Before he meets Achilles, Odysseus encounters his great comrade Agamemnon:
“He knew me at once, as soon as he drank the blood,
and wailed out, shrilly; tears sprang to his eyes,
he thrust his arms toward me, keen to embrace me there—
no use—the great force was gone, the strength lost forever,
now, that filled his rippling limbs in the old days.” (X 443–447)
The physicality that was Agamemnon, the power of his person, is no more. So is the capability of embracing a comrade. The bodily aspect of the human is essential to the fullness of human experience. Though the joy produced by meeting an old friend is a mental state, and Agamemnon’s shade feels it powerfully enough to bring tears to his eyes, without the bodily element of the embrace, the joy is incompletely realized. The result is ineffably sad.
And this is after Agamemnon drinks the blood, which has brought him back to a kind of life, at least in the sense of the ability to interact with a living human. In the absence of Achilles’s sacrifice, he is just another of the “empty, flitting shades.” Here, Homer powerfully evokes the superiority of life to the eternal afterlife of the underworld.
There are, of course, beings in the Iliad and the Odyssey who possess both eternal life and physicality. They are the gods. Their power is even greater than the “great force” of the living Agamemnon. They eat and drink and love and lust like humans—and never have to face the prospect of the end. Achilles became like them through force of inner greatness—the ability of a great hero to overcome the power of death by his willingness to risk dying. In the case of Achilles, it was not merely a risk: it was a certainty, thanks to the prophecy. Death had no more power over him while he lived than it does over the eternal gods.
But Achilles did die. A hero is not a god, no matter how god-like. And what does Achilles think of his disembodied eternal life in the underworld? Odysseus ventures some speculation directly to his old comrade:
“there’s not a man in the world more blest than you—
there never has been, never will be one.
Time was, when you were alive, we Argives
honored you as a god, and now down here, I see,
you lord it over the dead in all your power.
So grieve no more at dying, great Achilles.” (X 548–553)
Achilles will have none of this:
“No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!
By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.” (X 555–558)
As Achilles describes those who dwell in the “House of Death,” they are “the senseless, burnt-out wraiths of mortals” (X 539–540).
The great Achilles feels no greatness in death. He says he would prefer life as the lowest sort of person he can imagine to his incorporeal existence in the underworld. What has become of the inner greatness of Achilles, that he should compare himself unfavorably to a serf?
The answer is that he is no longer able to live life in such a fashion as to risk death. There is no exit from the House of Death: nothing to fear, nothing to hope for. In the underworld, his heroic heart has been deprived of the only condition in which it can flourish, that of mortal man.
But suppose Achilles had become a god? Though it never happens the other way around, conversion from mortal to immortal was not without precedent in Zeus’s world. This, alas, would not solve the problem. Death being an impossibility for an immortal, the gods are likewise incapable of risking death. Insofar as greatness of the kind Achilles embodied entails the willingness to risk one’s life, the gods are incapable of it. Death is something whose power they never have occasion to overcome. Next to the living Achilles, the gods seem childlike, innocent in their ignorance of the full meaning for living mortals of both death and greatness.
The underworld of “the breathless dead” is apparently completely cut off from the world of living humans, except under such extraordinary circumstances as those of Odysseus (and Heracles, another great hero, one of whose challenges was to descend to the underworld and bring back Cerberus, its three-headed guard dog). So Achilles then asks Odysseus for news of his son, Neoptolemus, and his old father. When I think about it, it’s exactly the question I would put to a visitor from the world of the living if I had made an untimely exit eighteen years ago to an underworld resembling that of the Greeks: How’s my family, how are my children? There is nothing at all heroic about Achilles’s inquiry. Indeed, it is a perfect expression of his journey in death to the realm of the ordinary. Death is an equalizer, visiting the heroic and the ordinary alike.
Odysseus tells Achilles that Neoptolemus is thriving, a fearless terror in battle and unscathed from it.
“So I said and
off he [Achilles] went, the ghost of the great runner, Aecus’ grandson
loping with long strides across the fields of asphodel
triumphant in all I had told him about his son,
his gallant, glorious son.” (X 612–616)
Achilles is at last happy in death, because he is thinking not about himself and the condition to which his greatness has been reduced, but of his son doing well in the world of the living.
So a funny thing happened around the time of the birth of metaphysics in the cave clan. Mortal human beings tried to postulate a kind of being, immortal being, superior to their mortal being in being relieved of the necessity to die. And they succeeded, only to reveal that a certain human type, the hero willing to risk death, in so doing reaches a higher place than an immortal could in all eternity.
The inevitable collision of heroic types with politics. The instability of political order in the age of classical heroism.
What most distinguishes the politics of the ancient world from the politics of the modern world is that political failure in the ancient world was routinely a matter of life and death. The rewards for success in politics were and are great, now as then: acclaim, riches, the freedom to associate with the similarly high and mighty. The penalty for failure, however, is now much diminished. If you lose an election or make a bad decision these days, you do not typically lose your head.
Consider the case of the Greek city-state of Melos in the fifth century BCE. As Thucydides describes it in the History of the Peloponnesian War, all the Melians wanted was to remain neutral in the war between Athens and Sparta. But that wasn’t good enough for the Athenians, who demanded Melos’s allegiance as well as annual tribute. A delegation of blunt-speaking Athenian generals visited Melos and met with some of its leading citizens, explaining in no uncertain terms that in case of non-compliance, Athens would destroy Melos. The Melians, for centuries a proud and independent people, refused to bend to the Athenian demands. They voiced their conviction that because Melos was a colony of Sparta, if Athens attacked the Spartans would come to their aid. In any case, the Melians said, they believed they would prevail because the gods knew their cause was just. The Athenians scoffed at Melian naïveté.
The Athenians turned out to be right: The Spartans didn’t come to the Melians’ rescue. Nor did the gods. So to punish the Melian defiance, after defeating them in battle, the Athenians killed