearest brother, Deiphobus, persuaded Hector to stop running and fight Achilles face to face. After Hector realised the trick, he knew the battle was inevitable.
Hector pulls out his sword, now his only weapon, and charges. But Achilles grabbed his thrown spears that were delivered to him by the unseen Athena who wore the Hades helmet. Achilles then aimed his spear and pierced the collarbone section of Hector, the only part of the stolen armour of Achilles that did not protect Hector.
The wound was fatal yet allowed Hector to speak to Achilles. In his final moments, Hector begs Achilles for a honourable funeral, but Achilles replies that he will let the dogs and vultures devour Hector’s flesh. Hector dies, prophesying that Achilles’ death will follow soon: ‘Be careful now; for I might be made into the gods’ curse … upon you, on that day when Paris and Phoibos Apollo…destroy you in the Skainan gates, for all your valour.’

Retrieving Hectors body
With the assistance of the god Hermes, Hector’s father, Priam, went to Achilles’ tent to plead with Achilles to permit him to perform for Hector his funeral rites. The final passage in the Iliad is Hector’s funeral, after which the doom of Troy was just a matter of time.

Spoken by Priam to Achilles
‘Think of thy father, and this helpless face behold
See him in me, as helpless and as old!
Though not so wretched: there he yields to me,
the first of men in sovereign misery!
Thus forced to kneel, thus grovelling to embrace
the scourge and ruin of my realm and race;
Suppliant my children’s murderer to implore,
and kiss those hands yet reeking with their gore!’
Achilles, moved by Priam’s actions and following his mother’s orders sent by Zeus, returns Hector’s body to Priam and promises him a truce of twelve days to allow the Trojans to perform funeral rites for Hector. Priam returns to Troy with the body of his son, and it is given full funeral honours. Even Helen mourns Hector, for he had always been kind to her and protected her from spite.

Death of Achilles
The death of Achilles, even if considered solely as it occurred in the oldest sources, is a complex one, with many different versions.
In the oldest one, the Iliad, and as predicted by Hector with his dying breath, the hero’s death was brought about by Paris with an arrow. In some versions, the god Apollo guided Paris’ arrow. Some retellings also state that Achilles was scaling the gates of Troy and was hit with a poisoned arrow. All of these versions deny Paris any sort of valour, owing to the common conception that Paris was a coward and not the man his brother Hector was, and Achilles remained undefeated on the battlefield.
Achilles bones were mingled with those of Patroclus so that the two would be companions in death as in life and the remains were transferred to Leuke, an island in the Black Sea.

Death of Paris
Later in the war, after Philoctetes mortally wounds Paris, Helen makes her way to Mount Ida where she begs Paris’s first wife, the nymph Oenone, to heal him. Still bitter that Paris had spurned her for his birth right in the city and then forgotten her for Helen, Oenone refuses. Helen returns alone to Troy, where Paris dies later the same day.
In another version, Paris himself, in great pain, visits Oenone to plead for healing but is refused and dies on the mountainside. When Oenone hears of his funeral, she runs to his funeral pyre and throws herself in its fire. After Paris’s death, his brother Deiphobus married Helen and was then killed by Menelaus in the sack of Troy.

Fate of Achilles’ armour
With the death of Achilles, his armour was the object of a feud between Odysseus and Telamonian Ajax (Ajax the Greater). They competed for it by giving speeches on why they were the bravest after Achilles to their Trojan prisoners, who after considering both men came to a consensus in favour of Odysseus.
Furious, Ajax cursed Odysseus, which earned the ire of Athena. Athena temporarily made Ajax so mad with grief and anguish that he began killing sheep, thinking them his comrades. After a while, when Athena lifted his madness and Ajax realised that he had actually been killing sheep, Ajax was left so ashamed that he committed suicide.
Odysseus eventually gave the armour to Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles.
A relic claimed to be Achilles’ bronze-headed spear was for centuries preserved in the temple of Athena on the acropolis of Phaselis, Lycia, a port on the Pamphylian Gulf.
Alexander the Great, who envisioned himself as the new Achilles, visited the city in 333 BC.

Influence of the Iliad
The Iliad, as well as being the first great book, is also the first great war book, and it has shaped the way we think about military conflict ever since. Alexander the Great slept with the Iliad (that was given to him by his tutor Aristotle) under his bed on his military campaigns. Even now it is read on the literature course at West Point, the US Military Academy (an institution that is nicknamed…Sparta).
Homer uses Achaean, Danaans and Argives instead of Greeks – as the term Greek does not come into usage until Roman times.
The Trojan Horse is a story from the Trojan War about the subterfuge that the Greeks used to enter the city of Troy and win the war. There is no mention of the Trojan Horse in the original Iliad by Homer, and the conclusion of the story is marked by the retrieval of Hector’s corpse by his father, King Priam, from the willing hands of Achilles. The implication is that the Trojan War ended in amicable peace.
But in the popularized, fictional work of the Aeneid by Virgil (written 700 years after the Iliad), after a fruitless 10-year siege, the Greeks at the behest of Odysseus constructed a huge wooden horse and hid a select force of men inside. The Greeks pretended to sail away, and the Trojans pulled the horse into their city as a victory trophy. That night the Greek force crept out of the horse and opened the gates for the rest of the Greek army, which had sailed back under cover of night. The Greeks entered and destroyed the city of Troy, ending the war.
The Trojan Horse is first mentioned in The Odyssey if only briefly.
Oxford historian Robin Lane Fox, (whose biography of Alexander was the primary inspiration behind Oliver Stone’s film Alexander), has long maintained that Alexander the Great cultivated the persona of a “new Achilles”, a successor to the greatest hero of the Trojan War.
Plutarch writes that Alexander showed a special affection for the memory of Achilles when he visited the Trojan ruins at the start of his Persian Campaign. When asked by a priest if he’d like to see the Trojan prince Paris’ harp, Alexander scoffed, replying “I would far rather see the lyre of Achilles, which he used to sing the glories of brave men”.
According to the Roman historian, Aelian, Alexander was imitating Homer’s Achilles when he cut his hair to pay homage to the heroes of the Trojan War. The images of Achilles that Alexander would have seen growing up in Macedon showed the hero as clean-shaven, a rarity among male warriors of that time.

Source: The Iliad by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles, Alexander Pope, ‘It’s all Greek to me’ by Charlotte Higgins, en.wikipedia.org and ancientheroes.net
Image: copyright Marvel Comics.