24.507–551

ὣς φάτο, τῷ δ᾽ ἄρα πατρὸς ὑφ᾽ ἵμερον ὦρσε γόοιο:
ἁψάμενος δ᾽ ἄρα χειρὸς ἀπώσατο ἦκα γέροντα.
τὼ δὲ μνησαμένω ὃ μὲν Ἕκτορος ἀνδροφόνοιο
κλαῖ᾽ ἁδινὰ προπάροιθε ποδῶν Ἀχιλῆος ἐλυσθείς,
αὐτὰρ Ἀχιλλεὺς κλαῖεν ἑὸν πατέρ᾽, ἄλλοτε δ᾽ αὖτε
Πάτροκλον: τῶν δὲ στοναχὴ κατὰ δώματ᾽ ὀρώρει.
αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥα γόοιο τετάρπετο δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς,
καί οἱ ἀπὸ πραπίδων ἦλθ᾽ ἵμερος ἠδ᾽ ἀπὸ γυίων,
αὐτίκ᾽ ἀπὸ θρόνου ὦρτο, γέροντα δὲ χειρὸς ἀνίστη
οἰκτίρων πολιόν τε κάρη πολιόν τε γένειον,
καί μιν φωνήσας ἔπεα πτερόεντα προσηύδα:

So [Priam] spoke, and a desire to grieve for his own father rose in [Achilles].
He took the old man by the hand and eased him gently away.
And the two fell to remembering: [Priam] wept for
manslaughtering Hector, huddled at the feet of Achilles,
but Achilles wept now for his father, and again for Patroclus,
and the sound of their mourning rang through the house.
But when brilliant Achilles had taken his satisfaction from weeping,
and the yearning for it went from his mind and his body,
right away he rose from his chair, and pulled the old man to his feet
by the hand, pitying his gray head and beard,
and addressing him spoke winged words:

Iliad 24.507–17

Their shared weeping extends the painful intimacy of Priam’s first gesture. By pulling the old king to his feet, Achilles restores some dignity to Priam after his initial abasement. The phrase γόοιο τετάρπετο (513) reminds us that in Homeric epic, there is nourishment in grief (see essay on 24.1–21). As Achilles begins to speak, we should pause to recognize how far he has already traveled from the isolating rage that has gripped him in the wake of Patroclus’s death. His anger left him more and more alone, finally reduced to sleeplessness and fruitless circular motion as he dragged the corpse of Hector. Arrogant self-assertion enforced separation from others, especially after Patroclus’s death. This state reflects, as we have seen, the first imperative—as the ancient Greeks saw it—for adolescent males as they move into adulthood. So far, so good, but Achilles has been stuck, unable to move toward the second imperative, to come to terms with the world of his father. Touching Priam with gentleness rather than the violence his hands can deliver begins to free Achilles from his lonely exile from his friends and, as we will soon see, from himself. He can now pity the old king (506), but that will be only the beginning.

The second-self motif has played out in characteristic fashion so far: the second-self embodying those qualities within himself with which the hero’s arrogance and lack of self-knowledge cause him to lose touch; the hero’s subsequent resistance to change causing the second self to die. Now if the pattern is to hold, we look for some evidence that the hero can reintegrate the lost parts of himself. The compassion that Achilles shows to Priam would seem to point in that direction. No character in the Iliad embodies more completely the urge to connect with others than Patroclus—Book 24 might well be called “The Return of Patroclus.” What this return implies for the poem’s meditation on the meaning of human life will soon be revealed.

With Achilles’s first speech, perhaps the most important words he will speak in the poem, we feel the impact of the thematic synthesis the poet has been building toward. Wondering at the old king’s endurance, he echoes both Priam (πῶς ἔτλης, 519; ἔτλην, 205) and Hecuba:

πῶς ἔτλης ἐπὶ νῆας Ἀχαιῶν ἐλθέμεν οἶος
ἀνδρὸς ἐς ὀφθαλμοὺς ὅς τοι πολέας τε καὶ ἐσθλοὺς
υἱέας ἐξενάριξα; σιδήρειόν νύ τοι ἦτορ.

How did you endure going to the ships alone
before the eyes of the man who killed so many
and excellent sons? Your heart is iron.

