In the Greek word of Homer’s day, the heroic warrior’s response is aristeia, “a victorious rampage, irresistibly sweeping all before him, killing whomever of the enemy he can catch or whoever stands against him.” The combat, moreover, was intimate and hand-to-hand, conducted with spear and sword and club. The connection between combatants at the moment at which one prevails and the other succumbs was human at its most brutal, as in Achilles rushing into the Trojan ranks in Book XX of the Iliad:
. . . his first kill was Iphition,
Otrynteus’ hardy son and a chief of large contingents. . . .
As the Trojan charged head-on Achilles speared him
Square in the brows—his whole skull split in half
And down he crashed, Achilles exulting over him:
“Here you lie, Otrynteus’ son—most terrible man alive!
Here’s your deathbed! . . .” (XX 436–444)
There is no advance guarantee that one’s rampage will be victorious; charging headlong into battle courts death. Iphition, too, charged into the fight: He was sufficiently formidable in his own right and by family heritage for Achilles to recognize him as he perished. The Iliad is not Iphition’s tale; he appears in it only to die in this passage. But neither does the Iliad depict the death of Achilles himself. Though much foretold throughout, and well understood to be ineluctably forthcoming by audiences from Homer’s day to our own, Achilles’s death takes place after the conclusion of the Iliad, whose final concern is the return to Troy of the body of Achilles’s last victim, Hector, the beloved son of Troy’s King Priam. Heroes—and Iphition perhaps lacked only an epic chronicle of his own for us to regard him as one—not only risk death but sometimes do actually die in battle.
Here, perhaps, the question is how they die: As Hector and Achilles begin their final confrontation, Hector realizes that the gods have turned their backs on him:
“So now I meet my doom. Well let me die—
but not without struggle, not without glory, no,
in some great clash of arms that even men to come
will hear of down the years!” (XXII 359–362)
Hector gets his wish, of course: We still pay attention to his epic clash with Achilles, and it still has something to teach us.
Hector’s willingness to engage in a struggle worthy of his high sense of himself, though not unique to the victorious hero Achilles, was hardly universal among the combatants. Homer narrates one such case that stands in sharp contrast:
. . . Tros, Alastor’s son, crawled to Achilles’ knees
and clutched them, hoping he’d spare him,
let Tros off alive. . . .
Here was a man [Achilles, that is] not sweet at heart, not kind, no,
he was raging, wild—as Tros grasped his knees,
desperate, begging, Achilles slit open his liver,
the liver spurted loose, gushing with dark blood,
drenched his lap and the night swirled down his eyes
as his life breath slipped away. (XX 523–533)
When the Trojan prince Aegnor sees Achilles coming, he considers trying to run for it, but rejects the idea when he realizes Achilles will “catch me and slash my coward’s throat.” Then he considers hiding out, but worries lest Achilles “sees me turning tail.” Aegnor fears death less than he fears ignominy.
The distinctive characteristic of the heroic figure is the willingness to risk death. It may be done in ignorance of the outcome, as in the case of Iphition, and therefore with the hope of success foremost in the mind up until the very end. It may be subject to post facto regret, as in the case of poor Tros, abjectly unheroic in the final scene of his life. It may be a matter of weighing alternatives and dismissing as inferior all but standing one’s ground, as for Aegnor. And it may be that the decision to risk violent death is subject to reversal as circumstances develop; Homer says the god Apollo arranged for Aegnor to make a getaway. But what matters in the first instance is the pursuit of aristeia, the mantle of the victorious warrior.
There are a number of qualities that set Achilles apart as a hero above and beyond the other greats of the ancient world. He is, by universal acknowledgment of his peers, the greatest of the Achaean warriors. He has an unusual capacity for self-understanding, even in the midst of his passion. And above all, unlike any other mortal, Achilles knows in advance what the outcome of his decision to stay at Troy will be:
“[. . .] 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,
the stroke of death will not come on quickly.” (IX 497–505)
Achilles is acutely aware of the consequences of the choice before him. To stay and fight does not merely allow for the possibility of dying young—that is, one possibility among others, including the possibility of winning eternal glory in battle and returning home to a long and happy life. For Achilles, an untimely demise is a certainty if he stays and fights. No doubt many of the Achaeans besieging Troy set out from their homes well aware that they might not return. But they could hope for a victory that would cover them in glory, and hope as well to return home to a long and happy life. In fact, that hope might abide within them up to the very moment of death. Some, like Tros, realizing that the enterprise was going to end badly, ended up regretting the whole thing. In pleading for his life, Tros forfeits a heroic profile in favor of keeping hope alive a moment longer. The hope that everything turns out well in the end is, in most instances of heroic action then and now, one of the spurs to the willingness to put one’s life at greater risk. But there is no hope underlying the actions of Achilles. He knows his fate in advance. If he stays in Troy, it’s death and glory. One could fairly describe the story of the Iliad as Achilles coming to terms with his own superiority and mortality.
Homer advises us, from the first word of the first sentence of the Iliad, that the subject matter of the poem is the “rage” or “wrath” of Achilles. Throughout the poem, Achilles burns. His rage has two divisions, each encompassing roughly half the Iliad. The first object of Achilles’s rage is the Achaean king, Agamemnon. We will turn to it in the next chapter, when the time comes to try to understand more fully the political problem that heroes pose. Here, we skip to the second source of Achilles’s rage: the death of Achilles’s comrade-in-arms and confidant, Patroclus, in battle at the hand of Hector, son of the Trojan king.
The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is somewhat mysterious. The depth of Achilles’s attachment to his friend is something Homer asserts and reveals the consequences of, but does not explore. It lacks what T.S. Eliot, writing about Hamlet, called an “objective correlative”: As Hamlet’s extreme emotional responses seem excessive relative to the facts as presented in the play, so too does Achilles’s response to his friend’s death seem extreme relative to what we know about them. Homer does not show us how the bond between the two formed