Читать книгу The Heroic Heart - Tod Lindberg - Страница 8
ОглавлениеThe origins of heroism. Immortals and mortals, the willingness to risk death, inner greatness.
The three biggest things human beings have in common are life, death, and the consciousness of both, including the ability to speak with each other about all three. Nonhuman animals may possess intelligence and self-awareness; the will to keep living or “survival instinct” may be as strong in them as in any person. But they can’t talk among themselves about what life and death mean. That conversation is the start of our story.
Who am I? How did I get here? Who are these others? What do they want? What do I want? What should I want? These are primal questions. We would do a grave injustice to our ancestors to presume that because we have more knowledge of biological and social processes than they, their grappling with exactly the same questions was any less profound than ours.
A phrase often attributed to Aristotle to describe human beings is zoon logon echon. The phrase is often translated as “rational animal,” following a detour from the ancient Greek to English by way of Latin. A more direct rendering is “the animal that talks.” That leaves us as heirs to and custodians of a set of questions about who we are and how we should live—something we do indeed have the capacity to talk about—without necessarily granting us the capacity to arrive at a final, “rational” answer we must all agree to.
“The animal that talks” takes us in the right direction: language is a shared understanding that enables, through interchange, further and deeper shared understanding. Of course language also allows for the expression of disagreement, and may at times even contribute to disagreement, as terms get confused and people harden their positions in opposition to each other—to say nothing of the possibility of lying. Disagreement is prior to language, even if language often expresses disagreement and leads to new disagreements. But language is also a means to bridge disagreement.
Where did language come from? The answer common to the ancient world was: from God, or the gods. Interestingly, the matter that seems most to have vexed our forebears, according to the texts and traditions that have come down to us, was the multiplicity of languages. In many accounts, all people originally spoke the same language—until a deity intervened, dividing tribe from tribe by means of language. The implication is that the ability to speak with one another was once a common property of all human beings. A world in which people are divided one from another by language therefore represents a falling away from a better prior condition.
In the ancient understanding, human beings are not only created in the image of God, as the Genesis account and many others hold. They also speak the language of God or the gods, an understanding that does not seem to have struck our forebears as especially noteworthy at the time. In the ancient world, there appears not to have been much additional curiosity about the initial human acquisition of language. The doings of the gods were explanation enough. There would have been no need, prior to Darwin, for an account of how human beings became the animals that talk. The stories about God (or the gods) giving speech to human beings, or simply talking to a comprehending human being, were sufficient explanation.
We, who do not accept as literally true the biblical or mythological accounts of creation and the speech that comes to human beings along with it, need a little more detail in the account of the origin of speech, and thus the dawn of the human. Yet we can have no direct access to the origin or invention of speech. Even stories about humans brought up without speech—say, the feral child of myth and story (Tarzan, Mowgli) and, alas, occasionally reality (Danielle Crockett, a seven-year-old girl found stashed away in a Florida basement in 2005)—take place in a world in which others can speak. There is no going back. Our only recourse is speculation.
At the origin of speech must have been a terrible struggle to say anything at all and make it understood. In the Genesis account (2:19–20), God puts the animals He has created before Adam to see what Adam will call them. Thus the animals get their names. A conventional interpretation here is that God thereby grants man the power to create language. That can’t be quite right, however, because God has already spoken to the man (2:16), telling him to feel free to eat the fruit of any tree but one. On the other hand, the imputation to man of the naming power does at least gesture toward a world in which things have no names—in which man is not yet but is about to become the animal who talks, by his own labor. And emphatically, the naming is associated with a grant of power: God has given man dominion over the plants and animals.
Yet in the absence of a benevolent god to speed the process along, it is hard to imagine the origin of language as anything but an epic struggle taking place in the context of a preverbal epic struggle—for simple survival for oneself and for the band of primate protohumans in which one found oneself, and for dominance within that band. Who knows what kind of force might (or must) have accompanied the first-ever assertion, “Mine!”? In the grunt of the caveman lies the origin of property and the demand for recognition, or justice. Perhaps we have cavewomen to thank for the first discourse unconnected to the sheer assertion of power.
With language comes a quantum leap in the power of imagination—envisioning the world around us as something different from what it is. Imagination is surely preverbal: perhaps cavepeople sometimes dreamt they could fly and remembered the dreams when they woke up. Surely such a dream would color one’s impression the next time one observed a bird in flight. But language offers a more comprehensive possibility for the imagination.