Iliad 24.519–21 = 203–6

There is wonder here, but also compassion, as the spirit of Patroclus begins to surface in Achilles’s hut. His urging Priam to sit reminds us of the little consolation ceremony when Thetis comes to Olympus (24.100–19), as the goddess symbolically accepted consolation for the loss of Achilles to death. Here too, the goal is consolation, of Priam for the loss of Hector.

The speech is carefully structured, framed by the exhortation to “endure” (ἄνσχεο, 518, 549). There is, Achilles says, no good to be gained from chilly grief. The gods have “spun” (ἐπεκλώσαντο, 518) fate for wretched mortals, to live unhappily, while they have no cares. Then, a moral allegory to place Priam’s pain in a universal perspective:

δοιοὶ γάρ τε πίθοι κατακείαται ἐν Διὸς οὔδει
δώρων οἷα δίδωσι κακῶν, ἕτερος δὲ ἑάων:
ᾧ μέν κ᾽ ἀμμίξας δώῃ Ζεὺς τερπικέραυνος,
ἄλλοτε μέν τε κακῷ ὅ γε κύρεται, ἄλλοτε δ᾽ ἐσθλῷ:
ᾧ δέ κε τῶν λυγρῶν δώῃ, λωβητὸν ἔθηκε
καί ἑ κακὴ βούβρωστις ἐπὶ χθόνα δῖαν ἐλαύνει,
φοιτᾷ δ᾽ οὔτε θεοῖσι τετιμένος οὔτε βροτοῖσιν.

For two jars sit on the doorsill of Zeus,
of the gifts the gods give us, one of evils, the other of blessings.
If Zeus who delights in thunder gives to someone a mixture of the two,
they encounter evil one time, blessings another;
but one to whom he gives from the jar of evils only, he makes a failure,
and dreadful hunger drives them across the shining earth,
wandering honored by neither by the gods nor by mortals.

Iliad 24.527–33

In the rest of the speech, Achilles works his way back to the present place and time, applying the message of the allegory. To Peleus, despite his divine wife, his riches, and his sway over the Myrmidons, the gods delivered evil, only one son, doomed to an untimely death, far away and unable to comfort his father in his old age. Instead, he sits in Troy, tormenting Priam and his sons. The word παναώριον (540) might be translated more literally as “all out of season,” marking Achilles’s dawning awareness of himself as out of synch with the rhythms of nature, the hero who blocked the river Scamander with corpses (21.214–26), who has been unable to accept the most important product of all those natural rhythms, his own mortality. We are hearing evidence that Achilles has begun to come to terms with his father’s limited, human world, having moved away from his mother’s unlimited divine existence. The result, as we now hear, is the ability to feel and understand Priam’s pain, with which he concludes, closing by repeating ἄνσχεο (549).

Achilles’s words are a powerful answer to Priam’s, both structurally and thematically.

His “ring form” mirrors the structure of Priam’s first speech (μνῆσαι, 485; μνησάμενος, 504), as do other elements, the description of Priam’s misfortunes (518–21; 493–501), the futility of grief (550–51; 522–24), the comparison of Peleus and Priam (538–40; 493–501), and παναώριον (540), which echoes πανάποτμος (493). Both speeches form, beginning with Thetis’ visit to Olympus (77–140), a chain of consolation, which builds as the two men share their grief and will continue in Achilles’s second great speech (599–620). The entire progression rests on the acceptance of Achilles’s mortality, by his mother and then, however tersely, by him.

The speech marks a stunning turnabout. The man whose rage has been fueled by a sense of his separation from others and his desire to transcend the limitations that constrain all humans now sees every person’s life as the result of a gift from the gods, never under anyone’s control. The focus here shifts from one set of boundaries to another: instead of viewing the world as divided between mortal friends and enemies, Achilles now sees a fundamental divide, between the gods who live at their ease and humans, who can hope for at best a mix of prosperity and catastrophe, at worst unrelieved misery. There is recognition here of the basic fact of human existence that Achilles has been unable to accept: all humans are united by their mortality. The rest of the encounter in the Greek camp will develop and enrich this perspective, but the big work, within Achilles’s heart, is signaled here.

Further Reading

Nagler, M. 1974. Spontaneity and Tradition: The Oral Art of Homer, 189–192. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Schein, S. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad, 159–160. 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, 80–81. New York: Oxford University Press.