Achilles

The Iliad announces its subject in its first word, and the subject is not the Trojan war. It is the anger of Achilles, and the poem covers a few weeks near the end of a ten year siege in which that anger does its work. Agamemnon takes a captive woman awarded to Achilles as a prize of honour; Achilles withdraws from the fighting and asks his mother to have Zeus give the Greeks the worst of it, so that they will learn what he is worth; and men die in large numbers because of it, including, eventually, the one he cared about.

What makes him more than a sulking champion is that he is the only figure in the poem who knows the terms. He has been told he can go home and live a long life that nobody will remember, or stay and die young with undying fame, and he has chosen. When ambassadors come to buy him back with gifts he says the thing no other hero says: that cattle and tripods can be won back but a life cannot, and that he is not sure the exchange is worth it. It is the closest the Iliad comes to putting its own value system in question, and it is put by the man with most to gain from it.

He returns to the fighting only when Patroclus is killed wearing his armour, and the grief that drives him then is not about honour at all. What follows is the killing of Hector, the abuse of the body, and finally the scene with Priam that ends the poem.

It is easy to treat Achilles as literature and forget that he received worship. Hero cult in the Greek world was a real institution, distinct from the worship of the gods: it was tied to a tomb, the offerings went down into the earth rather than up in smoke, and the hero was expected to act locally, for the community that held his bones.

Achilles had such cults in several places, and they were not minor. There was a tumulus in the Troad identified as his tomb and visited by travellers, including, famously, by conquerors who wished to associate themselves with him. Around the Black Sea he was worshipped widely, and the island the Greeks called Leuke, the White Island, off the mouth of the Danube, was held to be where he lived on after death with a chosen company, with a temple and a body of sailors' reports of hearing him.

The relation between the cult and the poem is not simple, and the cult may well be older. What the two together show is a figure occupying a position the modern categories handle badly: not a god, not a fiction, but a dead man whose power was thought to be locally available and worth the cost of sacrifice. The atlas holds the Greek heroes in the same table as saints and sages for that reason, since the practice around them was closer to that than to anything literary.