In our world all athletes know that their years are short; they understand too that they have to be mean, passionate, merciless, and unrelenting if they wish to rise to their own kind of lasting fame. Achilles will always be their patron and their guardian divinity. We each of us know, or have known, someone with a glimmer of Achilles’s flame in them. We have loved and loathed them. We have admired them, sometimes even shyly worshipped them, often needed them.
