The War That Killed Achilles Quotes

“In the modern era, teachers and scholarship have traditionally laid strenuous emphasis on the fact that Briseis, the woman taken from Achilles in Book One, was his géras, his war prize, the implication being that her loss for Achilles meant only loss of honor, an emphasis that may be a legacy of the homoerotic culture in which the classics and the Iliad were so strenuously taught—namely, the British public-school system: handsome and glamorous Achilles didn’t really like women, he was only upset because he’d lost his prize! Homer’s Achilles, however, above all else, is spectacularly adept at articulating his own feelings, and in the Embassy he says, “‘Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, / loves her who is his own and cares for her, even as I now / loved this one from my heart, though it was my spear that won her’ ” (9.340ff.). The Iliad ’s depiction of both Achilles and Patroklos is nonchalantly heterosexual. At the conclusion of the Embassy, when Agamemnon’s ambassadors have departed, “Achilles slept in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and a woman lay beside him, one he had taken from Lesbos, / Phorbas’ daughter, Diomede of the fair colouring. / In the other corner Patroklos went to bed; with him also / was a girl, Iphis the fair-girdled, whom brilliant Achilles / gave him, when he took sheer Skyros” (9.663ff.). The nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos played an unlikely role in a lawsuit of the mid-fourth century B.C., brought by the orator Aeschines against one Timarchus, a prominent politician in Athens who had charged him with treason. Hoping to discredit Timarchus prior to the treason trial, Aeschines attacked Timarchus’ morality, charging him with pederasty. Since the same charge could have been brought against Aeschines, the orator takes pains to differentiate between his impulses and those of the plaintiff: “The distinction which I draw is this—to be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste is the experience of a kind-hearted and generous soul”; Aeschines, Contra Timarchus 137, in C. D. Adams, trans., The Speeches of Aeschines (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 111. For proof of such love, Aeschines cited the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos; his citation is of great interest for representing the longest extant quotation of Homer by an ancient author. 32”
― Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War

“Priam and Achilles meet in the very twilight of their lives. Their extinction is certain and there will be no reward for behaving well, and yet, in the face of implacable fate and an indifferent universe, they mutually assert the highest ideals of their humanity.”
― Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War

“This, the only occasion in the Iliad when furious Achilles smiles serves as a bittersweet reminder of the difference real leadership could have made to the events of the Iliad. Agamemnon's panicked prize-grabbing in Book One and even Nestor's rambling "authority" pale beside Achilles' instinctive and absolute command of himself and the dangers of this occasion.”
― Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War

“Surely, by all convention, the Iliad will end here, with the triumphant return of its vindicated hero. But the Iliad is not a conventional epic, and at the very moment of its hero's greatest military triumph, Homer diverts his focus from Achilles to the epic's two most important casualties, Patroklos and Hektor: it is to the consequences of their deaths, especially to the victor, that all action of the Iliad has been inexorably leading.”
― Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War

“The greatest war story ever told commemorates a war that established no boundaries, won no territory, and furthered no cause.”
― Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War

“Nestor is the spokesman for the status quo, for the tradition-hallowed belief that institutional power equates with unquestioned authority.”
― Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War

“Homer's epic does not tell of such seemingly essential events as the abduction of Helen, for example, nor of the mustering and sailing of the Greek fleet, the first hostilities of the war, the Trojan Horse, and the sacking and burning of Troy.
Instead, the 15,693 lines of Homer's Iliad describe the occurrences of a roughly two-week period in the tenth and final year of what had become a stalemated siege of Troy.”
― Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War

“That after the roll of centuries, this same Iliad, whose message had been so clearly grasped by ancient poets and historians, came to be perceived as a martial epic glorifying war is one of the great ironies of literary history. Part of this startling transformation can undoubtedly be attributed to the principal venues where the Iliad was read—the elite schools whose classically based curriculum was dedicated to inculcating into the nation's future manhood the desirability of "dying well" for king and country. Certain favorite outstanding scenes plucked out of context come to define the entire epic: Hektor's ringing refusal to heed the warning omen, for example—" 'One bird sign is best: to fight in defence of our country' "—or his valiant resolution—" 'not die without a struggle and ingloriously.' " Homer's insistent depiction of the war as a pointless catastrophe that blighted all it touched was thus adroitly circumvented.”
― Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War

“Éris—strife—between heroes, it will be recalled, was a favorite theme of epic. Looked at coldly, stripped of the dignity of their noble epic contexts, these quarrels are almost always petty. In the Cypria, "Achilles quarrels with Agamemnon because he received a late invitation" to a feast; in the Aethiopis, "a quarrel arises between Odysseus and Aias over the armor of Achilles"; the Odyssey tells of a quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus at a festival, not to mention the Iliad's own dramatic action arising from the "quarrel" between Achilles and Agamemnon.”
― Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War

“of cattle, a bringer of dreams,”
― Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War