All about the killed of archilled

THE KILLED of ACHILLES

Oct 26th, 2009 by Mc.Mamudah | 0

the true story you should read

THE WAR THAT KILLED ACHILLES

The True Story of Homer’s “Iliad” and the Trojan War

By Caroline Alexander

Just how angry was Achilles, the best of the Achaean warriors at the siege of Troy, whose rage against his commander in chief, Agamemnon, sets off the calamitous events described in the “Iliad”? So angry that the Homeric word for his all-consuming wrath - menis, a word that in the “Iliad” is restricted to godlike Achilles and the gods themselves - bears fearful cosmic overtones. As Caroline Alexander argues in “The War That Killed Achilles,” her spirited and provocative reading of the world’s mightiest epic, the eternally anguished, all too mortal Achilles shares bonds with the divine order that run far deeper than the poet of the “Iliad” openly divulges.

In Alexander’s account, the fate Achilles “almost had” was not only to be a god, but to dethrone Zeus and rule the heavens in his place, in much the same way that Zeus had overthrown his own father, the titan Kronos. This was because of Achilles’ divine mother, the eerily lugubrious mermaid Thetis, who was destined to bear a son stronger than his father. “A cosmic crisis was thus averted,” Alexander writes, “but the price, to Thetis’ eternal sorrow, would be the certain, untimely death of her short-lived son, Achilles.”

Thus cheated, and in a cruel universe that offers no hope of a meaningful hereafter, Achilles must also choose between a heroic life that’s short and glorious, or a long, obscure and oblivious life in his Greek homeland, Phthia (which, it is pointed out, means something like “Waste-Away Land”).

The poem discloses that the god Apollo played his lyre at Thetis’ wedding, but he is still Achilles’ nemesis and fated killer. Achilles is nominally alive at the end of the epic, but in the most bloodcurdling of many foreshadowings of his death - and in circumstances reminiscent of animal sacrifice - Apollo the destroyer takes a brutal hand in the slaying of Achilles’ beloved companion, Patroklos, who, wearing Achilles’ armor, is nothing less than a ritual substitute for the son of Peleus. “The traits that define Apollo - bringer and averter of destruction, healing powers, aloofness and withdrawal, youthful beauty, skill in the lyre. . . . These are the traits that also define Achilles.”

Such examples of “submerged myth” and other Homeric enigmas touch only a fraction of the strange and terrible beauty churning beneath the epic surface of the “Iliad,” a rich sample of which is on display in “The War That Killed Achilles.”

Alexander’s own interpretations aren’t always persuasive. Achilles is at once a starlike demigod and a raging monster. Distracting, too, are the modern war parallels she draws - from World War I, Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq; fleeting and uninspired, they are, one suspects, an unnecessary effort to suggest contemporary “relevance.”

Yet, “the Trojan War represents Total War,” Alexander insightfully maintains: by the end of the “Iliad,” the cumulated grief of doomed Trojans, ordinary men, women and children, “is a match for the heroic and outsize grief” of godlike Achilles. This, after all, is the import of the epic’s title, she writes: “The ‘Iliad’ relates the fate of the soon-to-be-extinct city of Ilion” - and, by extension, the fate of the Mycenaean cities from which the distant ancestors of Homer’s audience fled; the fate of Carthage and then of Rome, in the imagination of cultured Romans; and ultimately, the fate of any human society subject to the sword.