Homer, rage, and the futility of it all.

Homer’s great work, The Iliad, introduces us to the tragic experience of Achilles who, by his own rage and rash action brings upon himself intense suffering. The epic contains an abundance of references to a process of transformation considered by the classical world as essential to maturity, civilization, and human life. Achieving authentic human life comes only through relinquishing the adolescent fixation with our own godlike ego and grappling with the inexorable fact of mortality. Thus the epic embodies a perennial problem at the core of what it means to be human.

The name of "Achilles”, the protagonist in Homer’s tragic epic, The Iliad, most probably comes from the Greek word Achos (αχο?) which means "pain, sorrow, misery". Achilles, therefore, is the “first sufferer” of the work. Ideally his pain ought to prompt him to mature, to enter into that hero's journey away from the known, the familiar, the comfortable of the civilized world and into the barren wastelands of the desert, there to experience a great trial and eventually return "home" to maturity. This same pattern is parallel to the transformation referred to by the classical world thinkers as “the alchemical exchange” which, itself, follows the pattern of the developing natural world. Many artists and thinkers of the classical world represented this transformation with the three stages of the butterfly after emerging from the egg; caterpillar, chrysalis, and adult. This three stage development also corresponds to the three forms of rhetoric in a classical curriculum.

The larval stage is the stage of youth correspondent to pathos in rhetoric. The classical Greeks referred to the larval stage as “σκ?ληξ”, a word distantly related to “scheme” and “school”. In the beginning of the epic, book 1, Achilles reveals that he is juvenile, self-centered, impetuous, and lacking in empathy towards others. He even refers to himself three times in book 1 as, “the best of the Achaeans”. He yells at his commander, he is deeply insulted by the loss of honor, he weeps to his mother to help him, and he makes a vow in anger that will doom him and others to great loss. In short, Achilles is like an untamed horse. He has always had things go his way and so he thinks he is a god, all the while being driven by petty emotions such as rage (“μ?νιν” in Greek), mania at perceived slights to his honor. Thus he removes himself from the conflict against the Trojans and removes himself from the obligation he has to his clan or people. Metaphorically, through his juvenile case of the sulks, he removes himself from the human race. Pathos is an appeal to the emotions. It is the method of persuasion used in book 9 of The Iliad by the third speaker, Ajax, when he tries to bring Achilles back into the war[1]. Pathos assumes that the emotions of a person can be energized and manipulated by conjuring the right images. Ajax tries to appeal to Achilles’ sense of thumos, or spiritedness. Thumos was a word frequently associated with horses, and had a physical association to ideas about human breath and blood. Achilles responds to Ajax that his anger toward Agamemnon supersedes all other emotions. 

my heart still heaves with rage 

whenever I call to mind that arrogance of his—

how he mortified me, right in front of the Argives—

that son of Atreus treating me like some vagabond, 

like some outcast stripped of all my rights! 

(Fagles translation)

So Achilles refuses to rejoin the human race instead, like a child, armoring himself in the anger incurred from a slight to his honor.

The chrysalis stage corresponds to the logos in rhetoric. Logos is logic, reason, the order of the universe, but it is also a stage of transition. Once exiled (self-inflicted, but still exile) from the clan Achilles has time to reflect and think about his condition. Responding to Odysseus, Achilles reveals in book 9 that he is wrestling with a futility of all human action;

“One and the same lot for the man who hangs back 

and the man who battles hard. The same honor waits

for the coward and the brave. They both go down to Death, 

the fighter who shirks, the one who works to exhaustion. 

And what's laid up for me, what pittance? Nothing—

and after suffering hardships, year in, year out, 

staking my life on the mortal risks of war.

     Like a mother bird hurrying morsels back

to her unfledged young-whatever she can catch—

but it's all starvation wages for herself.

                                                           So for me.”

(Fagles translation)

By his public humiliation and retreat from humanity Achilles has reached the desert of the heroic journey and it is not a pleasant place to be. It is this state of meaninglessness that occupies most of the text of the epic and it is while in this state that Achilles experiences the terrible loss of Patroclus, prompting the wholesale slaughter of his fellow men. He is challenged by a vision of meaninglessness that is heightened by Patroclus’ death and it is this challenge which tests whether he will be able to feel empathy for his fellow men and control himself or whether he will attempt to enforce his will on the world like a god. This question is the question of the logos; whether life has any meaning. More dramatic still is the question whether anyone can return to the human race from such futility and share in the common suffering of all men. The word “chrysalis” comes from the Greek word “chryses” meaning “shining, or golden” and most frequently refers to armor. Not only does the epic begin with a character possessing this name, Chryses, but it is Achilles’ shining armor his beloved friend, Patroclus, is wearing when he dies at the hands of Hector. The shared armor creates a literary transference in which Patroclus represents Achilles’ second self. Thus with the death of Patroclus, Achilles metaphorically dies, and as Patroclus exhibits all the youthful virtue and potential so lacking in Achilles this too dies with him. 

