Achilleus

Achilleus stands at the centre of the depth-psychology corpus not as a fixed mythological figure but as a dynamic site where questions of heroic selfhood, fate, rage, grief, and kleos converge. The Homeric scholarship assembled here—ranging from Lattimore’s editorial introductions and Nagy’s structural analyses to Sullivan’s ethical psychology and Snell’s account of deliberate decision—treats Achilleus as the primary test case for understanding how archaic Greek culture constructed the interior life of the exceptional individual. Nagy demonstrates that Achilleus and Apollo function as formal and thematic doubles, their ritual mirroring encoded in epithets, hair-shearing rites, and the structural logic of mênis. Snell situates Achilleus at the origin point of the Western tradition of heroic choice, arguing that Aeschylus sharpened Homer’s fatalistic either/or into a genuine psychological decision. Sullivan reads his portrayal through the lens of aretê—excellence rendered vulnerable by divine caprice and circumstance. Lattimore’s editorial apparatus foregrounds the paradox that the hero whose name most plausibly means ‘grief for the fighters’ is also the supreme embodiment of martial glory, kleos aphthiton. The tension between these positions—Achilleus as psychological archetype, as ritual analogue of Apollo, as ethical agent, and as vehicle for cultural mourning—gives the corpus its productive instability.

In the library 18 passages

Walter Burkert is so struck by the physical resemblance in the traditional representations of the god and the hero—especially by the common feature of their both being unshorn in the manner of a kûros—that he is moved to describe Achilles as a Doppelgänger of Apollo.

Nagy argues that Achilleus and Apollo are formally and thematically mirrored in the dimension of ritual, their structural doubling enacted through shared physical attributes, epithets, and the logic of mênis and loigos.

Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979thesis

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For Achilleus, ‘unwithering fame’ (kleos aphthiton) must come at the price of death at Troy, in contrast to a return home without glory (9.413). He was never fated to enjoy the short-term rewards of war, over which he has quarreled.

Lattimore establishes the structural opposition governing Achilleus’s existence: immortal glory purchased only by premature death, a paradox that defines his entire heroic itinerary.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011thesis

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Homer does not yet speak of such a dilemma; his Achilles merely knows that it is his fate either to die as a young man in a blaze of glory, or to live a long and obscure life. But Plato later gives us to understand that Achilles intentionally elected the more heroic alternative.

Snell traces the transformation of Achilleus from a figure governed by fatalistic foreknowledge in Homer into an agent of deliberate heroic decision in Aeschylus and Plato, marking a key development in the history of psychological inwardness.

Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953thesis

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Achilles is the swiftest of the Achaeans who came to Troy, the noblest fighter, and overall the best warrior. Justifiably he attracted, by his nature, enormous interest.

Sullivan situates Achilleus as the primary Iliadic test case for the concept of aretê, an excellence that is both innate and perilously vulnerable to divine intervention and circumstance.

Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995thesis

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It is not accidental that the name Akhilleus is most plausibly etymologized as ‘grief akhos for the fighters laos.’

Lattimore identifies the etymological core of Achilleus’s name as ‘grief for the fighters,’ binding his identity semantically to communal suffering and foreshadowing through Patroklos the hero’s own imminent death.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011thesis

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Achilleus is as interesting and complex a character as Odysseus, but the latter cannot master his fate on a homecoming buffeted by Athene and Poseidon, whereas the former, with god-like rage, [shapes his own destruction].

Lattimore contrasts Achilleus and Odysseus as two models of heroic selfhood, arguing that the god-like rage of Achilleus makes the Iliad character-driven rather than plot-driven, which explains the poem’s distinctive reception history.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011supporting

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one must become, as Achilleus was, a ‘speaker of words and one accomplished in action’ (9.443)

Lattimore invokes Achilleus as the Homeric embodiment of the Greek cultural ideal that mastery of speech and mastery of action are inseparable excellences.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011supporting

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The sufferings of the first World War, however, damped enthusiasm for the heroic embodiment of violent passion and revenge. In the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 more than 130,000 soldiers died on both sides of the conflict over the Dardanelles—a few dozen kilometers from the site of ruined Troy.

