Achilles’ heroic identity is tied into combat as theater. How one performs in battle before the eyes of both friends and enemies is all important. This ideal of heroism is fiercely competitive. He performs not in the collaborative sense of theater as we might define it. Achilles is the only star, the only director, the only stagehand. After the death of Patroclus, he takes the weight of Greek army upon his back. He will succeed or fail on his own efforts and merits alone. To him will come all the shame or all the glory: “Warrior and hero are synonyms, and the main themes of a warrior culture are prowess and honor.” *
The warriors in a shame culture take all or nothing gambles. They either triumph over their enemy and strip his armor and claim his goods and women – their rewards must be material for others must be able to see and touch their value – or die, or worst of all, betray fear and live and thus be shamed as less than a man in front of both friends and foes. These are Samurai values.
To us these heroes often seem monstrous. They pursue purely personal agendas and are pitiless in that pursuit. They take actions on the battlefield that we would call war crimes. In The Iliad, Achilles slits the throats of 12 Trojan soldiers so he can place their bodies on Patroclus’ funeral pyre.
Hector is a contrast to this. He is heroic in defense of his city and his people. He would be perfectly happy if Achilles and Agamemnon and the whole lot took off in their black ships never to return. He is a hero who yearns for peace. Achilles must have war. Without it, he is without purpose.
In Sophocles’ Ajax, the title character, a warrior second only to Achilles, deprived of Achilles’ armor by a lying Odysseus and thus doubly humiliated, goes mad, slaughters animals he believes to be other Greeks and finally, because he cannot bear the shame, kills himself.
Odysseus’ ideal of heroism is a contrast to both Achilles and Ajax. He is a superb warrior and courageous, but he is flexible in mind and action. The theater of combat is less important to him than suppleness of mind. He lies, and he kills mercilessly, but he is never tied to an unyielding vision of his place in the world. Neither Ajax nor Achilles possess this. They must live within the rigid code of the HERO. They die. Odysseus survives.
*From The World of Odysseus by M I Finley, p 115.
**I recently finished a 16-week course on ancient Greek literature. I’m pulling together my thoughts in several Posts.
