Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
strength that makes him invincible. Destined never to grow old, he has a young man’s splendour and a young man’s energy. His emotions are extreme, his responses passionate, his actions devastating. For all these reasons he is unique among the Homeric warriors. Nestor may be wiser, Odysseus more astute and articulate, Ajax stronger in a hand-to-hand fight; but Achilles is, by common consent, the ‘best of the Achaeans’. Only Agamemnon disputes his right to that title, and he does so on political grounds. He doesn’t claim that he is a greater individual than Achilles. He bases his challenge on the assumption that no individual can count for as much as a community, and that therefore the ruler of that community is, by definition and regardless of his or anybody’s else’s personal qualities, the greatest person in it. Extraordinary as Achilles’ gifts may be, they do not procure him especial status. Agamemnon tells him, ‘You are nothing to me!’
That would be enough to enrage Achilles, but there is more. Beyond the competition between Agamemnon the king and Achilles the hero lies the question of the legitimacy or otherwise of the war in which they are engaged. The disputed women are prizes, not booty. (They are also of course human beings whose rights, judged by modern standards, are being grossly violated – but let that be.) They have been awarded to the two men as marks of honour. They are not mere chattels to be passed from tent to tent, any more than a medal awarded for valour is only a coin on a ribbon, or an athlete’s gold cup just an expensive drinking vessel. A prize awarded to one person cannot be appropriated by another without its meaning being erased and the symbolic code within which it existed being called into question. In demanding Briseis, Agamemnon is acting, not like a warrior eager for glory, but like a bandit greedy for loot. In doing so, he shames not only himself, but the whole Greek army. In the gruesome setting of the battlefield, a situation where men are all too easily reduced to the level of beasts of prey, or to carrion, it is essential to hold fast to the elusive concept of honour as a talisman against horror and despair. Achilles came to Troy to avenge the insult done to Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus when the Trojan prince Paris abducted Helen, Menelaus’ wife – to protect their honour. But if Agamemnon seizes Briseis, then he is a rapist and an abductor, just as Paris is. The Greeks’ invasion of Priam’s kingdom is revealed to be no more than a predatory attack on a wealthy victim, and Achilles no longer a warrior in a noble cause but the underling of an unprincipled looter. If he dies he will do so ignominiously, in the prosecution of a stupid, brutal war, and the eternal fame for which he hoped will be denied him. As he later tells those who come to implore him to return to the field, there is no point in doing so once Agamemnon has robbed fighting of its meaning. The King’s rapacity has levelled all value, trivialized all achievement. In a world in which the distinction between the noble warrior and the thug has been erased, ‘The same honour waits for the coward and the brave. They both go down to death.’
When it becomes clear that the Greeks will continue to obey Agamemnon, Achilles turns his back on them, becoming, like so many subsequent heroes, a voluntary outcast from a society he despises. Self-exiled, he is isolated. His only companion is Patroclus, the beloved friend who has followed him to Troy. Always exceptional, he is now unassimilable. He respects no human jurisdiction. He defers to no one; he fears no one. In Homer’s telling of his story he is the champion of individualism against the compromising demands of the community, the defender of the loner’s purity against the complex imperfections of the group. In that role he is superb, but potentially lethal to any ordered state. When an embassy comes to him from Agamemnon, imploring him to rejoin the fighting, promising him splendid gifts and the restoration of his honour, he rejects the offer: ‘I say my honour lies in the great decree of Zeus.’ He asks nothing of his fellows now, nor does he acknowledge any claim they might make on him. In a ferociously apocalyptic vision he prays that Greeks and Trojans alike may cut each other to pieces, leaving no one alive but Patroclus and himself, so that the two of them might, alone, bring Troy’s towers toppling down. In his tent, he plays the lyre and sings to himself of ‘the famous deeds of fighting heroes’. He acknowledges allegiance now not to any living society, but only to his dead peers, each one exceptional, brilliant mavericks like himself.
While Achilles broods his fellow Greeks fight on. Slowly, inexorably, over several days, the Trojans, led by Hector, force them back across the coastal plain. Their leaders – Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus – are all wounded. They throw up a rampart of rocks and clay to protect their ships. The Trojans breach it. The two armies are fighting hand to hand on and around the ships, the beach is black with blood and the air full of the scorching heat and ferocious crackle of the firebrands when Patroclus comes weeping to Achilles, begging his friend to relent, to save the Greeks from defeat and from the horror of being marooned in a hostile land, their ships burned, to be massacred or enslaved. Achilles is moved, but he has sworn he will not join the battle unless the Trojans menace his own ships, still secure at the furthest end of the Greek lines. He will hold to his vow. He will not fight in person. But he agrees to a compromise. He will lend Patroclus his armour and send him out to battle in his stead.
A hero of the stature of Achilles has only to show himself in order to alter the course of events. Encased in the magnificent star-emblazoned, silver-studded bronze armour, which is immediately identifiable to Greek and Trojan alike as that of the terrible Achilles, with a great crest of horsehair tossing on his helmet’s crest, Patroclus leads out the Myrmidons, ‘hungry as wolves that rend and bolt raw flesh,/Hearts filled with battle-frenzy that never dies’. Seeing him, the Trojans quake, their columns waver. Achilles appears to have returned, bearing with him ‘sudden, plunging death’. Shrieking, wild as storm clouds driven by a cyclone, the Trojan army stampedes back and away from the Greek ships, back towards the safety of their own walls.
In the fighting that follows Hector kills Patroclus and strips from his corpse the armour of Achilles. When the news is brought to Achilles he lays aside his quarrel with Agamemnon. In the frenzy of his mourning all scruples about propriety, about honour, about the sanctity of vows, are forgotten. He resolves to fight the next day, but first he displays himself to his enemy. As twilight descends he climbs alone and unarmed onto the rampart before the Greek ships. Pallas Athena, whose favourite he is, crowns him with a diadem of fire that blazes from his head to the sky, and slings around him a shield of flaring storm. Furious with grief for his slaughtered friend, he lets loose three times a war cry so piercing and terrible that the Trojans whirl round in panic. ‘Twelve of their finest fighters died then and there, crushed by chariots, impaled on their own spears’, killed by the mere sight and sound of the awful Achilles.
‘The man who is incapable of working in common, or who in his self-sufficiency has no need of others, is no part of the community,’ wrote Aristotle. Such a man is ‘like an animal or a god’. Achilles, who has divorced himself from the fellowship of the army, who looks to Zeus alone for the validation of his claim to honour, has made himself independent of his fellow men. He re-enters the battle not to save his compatriots, but in pursuit of a private revenge. In the cataclysmic battle that follows he is both subhuman and superhuman, both bestial and divine. He is likened to a forest fire, to a massive ox threshing barley, to a lion (repeatedly), to the Dog Star that rains down pestilence, to the frenzied god of war. He kills and kills and kills until the earth is drenched with blood and the river that flows before the walls of Troy is choked with corpses. His rampage is outrageous, so transgressive in the extremity of its violence that earth and heaven alike are angered by it. The river rises up against the desecration of its waters: a tremendous tidal wave threatens to engulf Achilles and sweep him away. The god Hephaestus, to protect him, hurls a great fireball down from heaven. The blaze races across the plain, blasting trees and corpses and scorching the river banks until the river is all but dried. The conflict is elemental, apocalyptic, and at its centre Homer places Achilles, a figure from a nightmare, trumpet-tongued, gigantic, shrieking out his rage, his sharp-hoofed stallions trampling on corpses, sending up sprays of blood, blood on his wheels, blood on his chariot’s