Though The Iliad shakes its fist at heaven, it ultimately offers submissive sacrifice to the gods and the godlike hero, Achilles. When Agamemnon spurns him, Chryses prays to the distant deadly Archer and plague ravages the army.
As the corpses pile higher, Achilles urges Agamemnon to deliver the Argives from death by returning the slave-girl to her father. What man would leave his countrymen to die over a personal affront? When the gods rage, nations perish; and thus, in justice, godlike Achilles has no choice but to abandon the people whose king tore them away from his grace.
Though Hera and Athena hold a strange objection that the goddess of beauty should not win a beauty contest, the gods and goddesses plunge into the resulting war, picking sides, swapping cities, and playing favorites.
This distant, divine nature that rages in the breast of Achilles soars on a higher plane of logic and law than the body it is housed in, evoking the struggle between heaven and earth together with the desire for some impossible resolution. While Achilles fulfills the characteristics of the Greek hero, such as being favored by the gods and a possessor of great strength, his requisite glory and honor is threatened by his also-requisite tragic fate and flaw.
Achilles has a tragic fate, a brief life, and though his honor hangs upon this fate, it is at the same time imperiled by his tragic flaw—which is, and controversially so, that he is godlike. When the two are brought together, the result is tragic, divinity being the very reality that makes the heroic status difficult to achieve on a human level.
In short, it is difficult to admire the divine, and admiration is central to heroism. The same honor waits for the coward and the brave. They both go down to Death, the fighter who shirks, the one who works to exhaustion.
Though Achilles is fierce in his rage, the transgression put by, his character completes an unexpected arc after the death of Hector. At the funeral games for Patroclus, Homer suddenly presents a vision of godly benevolence as Achilles presides with majestic kindness, awarding prizes to all.
Furthermore, when King Priam infiltrates the Argive camp to beg for the body of Hector, Achilles shows an empathy contrary to his unsympathetic withdrawal. Homer closes his epic, which often lambasts and bewails the gods, with a pious wish that the divine nature might become compassionate towards human nature.
The revolution from the City at War to the City at Peace involves reining in the impudence of kings who lash out against the inherent dignity of nature and society, refusing to accept that the ways of the gods are not the ways of men. While Homer is certainly on to something when he suggests that war is the natural, unquenchable state of man—even the City at Peace suffers from bloodshed and blood-price—there is yet a dance beyond the clash of heaven and earth, a realm of harmony, where man can regain his proper place before his forsaken gods.
The crisis of the forsaken god is the divine tragedy of Achilles. It is, in a way, the tragedy of Christ crucified and Christ-less society, when man murders Truth in brash, self-important pride that regards nothing as sacred. Beneath the divine, dramatic upheaval, The Iliad is seeded with the hope that God will not abandon the kings of the earth no matter how blinded they are by Ruin.
In the "Iliad," we see Achilles experience emotions like rage, confusion, grief and a sense of individualism. Achilles is also fiercely loyal to his friend Patroclus, who dies in battle while fighting in Achilles' places. Achilles' grief over Patroclus' death is a major element of his character and the overall story of the "Iliad.
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