Why you should love Achilles

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t had a chance to get caught up yet on the latest episode of The Iliad, this column is going to give away a lot of plot points.

I could try to make an elaborate analogy between the government shutting down and Achilles refusing to fight in Book One of The Iliad. But I really just want to talk about how awesome Achilles is, so that’s what I am going to do.

Achilles is the Greeks’ best warrior — at one point he kills 12 Trojans just by shouting. Hector, the Trojan’s greatest fighter whom the Greeks nicknamed “mankiller,” can’t help but run away whenever Achilles comes near.

But Achilles is not just a warrior: When some of the Greek leaders come to Achilles’ tent to convince him to rejoin the fighting, they find him playing the lyre and singing about “the glory of men.” He is also not ashamed to sit beside the sea and cry.

This isn’t to say that Achilles is a good guy: when he feels personally humiliated, he prays that Zeus will help the Trojans win in battle (you read that right: the Trojans, his enemies) so that the Greeks will learn to honor him.

Regardless of his moral shortcomings, I still find myself admiring Achilles. I think it is because he faces an issue that we all face (or ignore): mortality.

Achilles has a unique dilemma: He can choose the nature of his death. “Two different fates bear me toward the doom of death: if I stay here fighting around the city of the Trojans, my homecoming is lost, but I will have undying glory; but if I go home to my fatherland, my good glory is lost, but I will live for a long time.”

I think that everyone faces this choice, in some form or another. Trying to decide what to do with my post-grad life has sometimes seemed like a much less grand version of this decision: “Do I take a big risk in pursuit of glory, or do I go a safer, more domestic route?” I’m still not quite sure what to do.

We have The Iliad, so we know that Achilles chose glory and an early death, but it’s important to recognize why. Achilles does not come back to the fight because of any sort of intellectual conclusion. Instead, he returns to fight only when Hector kills Patroclus, Achilles’ closest companion. The choice between glory and longevity becomes insignificant when compared to Achilles’ grief, guilt and desire for revenge.

That scream I mentioned earlier, which killed 12 Trojans, isn’t a proud battle cry. More than anything, it’s a mourning cry over Patroclus’ death — a death Achilles helped cause.

Achilles gets the honor he asks for, but realizes that it wasn’t worth the loss of his friend. He does the glorious deeds we remember him for, but he does them in a rage of revenge and grief.

Maybe there was a era when being human was more simple, when our emotions and actions were in harmony instead of jangling discord, when we didn’t have to make these impossible trade-offs. It’s hard to know.

What we can know is that by the time The Iliad was composed more than 2,700 years ago, that era had already passed.