Achilles Takes It Back

There is a film coming. An Odyssey, by a major director, and a great deal of unhappiness about how its Achilles has been cast and how its Achilles will be portrayed. The complaint, as I can reconstruct it from the volume, is that the depiction does not honor the heroic ideal — that the man being put on screen is not the man we know from the Iliad, the man who chose a short and glorious life over a long and obscure one, the man we have been holding up for two and a half thousand years as the form a great soul takes when it accepts its own fate.

I would like to make a small observation that the people writing these posts have not, I think, encountered. To make it I need to set a scene most have not been led to.

The film in question is the Odyssey, not the Iliad. This already deserves a moment of attention. The Iliad is Achilles' poem; its hero is the rageful young god-touched killer who dies before he ages. The Odyssey is Odysseus' poem; its hero is the older man who endures, who improvises, who suffers ten years of obstacles in order to return to a household and a wife. The two poems share an author, a world, and a war. They do not share a hero, and they do not, properly speaking, agree about what a hero is.

Halfway through the Odyssey, in Book Eleven, Odysseus arrives at the edge of the world and performs a rite that allows him to speak with the dead. The Greeks called this passage the Nekyia, the consultation of shades. He is there on Circe's instructions to seek guidance from the prophet Tiresias on how to make it home. But once the dead begin to gather around the trench of blood, others come. His own mother, who he did not know had died. Agamemnon, who explains that he was murdered by his wife in the bath the night he returned from Troy. Ajax, who will not even look at him. And the shade of Achilles.

This is the structural centerpiece of the visit. Homer is staging something. The greatest of the Iliadic heroes is brought back to speak from the other side of the very choice the Iliad made him famous for. Odysseus, who is in the middle of choosing the long way home, addresses Achilles, who chose the short way to glory, and he delivers the line that the contemporary defenders of Achilles are now, three thousand years later, paraphrasing in earnest on the internet.

But now there came the ghost… of Peleus's son Achilles… and hailed me with a flight of mournful questions: '…What daring brought you down to the House of Death? — where the senseless, burnt-out wraiths of mortals make their home.' The voice of his spirit paused, and I was quick to answer: 'Achilles, son of Peleus, greatest of the Achaeans… there's not a man in the world more blest than you — there never has been, never will be one. Time was, when you were alive, we Argives honored you as a god, and now down here, I see, you lord it over the dead in all your power. So grieve no more at dying, great Achilles.' I reassured the ghost, but he broke out, protesting, 'No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus! By god, I'd rather slave on earth for another man — some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive — than rule down here over all the breathless dead.'

Notice what just happened. Odysseus offers the very encomium the internet is composing — you are the greatest of the Achaeans, you are honored as a god, you rule down here in all your power, grieve no more. This is the heroic ideal in its purest form, delivered to its purest example, by a man who fought beside him at Troy. It is also, almost exactly, what one would write on a recruiting poster for the war that has not yet been started in some young man's head.

And Achilles tells him to stop.

By god, I'd rather slave on earth for another man — some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive — than rule down here over all the breathless dead.

The poet who built the Achilles you are defending is the poet who wrote that line. Same lifetime. Same world. Likely the same scroll. The man whose biography you cite as proof of the heroic ideal repudiates it in the canonical text. Given the chance to look back, given the chance to see what the choice actually bought him, he chooses the dirt-poor farmer. He chooses the obscure long life. He chooses, in other words, the option the Iliad presents as the lesser one. This is not a modern reading. This is not a deconstruction. This is what Homer wrote.

And he wrote it as an Odyssey scene, in Odysseus' poem, spoken to Odysseus, who is at that moment in the middle of choosing the other model. There is a dialectic happening on the page, and the poet has constructed it deliberately. There is an Achillean way to live and an Odyssean way to live, and Homer is showing us, by literally bringing one back from the dead to recant before the other, which way he thinks comes out chastened. The Iliad sings glory and short bright lives. The Odyssey sings endurance, the long return, the slow recovery of a wife and a household and a name. The very poem now being put on screen is the poem that proposes the alternative — and inside that poem, the figurehead of the rejected model has himself rejected it.

I would like to widen the lens now.

There is a habit, very old but lately fashionable, of using ancient texts the way one uses a flattering mirror. The reader arrives with what he already believes and finds a Greek who said it first, and the antiquity of the saying is offered as proof of its rightness. The texts are not, in this practice, read. They are quarried. A line is chiseled out, brought up to the surface, and presented as if the rest of the rock did not surround it. Stoicism becomes a wellness app. Marcus Aurelius becomes a gym poster. The Iliad becomes a recruiting brochure for a fantasy of masculine refusal that the actual Iliad, read whole, is already nervous about — Achilles in Book Nine of the Iliad is already wavering, already considering going home, already aware that the deal he has made is not as clean as it has been chiseled down to. The poem knows. The reader does not, because the reader has not read the poem; he has read the meme of the poem.

This is how authority gets laundered. You take a text whose age makes it credible, ignore everything in it that would complicate you, and present the residue as the timeless voice of the West confirming what you already happened to want. The credibility of antiquity is borrowed. The actual antiquity is left where it lay.

I do not raise this because Homer needs defending against a film. I raise it because the people loudly defending the heroic ideal are, strictly speaking, defending an ideal the canonical depiction of its bearer abandons. They are angry on behalf of an Achilles their hero would have told them to shut up about. They have not, as a class, read past the part of the story where the bargain is struck. They have not arrived at the moment where the bargainer, having received what he asked for, says quietly across the trench of blood: do not flatter me about this. I got the worse end.

If you would defend Achilles against a film, defend the whole Achilles. The one who chose, and the one who, given a chance to speak from the other side of the choice, took it back. The first half without the second half is brainrot dressed up as classical literacy. We know the line that recruits us. We do not know the line that warns us.

And the film in question is, again, not the Iliad. It is the Odyssey. It is the long poem about the other model — the man who lives, who suffers, who endures, who comes home, who grows old beside his wife, who, in the scene we are discussing, listens to the shade of the dead hero tell him he picked the better road. That this is the poem now being made into a film, and that the people most exercised about it are exercised on behalf of a hero who in that very poem repudiates their position — well.

The choice we admire is the choice the chooser refused.

I leave that with you. It is an older question than the discourse it interrupts.

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Homer, Odyssey, Book 11.530–558 in the Fagles translation; 11.467–491 in the Greek.