The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War

by Caroline Alexander

Then let me not die without a struggle and ingloriously, but while doing some great thing for even men to come to hear of.” So speaking, he drew his sharp sword that hung down by his side, huge and strong-made, and, collecting himself, he swooped like a high-flying eagle, an eagle that plunges through lowering clouds toward the plain to snatch a soft lamb or a cowering hare; so Hektor swooped brandishing his sharp sword.

Hektor

Shining Achilles addressed him, dead though he was: “Lie dead. I will take death at that time when Zeus and the other deathless gods wish to accomplish it.”

Hera and Athene, “who kept still / their hatred for sacred Ilion as in the beginning, . . . because of the delusion of Paris / who insulted the goddesses when they came to him in his courtyard / and favoured her who supplied the lust that led to disaster.” These few lines are the Iliad ’s only overt reference to the so-called Judgment of Paris, which anointed Aphrodite as the most beautiful of the goddesses over Hera and Athene; Paris’ reward (and bribe) for his judgment was the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, later of Troy.20 This judgment, of course, was the cause of the Trojan War.

Life is more precious even than glory. Achilles never wavers in this judgment. It is not, after all, for glory that he sacrifices his life, but for Patroklos.

War makes stark the tragedy of mortality. A hero will have no recompense for death, although he may win glory.