In no other epic does a passion figure so prominently as in The Iliad. The action begins with the passion of wrath. The death of Patroclus rouses his wrath once again, though it is directed against Hector. His inordinate love for Patroclus reawakens his energy. Achilles is essentially an impulsive person. Never amenable to reason, he is always governed by passion That is because he is half-divine and half-human.
The element of beast is also not to be ignored. Violent, haughty, proud, egotistical, Achilles has also many lovable qualities, which distinguish him from men like Agamemnon and Menelaus. He has not the softer and nobler qualities, which characterise Hector.
He is a product of the heroic age, when to be soft and meek was unthinkable. The virtues extolled in a knight in the medieval age were an anachronism in the days of Achilles. Everything about Achilles is keyed to the highest pitch. He is strong in his likes and dislikes, passions and prejudices. He is intensely passionate in his love as well as in his hatred. Though so haughty, Achilles is not failing in his generosity. When informed that the innocent Iphigenia was brought on the plea that she was to be married to Achilles, he grew furious and offered to defend her from her father, and the furious Greeks, bent on sacrificing her.
Achilles is, no doubt, blood-thirsty. But fighting is not the only thing he was interested in. He has taste for art and music. Faced with a crisis, Ulysses and a few others went to Achilles requesting him to join the battle and save the Greeks. They found Achilles playing on a lyre and singing the deeds of the heroes of the ancient times.
Hospitality is another notable trait in the character of Achilles. As the messengers, led by Ulysses came to him, he ended a hearty welcome to them. He set them down and offered choicest food and drinks. He carved the meat for his guests.
But in spite of his passionate nature, Achilles never became mean and vulgar. Agamemnon insisted on the surrender of Briseis in place of Chryses. It was not the loss of a beautiful girl. What distressed Achilles was the loss of honour. Extremely sensitive to self-respect, he felt shocked that he was humiliated by a person, whose family wrongs he had come to avenge. He had no stake. Moreover he knew that he heightens the pathos of his life. And yet he never wanted to shirk the battle. He told his mother:.
Like a child Achilles burst into tears and called for his mother, who was at that time by the side of her aged father in the deep ocean-caves. In this crisis in his life, his mother came and consoled him. His mother was Thetis, a Nereid. She did everything she could to make him immortal: She burned him over a fire every night, then dressed his wounds with ambrosial ointment; and she dunked him into the River Styx, whose waters were said to confer the invulnerability of the gods.
However, she gripped him tightly by the foot as she dipped him into the river—so tightly that the water never touched his heel.
As a result, Achilles was invulnerable everywhere but there. When he was 9 years old, a seer predicted that Achilles would die heroically in battle against the Trojans. When she heard about this, Thetis disguised him as a girl and sent him to live on the Aegean island of Skyros. When Homer wrote the Iliad in about BCE, however, readers and listeners would not have known any of this. They only knew that Achilles was a great hero, that he had superhuman strength and courage and that he was supremely handsome.
Homer painted a more nuanced picture: In addition to these qualities, his Achilles was vengeful and quick to anger and could be petulant when he did not get his way.
He was also deeply loyal and would sacrifice anything for his friends and family. He did this by meddling in their political and emotional affairs. Each of the goddesses offered Paris a bribe in exchange for his vote. Unfortunately, the wife in question—Helen, the daughter of Zeus—was already married to someone else: Menelaus, the king of Sparta.
Menelaus vowed revenge. When the Iliad begins, the Trojan War has been going on for nine years. He has met with great success—in fact, he is undefeated in battle—but the war itself has reached a stalemate. In a battle that took place before the poem begins, Agamemnon had taken as a concubine a young Trojan woman named Chryseis. Enraged, Apollo punished the Greek armies by sending a plague to kill the soldiers one by one. As his ranks thinned, Agamemnon finally agreed to allow Chryseis to return to her father.
Achilles did as his commander asked and relinquished his bride. He gathered his belonging and refused to come out of his tent. The Greeks lost one battle after another. That way, the Trojans would think that Achilles had returned to battle and would retreat in fear. He helped the Trojan prince Hector to find and kill Patroclus.
Achilles vowed to take revenge. Because the refusal is to let him go his anger and concern for his own future and also very helpful to indicate a more adolescent or young adult viewpoint while his childless. When prime comes to retrieve the Hector Achilles treats him respectful manners. He is finally seen to the heart of his fury and pointless and distractive individual. He shows that who he treats his enemies with respect and courtesy because they are human as well and he also treat them as a loyal and good human.
In this whole poem the progress of Achilles character can be seeing very easily from child to an adult. He is the spiteful rage in the beginning to the compassionate respect in the end of epic, so Achilles development mirrors of a stereotypical human from childhood the level of maturity Homer , Get Access.
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