After Patroclus’ death Achilles is left abandoned in a sterile wasteland of the soul devoid of purpose. When he hears the news of Patroclus’ death Achilles falls to the earth, pours ashes over himself, and proclaims that he has lost the will to live. 

Overpowered in all his power, sprawled in the dust, 

Achilles lay there, fallen . .

It is at this stage that he realizes a harsh truth about his own complicity in Patroclus’ death. In a scene in book 18 parallel to book 1 he no longer proclaims himself “the best of the Achaeans” but instead wails to his mother, Thetis:

“I shall not return to my fatherland . . . 

nor did I bring one ray of hope to my Patroclus, 

nor to the rest of all my steadfast comrades,

countless ranks struck down by mighty Hector—

No, no, here I sit by the ships . . .

a useless, dead weight on the good green earth…”

(Fagles translation)

Such hopeless despair, Homer posits, frequently leads to a monstrous level of destruction as one manically fights against the injustice of the world. This mania appears in book 21 where by the river Xanthus Achilles, having already choked the river with bloody corpses, meets Lycaon, a young prince of Troy who begs for his life. Achilles responds with an almost inhuman coldness to the young man’s plight:

"Fool, 

don't talk to me of ransom. No more speeches. 

Before Patroclus met his day of destiny, true, 

it warmed my heart a bit to spare some Trojans: 

droves I took alive and auctioned off as slaves. 

But now not a single Trojan flees his death, 

not one the gods hand over to me before your gates, 

none of all the Trojans, sons of Priam least of all! 

Come, friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so?

Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you. 

And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am? 

The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life 

a deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell you, 

death and the strong force of fate are waiting."

(Fagles translation)

At the point in logos when all arguments become hollow and all emotions have run dry, the world seems a dull, sterile promontory drifting pointlessly through the chill of space. The individual, Homer seems to indicate, becomes an isolated sojourner frozen in his little gold space capsule of Hephaestian armor. The real crisis of the epic, then, emerges from this condition; if the mania of rage against the injustice of being alive leads us to such barrenness can anyone find a way back to humanity?

The third stage, corresponding to ethos is the stage of the butterfly. In Latin this is called “the imago” or “image”. In Greek the word is “psyche” or “soul”. This final stage of metamorphosis is the fully realized humanity, that which is finally able to be a soul. Ethos in rhetoric is an argument based on the ethical nature of the speaker; it assumes the respect and honor we each hold for another person. Phoenix in making his argument in book 9 appeals to the memory of Achilles father but is rebuffed by the young man still suffused with rage. In book 24, his rage finally spent, Achilles seems to realize that he is only a small part of a much larger world; he seems to recognize and accept that he is no longer a god among men, but is part of the human race. When his enemy, Priam, comes to beg for the body of his dead son, Hector, Achilles honors the old man, gives back the body, and even exhibits a level of self-control unavailable to the immature man of book 1.  In a moment of shared humanity the two men, enemies on the battlefield, weep together over their losses:

…overpowered by memory 

both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely 

for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching 

before Achilles' feet as Achilles wept himself, 

now for his father, now for Patroclus once again, 

and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.

(Fagles translation)

Achilles is no longer thinking he is a god. Instead he is conscious of his own mortality and of his capacity for tremendous violence. When Priam suggests that he take his gifts and go home Achilles, now self-aware, makes an heroic effort to withhold his anger;

A dark glance—and the headstrong runner answered, 

"No more, old man, don't tempt my wrath, not now! 

My own mind's made up to give you back your son. 

...

So don't anger me now. Don't stir my raging heart still more. 

Or under my own roof I may not spare your, life, old man—

suppliant that you are—may break the laws of Zeus!"

(Fagles translation)

He then orders his own servants to wash and anoint the body of Hector for burial lest Priam,

overwhelmed by the sight of Hector, 

wild with grief, … let his anger flare 

and Achilles might fly into fresh rage himself, 

cut the old man down and break the laws of Zeus.

(Fagles translation)

Finally he promises to withhold the Achaeans from battle for a time until Priam can bury Hector. All this indicates that Achilles is a much-chastened man. Like the phoenix he rises from the ashes of his own ruin, or like the imago he finally emerges from his armored prison shell. His sorrow and loss has awakened him to an awareness of shared humanity and, though he is not by the end of the epic a saint or hero, he is able to free his grip over the body of his enemy and thus to relinquish the rage against the unfairness of the world which every living man experiences.

Perhaps the point is just this then: rage and despair over the meaninglessness and injustice of living seem to be unavoidable experiences. Homer seems to suggest that in such a wasteland we all have a choice; either to become monstrous and cold, insulated in the cocoon of our shining armor – or to relinquish the rage and strive for common humanity. Only in the latter, it seems, is there the possibility of loving, being alive, and once again finding meaning to the universe.

[1] See “Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student” by Edward P. J. Corbett