In earlier antiquity, no doubt, the multiple and not necessarily consistent aspects of the Greek character found little difficulty in embracing spiritually, if not analytically, the supreme enigma of Achilles.

~Cedric H. Whitman

it is perhaps not surprising, amid the general leveling of individual aspirations in the growing megalopolis that it was the "Odyssey", not the "Iliad" which Livius Andronicus introduced to Rome as its first "cultural" school book.

~Cedric H. Whitman

The basic story of "The Iliad" seems not even very servicable, for it has few parallels anywhere.

~Cedric H. Whitman

To reveal death all at once would be to see it absolute, and not as the veiled end of the temporal process; yet such is Achilles' deathly earnest, so absolute is his fire that this is precisely what he threatens to do.

~Cedric H. Whitman

Achilles' absolute, like every heroic absolute, finds its telos or fulfillment, not in dislocating the world as it is, but in self-destruction.

~Cedric H. Whitman

To the semidivine hero, the mere fact of ruling over more men does not constitute greatness, and as for glory from Zeus, Achilles will prove by example which of them has more. The contest between Achilles and Agamemnon becomes from the outset a contest between internal and external values...

~Cedric H. Whitman

Odysseus sees reality as the situation or problem before him; Achilles sees it as something in himself, and the problem is to identify himself with it completely, through action.

~Cedric H. Whitman

There is a wonderful passage in the Odyssey where Odysseus meets the ghost of Achilles in Hades. They are profoundly courteous to each other. Odysseus, outlining his own toils, reminds Achilles that the supreme honor which the latter receives from all makes light of death; but Achilles, complimenting Odysseus on the magnificence of his adventures, answers that there is no consolation in death, for it is better to be the living slave of a poor man than king of all the dead. Yet, it is hard to imagine Achilles as the slave of a poor man, and hard to believe that he is speaking a literal truth. He is emphasizing the cost of his greatness, the incurable sorrow of being Achilles. He is saying, "I have suffered the wrost, and identified myself with it; you have merely survived. And Odysseus, for his part, says: "you are very honored indeed, but you are dead; I am doing the really difficult and great thing." In the gulf between the two men, and their characteristic views of life, in a few lines.

~Cedric H. Whitman

The Wrath of Achilles had probably been an epic subject for generations when Homer found it, and the germ of its meaning, the conflict between personal integrity and social obligation, must always have been inherant.

~Cedric H. Whitman

Personal integrity in Achilles achieves the form and authority of immanent divinity, with its inviolable, lonely singleness, half repellent because of its almost inhuman austeriy, but irresistible in its passion and perfected selfhood.

~Cedric H. Whitman

The fact that Achilles is the one to take the initiative (in the Chryse affair) is in itself significant: he feels responsiblity and concern for the cause, and is more quick and zealous than the king himself.

~Cedric H. Whitman

In order to fulfill the first fate of early death with glory, one must embrace the idea of death more closely than Achilles has yet done.

~Cedric H. Whitman

The inner necessity, which compelled him to defend his right to Briseis as he did, is still at work, sapping away such youthful simplicities as the love of life, with friends, wife, posessions, and setting in their place the terrible gift of heroic self-realization.

~Cedric H. Whitman

Achilles has been called stubborn, but Agamemnon is the really stubborn one. Achilles simply refuses to accept false coin for true....In the speech to Odysseus, he cannot as yet state clearly what he wants, but he knows that he does not wish to be bought.

~Cedric H. Whitman

The whole quarrel with Agamemnon was merely the match that lit a fire, the impetus which drove Achilles fro the simple assumptions of the other princely heroes onto the path where heroism means the search for the dignity and meaning of the self.

~Cedric H. Whitman

Even those who forgive Achilles his rejection of the embassy find it difficult to forgive him for letting Patroclus take his place on the battlefield. Certainly Achilles never forgives himself for it. And yet, from the point of view of the conflict created within Achilles by the very nature of the heroic paradox, there was nothing else he could do.

~Cedric H. Whitman

As if he realized that by acceding to Patroclus' wish he was losing a little of his personal supremacy, his will to absolute glory takes the peculiarly unrealistic form of wishing all the Greeks and Trojans might perish, and only Patroclus and himself "putting off death" like a pair of immortals, remain as the conquerors of Troy. In these lines, Achilles makes his nearest approach to self-deception. Caught between the jaws of his self-esteem and his magnanimity toward others, he half foresees the insoluble tragedy of his position, and reels back from it, wishing that all the world were dead except himself and his friend. He still has hope, but it is growing less and less reasonable. In the end, he will assert death for himself too.

~Cedric H. Whitman

In the end, Achilles and Patroclus do stand in the aura of isolated victor and immortal friendship which Achilles envisioned; but instead of being the ones to survive, they were the ones to die...

~Cedric H. Whitman

The absolute and the human meet, but only after death.

~Cedric H. Whitman

When Achilles' crest drops from Patroclus' head and is stained with dust for the first time in its history, Achilles is already death devoted, already dead.

