Achilles

Therefore I say, and swear it with a great oath - nay, by this my scepter which shall sprout neither leaf nor shoot, nor bud anew from the day on which it left its parent stem upon the mountains - for the axe stripped it of leaf and bark, and now the sons of the Achaeans bear it as judges and guardians of the decrees [ themistes] of heaven - so surely and solemnly do I swear that hereafter they sh …

Sing, O goddess, the anger [ mênis] of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.

" The son of Peleus felt grief [ akhos], and his heart within his shaggy breast was divided whether to draw his sword, push the others aside, and kill the son of Atreus, or to restrain himself and check his anger.

and the song of victory composed after this by the Muses, such as Achilles bade the Achaeans sing—the paean—at the dragging of Hector to the ships, himself leading off:

And besides all this, Achilles was subject to others, and was sent out with a small force, not as a commander but to campaign under another's orders;

He has represented Achilles, lingering in the camp of the Achaeans, singing no slack or amorous songs—though he says that Achilles was in love with Briseis—but using the cithara;

where by the spear of great Achilles, fiery Hector fell, and huge Sarpedon;

Achilles round the Trojan rampart thrice had dragged the fallen Hector, and for gold was making traffic of the lifeless clay.

There Atreus' sons, there kingly Priam moved, and fierce Pelides pitiless to both.

For example, they praise Achilles because he went to the aid of his comrade Patroclus, knowing that he was fated to die, although he might have lived.

And that which one of the practically wise or good, man or woman, has chosen before others, as Athene chose Odysseus, Theseus Helen, the goddesses Alexander Paris, and Homer Achilles.

So then, in regard to Hector, Homer, when desirous of restraining the anger of Achilles against a dead man, well says:

They say the Myrmidons returned home safely under Achilles' son Neoptolemos;

"My friend," answered Nestor, "you recall a time of much sorrow to my mind, for the brave Achaeans suffered much both at sea, while privateering under Achilles, and in that district [ dêmos] when fighting before the great city of king Priam.

Would that had been killed on the day when the Trojans were pressing me so sorely about the dead body of Achilles, for then I should have had due burial and the Achaeans would have honored my name [ kleos];

Achilles drags Hector, bound to his chariot:

\"And my heart deep within swells with sorrowful angers, when I recall myself bereft of honour and of all renown.

What is fouler than the Homeric Achilles, what than Agamemnon in the quarrel?

whereas Achilles, son of Thetis, they honored and sent to his place in the Isles of the Blest, because having learnt from his mother that he would die as surely as he slew Hector, but if he slew him not, would return home and end his days an aged man, he bravely chose to go and rescue his lover Patroclus, avenged him, and sought death not merely in his behalf but in haste to be joined with him whom death had taken.

And Aeschylus talks nonsense when he says that it was Achilles who was in love with Patroclus;

Do you suppose, she asked, that Alcestis would have died for Admetus, or Achilles have sought death on the corpse of Patroclus, or your own Codrus have welcomed it to save the children of his queen, if they had not expected to win a deathless memory for valor, which now we keep?

But when they ascribe the event of all things done to Jupiter as the cause, saying of him,— Many brave souls to hell Achilles sent, And Jove’s design accomplished in th’ event,— they mean by Jove no more but Fate.

Yea, he will repress his tears for Achilles and Agamemnon, while they are represented as mourning after their death, and stretching forth their limber and feeble hands to express their desire to live again.

As on Achilles’s foul usage of Hector’s carcass,— Gloomy he said, and (horrible to view) Before the bier the bleeding Hector threw.

But the most exquisite fineness of a flatterer consists in his imitation of that freedom of discourse which friends particularly use in mutually reprehending each other.

As Agamemnon could by no means digest the moderate censures of Achilles, yet bore well enough with the severer reprimand of Ulysses, O were thy sway the curse of meaner powers, And thou the shame of any host but ours!

And Achilles himself, though of a rough and untractable disposition and ready enough to find faults where there were none, yet heard Patroclus patiently when he ranted him thus:

Indeed, they say he will not even spare the poems of Homer or the names of the heroes, but will celebrate the friendship between Patroclus and Achilles, which, we are told, had its source in passion.

Although he speaks in many places of Patroclus and Achilles, he hides their love and avoids giving a name to their friendship, thinking that the exceeding greatness of their affection is manifest to such of his hearers as are educated men.

For Achilles says somewhere in the course of his lament for the death of Patroclus, as recalling one of the greatest of sorrows, that unwillingly he has broken the promise he had given to Menoetius, the father of Patroclus;

take the way in which Agathon and Homer portray Achilles.

The incident of Hector’s pursuit would look ridiculous on the stage, the people standing still and not pursuing and Achilles waving them back, but in epic that is not noticed.

And so the islanders of Astypalaea most devoutly worship Achilles;

Yet thou, miserable woman, hast gone so far in wantonness that thou canst lay thee down with the son of the very man that slew thy husband, and bear children to the murderer.

My trusted champion, yes!

