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The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry
The Best of the Achaeans
The Best of the Achaeans (1979, revised 1999) is Nagy’s foundational statement on the Homeric hero. The book reconstructs the vocabulary and conceptual architecture by which archaic Greek poetry named, ranked, and preserved its heroes — aristos, kleos, tîmê, aphthitos, nostos — and argues that epic song and hero cult are coordinated operations on the same figure rather than distinct literary and religious spheres.
The book’s central reading of Achilles — who declines nostos for kleos aphthiton, unfailing glory-in-song — establishes the structural logic by which the Iliad is organized around a figure whose death is the condition of the song’s permanence. Nagy distinguishes carefully between kleos (glory in song) and tîmê (honor in cult), and traces how the Homeric text registers the tension between the hero’s claim on the community of the dead and his claim on the community of singers.
Methodologically, the book refuses the author-centered reading of Homer. “The unity of a masterpiece like the Iliad may itself be the product of a lengthy evolution in the artistic streamlining of form and content” (Nagy 1979, §9). The Homeric epics are Panhellenic artifacts — shaped across generations by audience preference — and their structural integrity is the integrity of a tradition, not of a single mind.