Cast portrait: Achilles

Reading Troy — cast portrait · Achilles

This portrait is released the day Achilles's arc peaks in the cycle, after Posthomerica III — Death of Achilles. Read it as a coda — the full cross-cycle portrait, gathered after the moment.

Son of the mortal Peleus and the sea-nymph Thetis; foster-pupil of the centaur Chiron; raised in part by the old tutor Phoenix. Heir to the kingdom of Phthia and lord of the Myrmidons. Knows from his mother that two fates lie before him — a long obscure life at home, or a short life and undying fame at Troy. He chooses Troy. Of all the figures in the cycle, he is the one the cycle is most clearly built around: the Iliad is the song of his wrath, the Posthomerica the song of what happens once he is gone, the Odyssey a long argument with the value of the choice he made.

In the Iliad

He enters in Book 1 in a quarrel and exits in Book 24 in a reconciliation. Between those two scenes he is by turns sulker, mourner, killing-machine, and host. Agamemnon's seizure of his concubine Briseis is the public theft that lets him withdraw from a war he was already half-sick of; the embassy of Book 9 — Phoenix, Odysseus, Ajax bearing gifts — fails because Achilles has by then begun to see through the heroic exchange-economy itself ("the same lot for the man who fights as for the man who holds back"). It is the death of Patroclus, not Agamemnon's apology, that brings him back. From Book 19 to Book 22 he is something close to elemental: the river Scamander chokes on the bodies he piles into it; Hector dies in front of his own walls; the body is dragged. The poem ends not at the kill but with Priam, alone in his tent at night, kissing the hands that killed his son — and Achilles weeping with him for his own father Peleus, whom he will never see again. The Iliad refuses to let him be only a killer.

In the Posthomerica

Quintus picks him up where Homer left him. In Book 1 he kills Penthesilea the Amazon and, in the moment her helmet falls, falls in love with the woman he has just speared — a late-antique pathos Homer would not have permitted. In Book 2 he kills Memnon, son of the Dawn. In Book 3 Apollo and Paris together bring him down at the Scaean Gate with the arrow in the heel — the death the Iliad knew but never showed. His funeral games and the contest for his arms (won by Odysseus over Ajax, with disastrous consequences) occupy Books 4–5. He returns in Book 14 as a ghost demanding the sacrifice of Polyxena on his tomb, harder and more archaic than the Homeric Achilles ever was.

In the Odyssey

In Book 11, summoned up among the dead, he gives the cycle's most famous repudiation of his own choice: he would rather be a hired hand to a landless farmer than king over all the perished dead. Then, almost in the same breath, he asks after his son Neoptolemus, hears of his glory, and walks away across the asphodel "rejoicing in great strides" because his blood is winning fame. The contradiction is the point. The Odyssey uses him as Odysseus's foil — the hero who chose kleos and now half-regrets it, watching Odysseus walk the other road back to wife and home.

Across the cycle

His portrayal hardens as it travels. Homer gives us the contradictions — rage and tenderness, the killer who weeps with Priam. Quintus, working in late antiquity, gives us a more iconic Achilles, a fixed type to be killed and mourned. Virgil, who never names him on stage, lets him hover over the Aeneid as the dead Greek monster whose son Pyrrhus repeats his cruelty at Priam's altar in Book 2. The Homeric Achilles is the cycle's most honest hero because he keeps changing his mind about what heroism is worth; everyone after Homer keeps trying, and failing, to fix him in place.

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.