And first I counsel thee not to grieve to excess in thy present distress, for I too who need ne’er have born children to my sorrow, have lost the child of our love, Achilles swift of foot, foremost of the sons of Hellas.

O famous ships, you that once with countless oars went to Troy, conducting dances with the Nereids, where the music-loving dolphin leapt and rolled at your dark-blue prows, bringing Achilles, the son of Thetis, light in the leap of his foot, with Agamemnon to the banks of Trojan Simois.

The Nereids, leaving Euboea’s headlands, brought from Hephaestus’ anvil his shield-work of golden armor, up to Pelion and the glens at the foot of holy Ossa, the Nymphs’ watch-tower.

In the center of the shield the sun’s bright circle was shining on winged horses, and the heavenly chorus of stars, Pleiades, Hyades, bringing defeat to the eyes of Hector;

Which of his servants will announce to him that Achilles, the son of Peleus, is at his gates seeking him?

The warlike Myrmidons from Phthia held the right wing with fifty swift cruisers, upon whose sterns, right at the ends, stood Nereid goddesses in golden effigy, the ensign of Achilles’ armament.

Achilles next, that nimble runner, swift on his feet as the wind, whom Thetis bore and Chiron trained, I saw upon the beach, racing in full armor along the shingle, and straining every nerve to beat a team of four horses, as he sped round the track on foot;

Achilles falters:

Will never let thee touch the ships with fire

Achilles?

In the Homeric literature, for instance, the deceitful cunning of Ulysses appears as a virtue of the same rank with the prudence of Nestor, the constancy of Hector, and the gallantry of Achilles.

This interpretation would be less plausible than it is, were it not that, by a surprising coincidence, the ceremony described by Gaius as the imperative course of proceeding in a Legis Actio is substantially the same with one of the two subjects which the God Hephæstus is described by Homer as moulding into the First Compartment of the Shield of Achilles.

Locrus gave him a city and a people to govern, and strangers came to him from Argos and Thebes, from Arcadia and Pisa, But among the settlers he chiefly honored the son of Actor and Aegina, Menoetius, whose son went with the Atreidae to the plain of Teuthras, and stood alone beside Achilles, when Telephus turned to flight the mighty Danaans, and attacked their ships beside the sea, to reveal to a …

Peleus and Cadmus are counted among them, and Achilles who was brought there by his mother, when she had persuaded the heart of Zeus with her prayers—

Achilles, who laid low Hector, the irresistible, unswerving pillar of Troy, and who consigned to death Memnon the Ethiopian, son of the Dawn.

And Peleus’ son, the only child whom immortal Thetis bore in Phthia, had his life taken in battle by the bow, and roused the wailing of the Danaans while his body was burning on the pyre.

You keep it on your right hand and uphold the commandment, one of the precepts which they say once in the mountains the son of Philyra enjoined on the powerful son of Peleus, when he was separated from his parents:

And again the trailings of Hector’s body round the grave of Patroclus and the slaughter of the living captives upon his pyre, all these we will affirm to be lies, nor will we suffer our youth to believe that Achilles, the son of a goddess and of Peleus the most chaste of men, grandson of Zeus, and himself bred under the care of the most sage Cheiron, was of so perturbed a spirit as to be affected …

Again then we shall request Homer and the other poets not to portray Achilles, the son of a goddess, as, Lying now on his side, and then again on his back, And again on his face, and then rising up and Drifting distraught on the shore of the waste unharvested ocean, nor clutching with both hands the sooty dust and strewing it over his head, nor as weeping and lamenting in the measure and manner at …

Nor should we approve Achilles’ attendant Phoenix as speaking fairly when he counselled him if he received gifts for it to defend the Achaeans, but without gifts not to lay aside his wrath;

His memory was so bad that now the name of Ulysses would slip from him, now that of Achilles, now of Priam, men whom we know as well as our own tutors.

Do you think it belongs to the matter to inquire into the ages of Patroclus and Achilles?

if Achilles lived, and had been called to award the first place in valor to any claimant of his arms, no one would have grasped them before me.

He was mad with anger over the arms of Achilles.

To our own harm, it seems, we announced to the Greeks the contests for the arms of Achilles, if on all sides we are accounted corrupt because of Teucer, and if it will never satisfy you Salaminians, even when you are defeated, to accept the verdict which satisfied the majority of the judges.

It was here, child bred of the man who was the noblest of the Greeks, Neoptolemus son of Achilles, that I exposed long ago the native of Malis, Poeas’ son, on the express command of the two chieftains to do so, because his foot was all running with a gnawing disease.

For when fate decreed that Achilles should die—

Tell me no more, until I first know this—is the son of Peleus dead?

Leonymus the boxer is healed by Achilles in dreams.

It has been believed that the unburied are not brought down to the lower regions before they have received their due rites — according to the Homeric Patroclus, demanding his funeral in dreams of Achilles, because he could not otherwise approach the gates of the lower world, the souls of the buried keeping him afar.