The Iliad

by Homer

She left him, took on the body and the tireless voice of great Deiphobus, and went to Hector,

Hector is done in by deception, which he forswore using against Ajax

And yet the ash-wood spear of heavy bronze did not cut through his windpipe, so he had the power to speak in answer to his killer.

Achilles here truly misses

“So there are shades and spirits down in Hades!

There was doubt then, as now

Ajax slipped over as he ran—Athena had tripped him up. He tumbled in the dung from all the bellowing bulls Achilles slaughtered. The cattle dung filled up his mouth and nostrils.

Literally soils the victory

His wounds from all the blows are quite closed up, though many drove bronze weapons into him.

The gods can preserve him, even partly close up his wounds after death, but they don't have the power to raise him.

I brought with me a countless ransom. Please, Achilles, show reverence towards the gods and pity me,

This is the second embassy seeking to buy Achilles' pity. Again the ransom itself is useless. Here Achilles is moved, first by the entreaty of his mother (speaking on behalf of Zeus), then by the grief of an old man who reminds him of his own father.

endured what no man yet on earth has done— I pressed my mouth into the hand of him who killed my son.”

A kiss for his son's killer. Clytemnestra would have had to do more than kiss the hands of her daughter's killer, Agamemnon; so she kills him. A footnote from John Ciardi's translation of Dante's Purgatorio VI: 17–18. the Pisan . . . Marzucco: Farinata, son of Marzucco degli Scornigiani (Score-nih-JAH-nee) of Pisa. Farinata was killed in Pisa and Marzucco, who had become a minor friar, went to bury his body. In one account, he preached a funeral sermon of forgiveness and ended by kissing the hand that had murdered his son, thus “shining so true” in Christian charity.

But those he serves with unmixed suffering are wretched. Terrible starvation drives them across the shining world.

Another side of Achilles. He, perhaps alone in this poem, speaks of the wretched of the earth.

The women washed him and anointed him with olive oil and dressed him in the tunic and wrapped him in a fine cloth.

May he rise one day in Christ