Lattimore traces the historical reception of Achilleus as heroic embodiment, showing how the carnage of World War I geographically and symbolically located at ancient Troy precipitated a decisive cultural revaluation of the figure.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011supporting

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In the third part, when Priam arrives to seek the corpse of his son Hector, we may presume that Achilles’ heart was heavy with the knowledge of his imminent death, and that this knowledge gave to his reconciliation with Priam a majesty all its own.

Snell reads the Aeschylean Achilleus’s reconciliation with Priam as psychologically deepened by foreknowledge of death, making the scene a paradigm of tragic self-awareness absent from the Homeric original.

Snell, Bruno, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting

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Compare Apollo’s epithet akersekómês ‘unshorn’ (as at XX 39) with the hair-shearing scene of Achilles at XXIII 140-153. Burkert stresses the association of this theme with vestigial aspects of what anthropologists would call initiation.

Nagy marshals the hair-shearing ritual to demonstrate that Achilleus’s initiation-related practices formally encode his structural identity with Apollo, grounding the hero’s psychology in archaic ritual rather than individual characterization alone.

Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 1979supporting

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Achilles was raised by the Centaur Chiron in the wilds of Mount Pelion, along with his dearest friend, his father’s cousin, Patroclus. Also tutored by the human Phoenix. The leader of the Myrmidons, Achilles is known as ‘swift-footed’ for his special skill at sprinting.

The glossary entry establishes Achilleus’s biographical and relational coordinates—divine parentage, Centauric education, friendship with Patroklos—that the depth-psychological tradition repeatedly activates in its analysis of his character.

Homer, The Iliad, 2023supporting

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There is a dead man who lies by the ships, unwept, unburied: Patroklos: and I will not forget him, never so long as I remain among the living and my knees have their spring beneath me.

Achilleus’s vow of perpetual remembrance for Patroklos, spoken immediately after his killing of Hektor, crystallizes the inseparability of martial triumph and grief that defines his heroic identity.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011supporting

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the lords of Achaia were gathered about Achilleus beseeching him to eat, but he with a groan denied them: ‘I beg of you, if any dear companion will listen to me, stop urging me to satisfy the heart in me with food and drink, since this strong sorrow has come upon me.’

Achilleus’s refusal of food after Patroklos’s death dramatizes the complete subordination of bodily life to grief, an extreme that the scholarly tradition reads as both heroic excess and psychological dissolution.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011supporting

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‘But I will not leave off my killing of the proud Trojans until I have penned them inside their city, and attempted Hektor strength against strength, until he has killed me or I have killed him.’

Achilleus’s declaration to the river Skamandros of his unconditional commitment to killing Hektor—at the cost of his own life—presents the hero as one for whom purpose and death have become identical.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011supporting

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Three times swift-footed brilliant Achilleus swept in against him with the brazen spear. Three times his stroke went into the deep mist. But as a fourth time, like something more than a man, he charged in.

The tripled frustrated assault on Hektor, protected by Apollo’s mist, positions Achilleus as a force that exceeds ordinary mortal scale, enacting the ritual mirroring with the god at the level of narrative structure.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011supporting

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The death and burial of Achilleus, xxiv.35-94 (rather than the death and burial of Patroklos). The quarrel of Odysseus and Aias over the armor of Achilleus, xi.541-564.

Lattimore’s Odyssey introduction shows that the Odyssey consistently treats Achilleus’s death, burial, and legacy as the defining alternative epic tradition to the Iliad’s account, reinforcing his status as the paradigmatic heroic death.

Lattimore, Richmond, Odyssey of Homer, 2009supporting

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In contrast to Agamemnon, Achilleus’ first words are reasonable and calm, seeking an explanation for events. Significantly, he is the first among the warriors and their leaders to question the status quo and seek to improve conditions.

Lattimore notes that Achilleus’s initial response in the poem is not rage but rational inquiry, complicating the reduction of the hero to his anger and suggesting a more complex psychological portrait.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011aside

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When he is sent as an ambassador to Achilles, Odysseus presses him to return to the combat: ‘The Achaeans will honor you like a god. For you will certainly win for them a great kûdos, for this time you will triumph over Hector.’

Benveniste cites the embassy to Achilleus as a structural example of how kudos and timê operate as incentives within the Homeric honor economy, illuminating the institutional framework that Achilleus’s withdrawal places under radical pressure.

Benveniste, Émile, Indo European Language and Society, 1973aside

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