Behold the corpse of a member of your cave clan, alive yesterday, dead today. When there is no possibility of saying anything about this brute fact, it’s hard to see how the imaginative capacity could extend much beyond recalling the corpse as a living being and projecting that image forward in contrast to the dead thing at hand. This might produce sadness or grief at the loss (or, depending on one’s relations with the recently departed, it might produce memories of fear and a sense of relief). One might also look at the living and imagine them dead, with similar effects on one’s mood.
A preverbal curiosity about what exactly happened to the living element of the now-dead seems inescapable. And indeed, here we are but one step away from the birth of metaphysics. But it’s hard to see how such postulates as the immortality of the soul and the contours of the afterlife would come up in the absence of the ability to talk the problem over. The development of increasingly sophisticated language was certainly a useful tool in everyday life for the cave clan. But for the purpose of speculation about the meaning of life and death, it was absolutely essential. “In the beginning was the Word”: well, yes.
In accounting for the development and spread of language, we moderns, being of a generally utilitarian cast of mind, are probably inclined to emphasize the practical utility of language to the cave clan—its productivity-enhancing element in the cave. No doubt the efficiency of both hunting and gathering improved with the development of language.
But we should at least entertain the possibility that the bigger impetus to speech was the necessity of language to cave clan metaphysics. There were certain facts available to preverbal protohumans that really did call out for a deeper shared understanding, life and death first among them. Because language to grapple with these facts did not exist, it was necessary to invent it.
Speculative anthropology—including speculation about the anthropogenic moment, the point at which hominids became human—is a risky and necessarily inconclusive business. But it is likely fair to conclude that at some distant prehistoric point in the gazing of the living upon the newly dead, it first occurred to human beings to imagine beings somewhat like themselves but different in one decisive respect: they would not die. They would be immortal. And with this quality, these speculative beings would have a vast, inestimable superiority to the mortal beings speculating about them. The mortals would have to invent a new name to distinguish beings of this kind from themselves. They would have this need for a name quite apart from the question of whether such immortal beings actually exist or had made their existence manifest to mortals. “Gods” would do.
I take no position here on whether God created man in His image, or for that matter whether a superior and divine power called “God” or anything else was in fact responsible for the creation of human beings by whatever means. I would only note that prior to the anthropogenic moment and the human acquisition of language, any revelation by God or the gods of His or their existence would have fallen on, so to speak, deaf ears. There would have been no capacity to process the revelation, or to develop a shared understanding of it with others.
Of course, if God created man precisely in the manner described in Genesis, with language present at the creation, then God would have had no trouble making His presence known and significance understood. Speculative anthropology in that case would be pointless.
But it is not pointless. Another way of looking at the Genesis account is that in starting with a human being in possession of language, it begins where revelation of the existence of God would first be intelligible to man. To continue the quotation from John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The validity of this statement in anthropogenic terms is not dependent on its theological truth: With the language hominids acquired in the course of becoming human, they could for the first time imagine and exchange views on a type of being like them in possession of language, but different in not having to die. They would be driven to it by the experience of their own lives and the death of others. They would recognize this immortal being as superior to their own being, and because superior, possibly in possession of additional powers—up to and including the power to create and destroy them.
In their search for explanations for the workings of the world around them, some would perceive the influence of these additional, divine powers: the busyness of the gods in the rising of the sun, the flowing of a river, the change of the seasons, the variability of the weather. Some would long for and seek the intercession of the power of the superior being in pursuit of good things (say, a successful hunt) and to prevent bad things (say, a drought). Others might conclude that such a divine being was not real, but rather entirely imaginary—a point of view that, should it be expressed, might call forth the wrath of believers worried about the reaction of the superior being to the presence of unbelief among mere mortals. It’s only the degree of severity of a potential angry reaction to disbelief that distinguishes these prehistoric debates from those taking place in the modern world on precisely the same subject.
Whether God is in his Heaven or not, human beings from the beginning of “the Word” have been moved to contemplate their own mortality in contrast to the prospect of eternal life. Much of the speculation, of course, has centered on whether death is really the end, and if it is not, what happens afterward. The prospect of a benevolent eternity of life has long beguiled people, although it has often been accompanied by the anxiety that eternity will be a torment. What, if anything, one can do while alive on Earth to influence the outcome favorably has also been a subject of intense interest. But we start with human beings in a tragic position: Almost from the very moment at which they can say to each other, “We are alive,” they long for a permanency to life they cannot have—except, perhaps, through death, though here the afterlife remains entirely a speculative affair. Life without death is a primal longing of mortal being.
