Achilles

The Iliad begins with Achilles’ anger. Agamemnon, forced by plague to return the priest’s daughter Chryseis, takes Achilles’ prize Briseis in compensation. Achilles feels the insult as a public denial of his worth: he has won the girl by fighting, and the king has taken her without fighting. He is on the point of drawing his sword when Athena appears behind him and checks his hand. He withdraws from the war and asks his mother Thetis to secure a promise from Zeus that the Achaeans will suffer until they honour him again.

His withdrawal is not mere sulking. It is a claim about the relation between risk, reward, and honour. Achilles tells the embassy in Book IX that he gains nothing by fighting: his life is the stake, and Agamemnon takes the prize. The poem never simply condemns him; it shows the logic of a heroic code that has no answer to unfair distribution of glory.

Achilles’ refusal lasts until his closest companion Patroclus goes into battle in Achilles’ armour, kills Sarpedon, and is killed by Hector with Apollo’s help. The news breaks Achilles. His grief is physical and excessive: he rolls in the dust, refuses food, and fills the air with lament. Thetis brings him armour made by Hephaestus, and he returns to the field not for Agamemnon or for the Achaeans but for Patroclus.

He kills Hector outside the walls of Troy, drags the body behind his chariot, and refuses it burial until Priam comes to ransom it. In the final book he and Priam weep together, each remembering his own losses. Achilles returns the body and grants a truce for the funeral. The poem ends there, before the death that Thetis has told him is fated to come soon after Hector’s.

Achilles knows the choice he is making. Thetis tells him that a long, obscure life awaits him if he stays home, and a short, glorious one if he goes to Troy. He goes. When he chooses to avenge Patroclus, he knows that Hector’s death seals his own. His kléos is inseparable from his early death.

He is also the poem’s most troubling figure. His treatment of Hector’s corpse violates the ordinary obligations of the dead; his rage at Agamemnon nearly destroys his own side; his tenderness with Priam at the end is real but comes late. The Iliad does not resolve these contradictions. It holds them together in one man.