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Tuesday
My faculty book group concluded Homer’s Iliad yesterday with an examination of Priam’s meeting with Achilles to recover the body of his son. While we were discussing how revenge hollows out Achilles, I thought of Donald Trump openly promising retribution upon all who have slighted him.
In a recent appearance at Waco, Texas, an event that attracted white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other shady types, Donald Trump declared,
I am your warrior, I am your justice. For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution.
Trump is no Achilles, who is not only a great warrior but a gifted leader, but the thirst for revenge operates similarly on both men. But while I hold out little hope for Trump, Achilles reconnects with his humanity by the end of the epic.
First, however, Homer shows retribution’s corrosive effects. Following the death of his BFF Patroclus, Achilles goes on a killing rampage that eventually has his chariot throwing up a bloody spray:
…before great-hearted Achilleus the single-foot horses
trampled alike dead men and shields, and the axle under
the chariot was all splashed with blood and the rails which encircled
the chariot, struck by flying drops from the feet of the horses,
from the running rims of the wheels. The son of Peleus was straining
to win glory, his invincible hands spattered with bloody filth.
Wilfred Owen, incidentally, alludes to this passage in his great anti-war poem “Strange Meeting,” where he writes “when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels” to capture the horrors of World War I.
The killing spree continues. When one Trojan begs Achilles for mercy, the Greek hero not only ignores his pleas but derides and dishonors him:
Achilleus caught him by the foot and slung him into the river
to drift, and spoke winged words of vaunting derision over him:
‘Lie there now among the fish, who will lick the blood away
from your wound, and care nothing for you, nor will your mother
lay you on the death-bed and mourn over you, but Skamandros
will carry you spinning down to the wide bend of the salt water.
And a fish will break a ripple shuddering dark on the water
as he rises to feed upon the shining fat of Lykaon.
Even nature is appalled at what it is witnessing so that the Skamandros River rises up and threatens to drown Achilles.
We see how brutish Achilles has become in his final confrontation with Hektor. Before they fight, Hektor asks Achilles to agree that the victor will honor the other’s body. The imagery Achilles uses, however, reveals him to be animal-like:
Then looking darkly at him swift-footed Achilleus answered:
‘Hektor, argue me no agreements. I cannot forgive you.
As there are no trustworthy oaths between men and lions,
nor wolves and lambs have spirit that can be brought to agreement
but forever these hold feelings of hate for each other,
so there can be no love between you and me, nor shall there be
oaths between us, but one or the other must fall before then
to glut with his blood Ares the god who fights under the shield’s guard.
After killing Hektor, Achilles then drags him around the walls of Troy three times. Yet even this does not bring him peace so that, by the last book, he is thinking of further ways to enact revenge for the friend he has lost:
Remembering all these things he let fall the swelling tears, lying
sometimes along his side, sometimes on his back, and now again
prone on his face; then he would stand upright, and pace turning
in distraction along the beach of the sea, nor did dawn rising
escape him as she brightened across the sea and the beaches.
Then, when he had yoked running horses under the chariot
he would fasten Hektor behind the chariot, so as to drag him,
and draw him three times around the tomb of Menoitios’ fallen
son, then rest again in his shelter, and throw down the dead man
and leave him to lie sprawled on his face in the dust.
To end this madness and bring order back to humankind, Zeus sends down divine intermediaries. Priam is prompted to go and beg the body of his from the man who has killed him while Achilles is ordered to be merciful. At this point, as our discussion leader John Reishman pointed out, the gods withdraw from the scene, leaving it up to the two men to work things out. Priam wins Achilles over by prostrating himself before him and then asking him to think of his own father:
‘Achilleus like the gods, remember your father, one who
is of years like mine, and on the door-sill of sorrowful old age.
And they who dwell nearby encompass him and afflict him,
nor is there any to defend him against the wrath, the destruction.
Yet surely he, when he hears of you and that you are still living,
is gladdened within his heart and all his days he is hopeful
that he will see his beloved son come home from the Troad.
The plea gets through:
So he spoke, and stirred in the other a passion of grieving
for his own father. He took the old man’s hand and pushed him
gently away, and the two remembered, as Priam sat huddled
at the feet of Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor
and Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again
for Patroklos. The sound of their mourning moved in the house.
At that point they engage is very human actions, eating together and then retiring to sleep. The sacred rules of hospitality, which Paris violated when he ran off with Helen, have been restored:
Automedon took the bread and set it out on the table
in fair baskets, while Achilleus served the meats. And thereon
they put their hands to the good things that lay ready before them.
But when they had put aside their desire for eating and drinking,
Priam, son of Dardanos, gazed upon Achilleus, wondering
at his size and beauty, for he seemed like an outright vision
of gods. Achilleus in turn gazed on Dardanian Priam
and wondered, as he saw his brave looks and listened to him talking.
So are other sacred rituals. For instance, before Priam returns to Troy with Hektor’s body, Achilles asks him how long the father will need to mourn his son’s death (eleven days) and promises that the Greeks will hold off fighting until then.
John and others in our group noted that, in a world of cruelty and death, such rituals are essential if we are to rise above our animal selves and find meaning to our existence. Without them, the life of humans is (to quote Thomas Hobbes) “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
This is what awaits the United States if it allows Trump’s vengeful desires to win out–which is to say, if people with power act out their angry urges upon those who disagree with them. If Achilles and Priam, enemies with every reason to hate each other, can break bread together, then Democrats and Republicans should be able to do the same.