Human beings have developed an extraordinary array of strategies for coping with this unattainable longing. They have developed religious faith, or, if you prefer, they have accepted the truth of religion on the basis of revelation. Most religions promise that earthly mortality is not the end. The immortal soul goes on to another plane of being, or perhaps awaits reincarnation in a new body.
Some have tried philosophy: The Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero called the “whole life of a philosopher . . . a meditation on death,” which the philosopher Montaigne took to be the exercise of “learn[ing] to die.” Perhaps the consolation of philosophy is individual possession of eternal truth, or an awareness of what it means to long for such truth. Perhaps it is the pleasure of membership in an elite community of those, living or dead, now and to come, who know the truth.
Some make art that will outlast them. No one will ever know what got into the heads of the people who made the first cave paintings, which date back more than 30,000 years in Europe. Maybe the paintings were merely an ephemeral effort to spruce up the cave. Maybe, on the other hand, the desire to leave a permanent mark was part of the motivation. If so, the fact that the paintings can strike wonder in the minds of those living 1,200 generations later constitutes vindication. The desire of those ancient cave painters may be the same desire that motivates some of the artists of our day.
A small number seek by earthly deeds to win glory—not only the acclaim of human beings of their time, but also of generations to come as their stories are told and retold. The path to glory might entail conquering the world or exploring its unknown reaches. It might also be the pursuit of great scientific discoveries or sports triumphs.
On a more mundane level, people have children and grandchildren, and they often see a piece of themselves as living on through their descendants. They took this view long before the development of knowledge of genetics enabled us to think in terms of passing our genes along. Of course, we ourselves had our genes passed along to us, all the way back to the primordial soup, so perhaps we ourselves are merely temporary embodiments of a gene pool that preceded us and will extend itself indefinitely into the future; the human species, if not life itself, can become the vehicle for the contemplation of a type of immortality for each of its members.
Denial is also an option. One can just try to live out the life one has while giving as little thought to death as possible. In the state of nature as Thomas Hobbes imagined it, the “worst of all” elements of the human condition was “continual fear of violent death.” He detected three passions that “incline men to peace”: “fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them.” The state of nature includes a primal vision of a quiet and comfortable life, as well as the acknowledgment that such quietude and comfort are not natural; they have to be created by human “industry.” Such industry would include not only performing the work necessary to secure one’s daily bread, but also the work involved in creating and sustaining a state with a government strong enough to secure liberation from the “war of every man against every man.”
The modern, developed world, has come a long way from the Hobbesian state of nature. For those lucky enough to be born into it, unlike for the vast majority of human beings who have come before and for most of those alive now, life can be quite pleasant, what with evenings and weekends off, the Internet, cable, sporting events and concerts, and decent food available year-round. In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew quotes Jesus admonishing his listeners: “So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34). So it did; coping with the here and now was a challenge sufficient to keep most people fully occupied. The message of modernity is not to worry about tomorrow because each day brings pleasures of its own. And who can doubt that people born in pre-modern circumstances today, at least those seeking chiefly a quiet life for themselves, would switch places in a heartbeat to rid themselves of as much daily trouble as they could?
Unfortunately, none of these strategies for dealing with mortality—from religion’s promise of life after death, to philosophy’s contemplation of the eternal, to the creation of something meant to last, to the pursuit of glory, to one’s sense of place in the passing of the generations, to the urge to change the subject—has had the effect of actually eliminating physical death. And it is at this dead-end, so to speak, where we first encounter the subject of our study, the hero. The first thing that distinguishes heroes from the unheroic vast majority of human beings is a very different attitude from most others on the subject of mortality, starting with their own.
Heroes seek, by actions risking their lives, to demonstrate that death has no power over them. Their greatness will out, come what may. As Lord Krishna advises the warrior-king Arjuna on the eve of a great battle: “Be intent on action. / not on the fruits of action; / avoid attachment to the fruits”—including even the personal life-or-death consequences of action.
It’s not that heroes are under the illusion that they won’t themselves die. Homer’s Achilles, the greatest hero of the classical world, was thoroughly imbued with this sense of his own mortality. Though the son of the immortal goddess Thetis, Achilles was not exempted from the mortality of his father Peleus, the great king of the Myrmidons.
