ANCIENT GREEK MYTH: the Real Achilles

Achilles drags the body of Hector past the tomb of Patroclus - Priam and Hecuba look on.
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THE REAL ACHILLES

© 2004 Anthony Bulloch. Dept. of Classics, University of California, Berkeley
and the University of California, Berkeley

The real Achilles was an only child, the son of two beautiful and totally mis-matched parents, whose wedding was the most glitzy social event of the millennium. Without any exaggeration, there was not one other occasion in the aeons of time before it, or in the thousand years and more after it, when anyone could remember seeing such a turnout of the almighty, the all-powerful and the all-star. Every god and goddess was there, from the most powerful to the most minor – the doomed union of Achilles’ parents was the most unanimously witnessed and affirmed event in the history of mortal and divine affairs.  And the wedding gifts were among the most stunning ever seen. Some cynics say that the whole affair was a set-up by Zeus, and that he knew what the outcome would be: Earth had complained that there were too many people that she had to support, and that their behavior was pretty dismal, so she and Zeus instigated a chain of events that was to be nearly catastrophic for almost every Greek that participated.  Whether that was actually so, and whether or not it was part of some megalomaniac master-plan by the Grand Manipulator, the wedding of Peleus and Thetis led irrevocably to a war that engulfed east and west, and reverberated through history for the rest of time.

The real Achilles had a mother, Thetis, who was a sea-nymph, a not insignificant minor goddess, one of the fifty daughters of one of the oldest and most venerable figures in all creation, the ‘old man of the sea’, Nereus, son of Earth and Pontos and a contemporary of the very Titans – such was Achilles’ grandfather; Thetis’ mother, Achilles’ grandmother, was Doris, a daughter of Titan parents, with her father being Ocean himself. Thetis' origins, and, through her, half of Achilles’ origins, lay deep in the sea, and like the element she came from, and belonged in, she was fluid, changeable, and almost impossible to pin down. She was the very mist that comes up off the ocean, tenuous, mysterious and elusive. Thetis was also so desirable that she was once courted by Zeus himself (a second-cousin); and she was destined to have a son who would surpass his father.

The real Achilles had a father, Peleus, who was neither of ancient origin nor immortal. Despite his noble ancestry (he was one of several sons of Aeacus, himself a son of the island goddess Aigina with Zeus as the impregnating father), and despite his reputation for virtue and nobility of character, like his father, Peleus was a multiply displaced person, on the run (like not a few of his founding father contemporaries) for homicide and conspiracy. Peleus wielded an axe to help his brother Telamon assassinate their step-brother, a rival for their father’s throne (afterwards hiding the body in the woods); he then fled north and took refuge in the kingdom of Actor, but accidentally killed his host’s son with a javelin while hunting the famous boar of Calydon and had to flee once again, this time to Iolcus.

The real Achilles never knew what it was like to grow up in a regular household, with a father and a mother, and with lots of siblings, not to mention cousins and aunts and uncles, grandfathers and grandmothers. Combinations of mortal and immortal almost never work out, and not long after their glittering wedding Achilles’ parents became permanently estranged.

The real Achilles was deeply bi-polar, as the two parts of his being, the mortal and the immortal, struggled with one another, causing an existential crisis that we all face, but none so profoundly and so critically as Achilles: not ‘fame or fortune’ (nothing so mundane), but whether to choose life as a nobody or glory in an early death. ‘The Choice of Achilles’, the ultimate existential quandary, was resolved, as such things so often are, not through contemplative calm but in the fury of catastrophe – by the warrior, not the philosopher.

The real Achilles tried to dodge the draft for the Trojan War when Agamemnon and Menelaus went round enlisting Greece’s best for their expedition against Troy. His mother sent him into hiding on the remote island of Scyros, where he dressed as a girl and hid among the many daughters of the island’s king. He had to be trapped into revealing himself by an ingenious trick of Odysseus (who had also tried to avoid being enlisted, by feigning dementia), and carted off into the army. (He was still male enough, though, that he left one of Scyros’ daughters pregnant, with the baby who would become Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles whose destiny it was to finally capture Troy.)

The real Achilles had a close friend, an ‘alter ego’, his cousin Patroclus, who died on the battlefield of Troy wearing Achilles’ armor, while standing in for Achilles as the latter sat out the war in his tent after quarelling furiously with the Greek leader Agamemnon. Modern readers debate passionately whether Achilles and Patroclus were lovers, a question that no Greek would have bothered to think twice about, or worry about. Even Zeus, the most vigorous womanizer of them all, had his boyfriends.

The real Achilles went out of his mind (like almost every true Greek hero) on hearing the news about Patroclus. No food, no drink – only mindless, cruel slaughter. Revenge. A warrior birzirk, angry at death, the ‘choice’ made, set on a path of destruction. Pitiless and without mercy, disgusting even the gods.

The real Achilles contemptuously threw aside the ‘Geneva Convention’ and tortured and savaged the corpse of his Trojan opposite number, Hector, for days after running him down and slaughtering him outside the walls of Troy.

The real Achilles cut the throats of a dozen Trojan young men in bloody human sacrifice at the funeral of his cousin, friend and lover.

The real Achilles fell in love, with two of the children of his Trojan enemy Priam: first with the young prince Troilus (Troy’s great hope for the future), then with his sister, the Trojan princess Polyxena. Troilus he pursued, in combat, into a sanctuary of Apollo at Troy, and became enamored of him as they fought. When Troilus refused to make love to him Achilles decapitated him; Polyxena lured an amorous Achilles into an ambush outside Troy, professing love and passion, but trapping him in revenge for her brother’s death and exposing him to the arrow from her other brother Paris, which would hit him in his one weak spot, his heel. History’s Warrior, in love, defeated by History’s Lover. And before he died the great warrior made the Greeks promise to sacrifice Polyxena at his grave. Ambush and decapitation, revenge and sacrifice: the real Achilles.

The real Achilles died before the war ended and without seeing Troy taken. He never returned to Greece, and never saw his father or his son again. He never married, and the only thing he knew as an adult was fighting away from home overseas. He is buried in foreign soil, at Troy, close to the tomb of his beloved Patroclus, and not far from the burial place and sanctuary of his enemy Hector. He got the immortality which was always half his but which his half-mortal side always wondered about: he was admired by every Greek male ever after, and even worshipped in awe by Alexander the Great, whose nickname was ‘Achilles’ and who carried the very Shield of Achilles as a banner at the head of his army throughout his campaigns. Real Greek heroes. The Real Achilles.

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© 2004 Anthony Bulloch