24.120–158

She brought her grief over her son’s mortality to Olympus and now she brings it to her son along with consolation in the form of motherly advice to eat more and have sex with a woman. We have said that the preceding consolation of Thetis on Olympus is part of a larger process, as the poet moves his story toward its conclusion. The energy for this movement, an expression of the hero’s persistent rage, has zig-zagged since the opening of Book 24, fueled by Achilles’s anger and grief: from the seashore to Olympus, where the gods quarrel over the treatment of Hector’s corpse until Zeus steps in, then down to the ocean floor, then back to Olympus and now back again toward Troy, to Achilles’s hut and Priam’s palace. This journey enlarges the reach of the original emotion, but its ultimate source remains the μῆνις (“rage”) named in the poem’s first word as the cause of the death and suffering at Troy (1.1). And that force, its nature and origins, is in turn the key to understanding the hero himself and the meaning of the Iliad as a reflection of human experience.

The anger explodes first in response to what Achilles believes is a challenge to his rightfully won γέρας, “prize of honor” (1.148–71). His quarrel there with Agamemnon, as Nestor frames it for us, comes down to the question of how to evaluate a human life. Is inborn superiority, like Achilles’s semi-divine heritage, worthy of more honor than Agamemnon’s status as the leader of the Greek army, basically political and conferred in the context of human social organization (1.275–84)? The issue is not resolved then, as Achilles abruptly leaves the assembly and refuses to fight until he is given the honor he demands. Thetis makes her first visit to him by the seashore and endorses his view, promising to get Zeus to punish the Greeks for not giving him what he wants (1.357–427). When the Trojans threaten to overwhelm the Greeks, Agamemnon sends an embassy to Achilles in Book 9, to convince him to return to the fighting. The speeches all center on the relative importance of Achilles’s honor versus the welfare of his friends, who are dying on the battlefield (9.225–642). Achilles, though softening somewhat, refuses to return, and battle rages on. After the death of Patroclus, who has entered the battle as Achilles’s surrogate (16.777–861), the anger persists, but now directed at Hector instead of Agamemnon. Achilles’s demand for recognition vanishes, scorched away by his titanic rage at Hector and himself for letting his friend die in his place (18.78–93).

After Hector’s death, we expect the anger to fade, and the funeral games for Patroclus show us an apparently changed Achilles. But by the beginning of Book 24, the rage has emerged in yet another form, directed inward as Achilles enters the downward spiral that pulls the gods into the dispute and forces Zeus to act. Though the causes for the anger seem to change, it persists undiminished, malignant and destructive, as if it exists independent of any particular circumstance, somehow prior to the events that spark it.

The key to the function of this elemental force in the poem lies its relationship to Achilles’s semi-divine heritage. Greek tragic literature begins with the assumption that the gods represent the perfection that all humans should aim for, but none achieve. To be ἰσος θεοῖσιν, “equal to the gods,” in any way is to reach the pinnacle of human existence. As it turns out, however, to reach for this status and inevitably fall short is disastrous, as Achilles’s story demonstrates. From the beginning of the poem, Achilles and Thetis assume that he ought to get what he wants, no matter the cost to others. Her focus is on his mortality, while his is on unrestricted power, but the root of both attitudes lies in his lineage. Viewed from this perspective, Achilles’s anger reflects his frustration at being who he is, a human being living a limited existence, not a god. Though he never says as much, his response to everything in the poem can be traced back to his futile desire to transcend the bounds of humanity.

By putting Achilles together with his mother in Book 1 after he storms out of the Greek camp, the poet urges us to hear his demands as childish and invokes the human life cycle as one lens through which we can see his evolution in the poem. The confluence of Achilles’s yearning for an unfettered, godlike existence and his immaturity explains the centrality of his relationship with his mother and why the poem’s ultimate resolution must begin with her consolation for and reconciliation to his mortal nature. The masculine model for passage from childhood to manhood in ancient Greek culture requires a boy to separate from the nurturing protection of his mother and come to terms with the world of his father. The journey of Telemachus in the Odyssey reflects the pattern clearly: to grow up and either replace his father as male head of the household in Ithaka or stand beside him against the suitors if Odysseus returns home, he must sneak out to sea at night without his mother’s knowledge and learn about his father’s world from Nestor and Menelaus. Orestes in Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy represents a more violent version, killing his mother and her lover to avenge his father’s murder at their hands before stepping up to the kingship in Mycenae. Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus dramatizes the dire consequences of a failure to separate.

By accepting consolation for her son’s mortal nature and imminent death, Thetis lets him go and allows him to enter his father’s world. At the same time, because Peleus is mortal, the process will bring his son’s passage into mature adulthood into phase with the imperative that faces all humans in Greek tragic literature, to accept the fact of their mortality and the limits that status imposes. To complete his passage into maturity, Achilles must find a way to make contact with his father, who is far away in Thessaly. That interior journey will occupy the final scenes of the poem, the encounter with Priam and the release to him of Hector’s corpse.

Achilles’s response to Thetis is surprisingly brief:

τῇδ᾽ εἴη: ὃς ἄποινα φέροι καὶ νεκρὸν ἄγοιτο,
εἰ δὴ πρόφρονι θυμῷ Ὀλύμπιος αὐτὸς ἀνώγει.

So be it. Let him bring the ransom and take the body away, 
if the Olympian himself so strongly urges it.

Iliad 24.139–40

We may be forgiven for feeling a certain sense of anti-climax here. After all the bloodshed, all the pain, Achilles gives up the struggle with what amounts to a shrug. But it is characteristic of oral poetry to resolve expectations gradually, not in one stroke. We hear Achilles against the background of Zeus’s prophetic synopsis of the poem’s major plot and beyond (15.49–71), and Achilles himself seems to have accepted the fact of his mortal nature in the wake of Patroclus’s death (18.95–100).

Yet the words of Achilles are not always a complete guide to his true state of mind. His keeping the body of Patroclus with him, postponing the funeral until he could kill Hector, is on the one hand characteristic of a grieving figure, clinging to the dead and moving away from the living. But we have also seen that as a second self, Patroclus embodies parts of Achilles as yet unrealized by the hero, and the important trait is humility, the recognition of the limits of his existence, of where he fits in the larger structures of the universe, which is to say, his mortality. As we have said, by delaying the passage of his friend into the Underworld, Achilles seeks, however unconsciously, to deny his own mortality. Then when he finally lets go of Patroclus, he still keeps the body of Hector, denying him burial. Hector too embodies something in Achilles—symbolized by his being stabbed through Achilles’s armor—that has been driven out of reach by anger, his sense of responsibility to others (see above, Book 24 Introduction?).

The poet’s layering of motivation can seem dizzying, almost overwhelming at times, but we can keep our bearings by focusing on Achilles’s actions as well as his words as a guide to the inner world of this most complex of heroes. The symbolic bonds that Homer has forged between Achilles and the bodies of Patroclus and Hector point us toward the single most crucial act that Achilles must still complete, the release of the body of Hector to his father Priam. This final letting go will gather the many strands of Homer’s thematic structure. Until then, the healing is still in process, continuing in the mysterious night journey of Priam, which Iris’s second journey earthward sets in motion.

Further Reading

Redfield, J. 1975. Nature and Culture in the Iliad, 27–29; 91–98. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Schein, S. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad, 91; 115–116. Berkeley. University of California Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 1992. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero’s Journey in Ancient Epic, 44–45; 65–66. New York: Oxford University Press. 

———. 2008. Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture, 2–23. Westport, CT: Praeger.