The “continual fear of violent death” that Hobbes identified as the worst aspect of the human condition is something a hero such as Achilles overcomes. A hero doesn’t seek death, but neither does a hero let the possibility of violent death deter resolute action toward the purpose at hand. Of those who are so deterred, one may say that death has a power over them even as they live. The fear of death shapes their responses to the events of their lives. The prospect of putting oneself at additional risk of untimely and violent death is simply abhorrent, a non-starter: one would ordinarily run in the opposite direction from such a risk. The response to the sudden perception of danger, or fear, has long been known to produce a physiological response in humans and other animals: a higher pulse rate and a surge of adrenaline, which enhances perception and concentration. The so-called “fight-or-flight” response (some add “freeze” as a third option) kicks in in extremis. But the heroic type has this response firmly in hand: neither freezing nor running away in terror is an option. Action in accordance with their own sense of inner greatness or virtue is a must. “To be great,” as Rousseau wrote, “it is necessary only to become master of oneself.”
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 or much of how it operated in the nine years of the Trojan War prior to the beginning of the Iliad.
The old king Nestor, who recruited Achilles and Patroclus to Agamemnon’s cause in the war, recalls Patroclus’s father telling him to give Achilles “sound advice, guide him, even in battle” (XI 941). Patroclus, for his part, is evidently comfortable with the characterization of himself as advice-giver to Achilles. Yet through this point in the Iliad, there is no scene in which we see Patroclus actually offering Achilles advice. In fact, apart from hanging out in the company of Achilles—that is, simply being there—what we see Patroclus doing is exactly what Achilles tells him to do.
Patroclus is older than Achilles—a detail that runs somewhat counter to the impression of Patroclus as more or less Achilles’s pet. In their youth, Patroclus perhaps played the role of an older brother to Achilles: role model and sparring partner. Yet there is no lingering trace of such a role depicted in the Iliad. Later Greeks and modern critics alike have speculated about a homoerotic attachment as an explanation for the depth of Achilles’s sentiment, notwithstanding the absence of a direct textual basis for such a conclusion.
What we have in Patroclus, in the end, is the slightly older best friend and amiable constant companion to a man superior to himself in all respects, but evidently not above the need or desire or wish for such companionship and friendship: Even a great hero, “best of the Achaeans,” wants a great friend.
Why Patroclus? We still know little. It’s possible that in the Iliad (in Hamlet as well, for that matter), the absence of the objective correlative for great emotion—notwithstanding Eliot’s judgment of artistic failure—is a deliberate attempt on the part of the author to draw our attention to something. We do not ultimately know why Achilles is so attached to Patroclus. Achilles may or may not himself be able to articulate an explanation, let alone one we would find adequate. We confront, therefore, the bare fact of the greatest warrior’s greatest friend, and we must not rationalize it or explain it away, but take it seriously on its own terms.
It’s not until Patroclus is dead at the hand of Hector that Achilles definitively chooses to stay at Troy, thus exposing himself to the inevitability of dying young in accordance with the second of the two possible paths before him. Achilles laments to his mother:
. . . “My dear comrade’s dead—
Patroclus—the man I loved beyond all other comrades,
loved as my own life—I’ve lost him— . . .
. . . the dearest life I know.” (XVIII 94–96, 136)
To put it perfectly bluntly, if Achilles, the greatest warrior, says Patroclus is worth the sacrifice of the life of the greatest warrior—not even to save Patroclus, mind you, but simply to avenge his death—then who are you to disagree? Achilles does not owe you an account. He, “great in his greatness,” has made his decision.
Patroclus gets himself killed as a result of a scheme to try to draw Achilles out of his tent, where he has been brooding over Agamemnon’s slight, and back into the fight, which has been going badly in his absence. Patroclus, Achilles has agreed, will lead the Myrmidon army into battle wearing Achilles’s armor. But Achilles has admonished Patroclus that if the tide of battle turns in their favor, Patroclus must not pursue the retreating Trojans back to their city walls. Achilles frankly tells Patroclus that if Patroclus advances on Troy without him, “You will only make my glory that much less . . .” (XVI 105). The terms of the friendship between Achilles and Patroclus belong to Achilles to set.