~Cedric H. Whitman

Before it, Achilles' will is divided; after it, his will is unified, moving him unswervingly toward death. Hereafter, he is concerned with nothing but to activate his enormous prowess, not for the rewards which it may entail, but to redeem his honor, no longer a public thing, but the secret and bitter residue of a once bright faith in himself. But the ironical paradox is still present. Formerly he had desperately wanted to satisfy and wring recognition from all; now that he no longer cares for htat, and yearns only to satisfy his own burning self-esteem, his prowess takes on an indescribably terror and glory which demolishes all resistance, but leaves him still seething, still unsatisfied, still yearning for greater self-proof.

~Cedric H. Whitman

...he has done with mortality.

~Cedric H. Whitman

But he (Hermes) is also the Guide of the Dead, Necropompus; for Hector lies in the camp in once sense, but he also lies in the land of the dead, and so does Achilles.

~Cedric H. Whitman

Soon too, the beautiful godlike master of that walled court then fills the role of the king of the dead, an image which is again applied to him in the Underworld scene of the Odyssey.

~Cedric H. Whitman

But the miracle remains that he (Homer) and apparently he first, imagined the transcendence of the older scheme by a figure who would typify, not material triumph, but the triumph of the spirt amid self-destruction, and that he could dramatize this paradox as the search for the integrity of the self against a panoramic background invovling all the forces of the world, human and divine.

~Cedric H. Whitman

During a sight seeing trip round the town (the ruins of Troy) he (Alexander the Great) was asked if he would care to inspect a lyre which had belonged to Paris. He refused curtly saying that all Paris had ever played on this instrument were "adulterous ditties such as captivate and bewitch the hearts of woman." "But," he added, "I would gladly see that of Achilles, to which he used to sing the glorious deeds of brave men."

~Peter Green

No more is Deidamia the fairest of her company, and as she surpasses her own sisters, so does she herself own defeat compared with proud Aeacides. (Achilles)

~Statius (The Achilleid) Doesn't this worry you a little? Oh well...I guess that the Romans too liked very tall young women...very, very tall if this is any indication. *eg*

Achilles pays for nothing; to Hector everything comes dear. Yet it is not Hector, but Achilles, whose insatiable rancor feeds even on victories, and who is forever "gorging himself with complaintes." The man of resentment in "The Iliad" is not the weak man but, on the contrary, the hero who can bend everything to his will.

~Rachel Bespaloff

This man of passion, driven from restless boredom to frenzied action, is son to a goddess, to a light-footed Nereid whose grace enfolds him with calm.

~Rachel Bespaloff

In the same degree that Hector's respect for his "worthy mother," the tiresome and solemn Hecuba, is conventional, Achilles' attatchement to Thetis is true, spontaneous, and ardent.

~Rachel Bespaloff

For Hector, love is the forgetfulness of self. For Achilles, self is at the center of love.

~Rachel Bespaloff

Achilles' heroism is not so breathtaking as his discontent, his marvelous ingratitude.

~Rachel Bespaloff

The sport of war, the joys of pillage, the luxery of rage, "when it swells in a human breast, sweeter than honey on a human tongue," the glitter of empty triumphs and mad enterprises--these things are Achilles. Without Achilles men would have peace; without Achilles, they would sleep on, frozen with boredom, till the planet itself grew cold.

~Rachel Bespaloff

We must not forget that this disillusioned conqueror has a passion for music. Odysseus finds him at his cythara when he comes with his embassy to try to mollify him, the "beautiful, curiously wraught cythara" that he seized for his own use from the spoils of a city he destroyed. "His heart delighted in touching it and he was singing the exploits of heroes."

~Rachel Bespaloff

It would be possible to see Achilles in a Dionysaic strain, a passion for destruction growning out of a hatred for the destructibility of all things; and in Hector, the Apolloninan part, the will toward preservation growing out of love for human achievements in their vulnerablility.

~Rachel Bespaloff

His (Achilles') language is a form of action, and yet he is able to hint his disillusionment with his own glory, and with nature for denying him literal immortality.

~Harold Bloom

Achilles asks questions that cannot be answered and makes demands that cannot be met.

~Adam Parry

...he tunrs again to action as his form of language, and paradoxically kills out of his very hatred for mortality, including his own mortality.

~Harold Bloom

They pour along like fire that sweeps the whole earth before it.

~Homer (referring to the Argive armies)

Achilles' greatness is a greatness of force and of negation. He is different from other men by his greater capacity to deny, to refuse, to kill, and to face death. He is a heroic rather than a demonic figure because his negations are founded not on perversity of will but on clarity of intellect.

~James M. Redfield

Achilles' absolute incapacity for illusion makes him throughout the poem an insoluble problem to others and to himself.

~James M. Redfield

Achilles' acts are always true to his shifting versions of himself; Hector has placed his life at the service of others.

~James M. Redfield

...Achilles' agonizing reassessment of the kind of glory he is willing to die for.

~Katherine Callan King

...an origional portrait that distinguishes Achilles as much for his self-awareness as for his wrath; as much for his meaningfulness as for his pride; as much for his compassion as for his ability to kill.

~Katherine Callan King

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