Addressing Patroclus on the eve of battle, he concludes his speech with an appeal to the gods that is extraordinarily apocalyptic:
“not one of these Trojans could flee his death, not one,
no Argive either, but we [Achilles and Patroclus] could stride from the slaughter
so we could bring Troy’s hallowed crown of towers
toppling down around us—you and I alone!” (XVI 116–119)
The chilling vision Achilles conjures is of himself and his comrade the conquering sole survivors striding out of fields of the Trojan and Argive dead (Achilles and Patroclus are Myrmidons, not Argives). Achilles has spoken of his honor and glory as things he values highly, and he has absented himself from battle because of an insult. But there is no acclaim to be discerned in his fantasy-vision here; no one is left to take in the destruction of Troy but Patroclus and himself. It is not for the acclaim of the Achaeans that Achilles will fight, but for himself, with his comrade at his side. Achilles proffers a vision of a perfected glory, enjoyed solely by himself and his friend, that requires nothing of others. The dead have no opinions. Achilles and his friend are ultimately the only ones worthy of apprehending the greatness of Achilles—and Patroclus for no reason other than that Achilles has chosen him. Everyone else is expendable.
The rampaging Patroclus does indeed succeed in turning back the Trojan attack. But he continues to advance on Troy. He does not do as Achilles told him. And he dies at the hand of Hector. His last words are of Achilles, an admonition to Hector that Achilles will cut Hector down in turn. Patroclus believes his own death will bring Achilles into the battle. He is right.
Achilles, back in his tent, is full of foreboding. He has seen the tide of battle turn twice: first, against the Trojans, at the eleventh hour, as they were on the verge of burning the Argive ships, thanks presumably to Patroclus; now, alarmingly, back against the Achaeans.
Moments later, when word arrives that his fears are justified, Achilles is devastated. Homer depicts him befouling himself with dirt and ash, pulling out his hair, weeping, crying out in anguish. Achilles is tops in grief as well. His mother the goddess comes to him, and he tells her that she too will know “unending sorrows” (XVIII 102), for he is determined to kill Hector—setting in motion the course that will inevitably result, by the prophecy, in Achilles dying young.
The apocalyptic vision Achilles proffered—he and Patroclus alone standing among the Argive and Trojan dead as the towers of Troy crumble—is now impossible. With Patroclus dead, Achilles’s affinity for the human is gone. His grievance with Agamemnon is now meaningless. Achilles desires only two things of the human world: First, he wants revenge, which he will soon exact in his climactic rampage by the pitiless killing of Trojan warriors, culminating in his pursuit of Hector, Hector’s death at his hands, and the desecration of Hector’s corpse, which Achilles takes back with him to the Myrmidon camp. Second, since he knows he will soon die, he wants his bones buried with those of Patroclus, for whom he has arranged an elaborate funeral, including the ghastly slaughter of twelve captive Trojans next to the pyre. Once he avenges Patroclus, it is only his mortality that continues to bind him to the human world.
Priam, the Trojan king, steals into the Myrmidon camp to beg for the return of his son’s body to mount a proper funeral. Achilles agrees, expressing some sympathy for the Trojan king’s loss. But it is not the human quality of the appeal from Priam that is decisive in persuading Achilles to give back the body. Rather, it is because Zeus himself has made clear to Achilles that the god-king himself wants Achilles to return Hector’s body to Priam. A request grounded in common human affinity would mean nothing to Achilles by this point. But when a god asks something of him, he can respond as a peer.
Though the Iliad concludes with the Trojans burying Hector, Homer is not altogether done with Achilles. He turns up again in the Odyssey, the story of the wily Ithacan king Odysseus’s complicated journey home following the sack of Troy. Odysseus spins a tale about a visit he paid to the underworld, where he encounters (among others) the shades of a number of illustrious figures from the Trojan War.
Circe, a goddess with whom Odysseus has been shacking up for a year, has directed Odysseus to go to the underworld to consult on his destiny with the ghost of Tiresias, the great seer of Thebes. Odysseus is to make a blood sacrifice; once Tiresias and the other shades drink from it, they will be able to talk to him. Circe describes Tiresias as “the great blind prophet whose mind remains unshaken” (X 542) even after death. He is unique in this regard. She notes chillingly, “The rest of the dead are empty, flitting shades” (X 545).
The underworld is a deeply ambiguous place in Homer’s telling. On one hand, there is an afterlife, a place the souls of mortals go when they die, and where they continue in perpetuity. Death is not the end. On the other, the existence of these ghosts is something other than and distinctly less than human. The underworld is not Hell, exactly, but it is certainly not Heaven.
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.
