Perhaps his virtue is more idealized than real after all, we rarely see him actually fight, at least until his aristeia rampage at the end, which is not notably more impressive than the others already seen. Indeed, none of this is altogether relevant the objective value of Achilles is not in question, so long as he is presented and perceived as the “best,” which within the Iliad he unequivocally is. But the other Greeks are essentially depthless soldiers, Hector is a foil, and Odysseus, in Nagy’s words, “earns the title not for doing what he did at Troy but for doing what he did within the Odyssey itself,” (40) which is outside of our lens.
Other warriors-Aias, Diomedes-seem as much or more powerful Odysseus seems more capable, and Hector more noble.
This last is an important point, if we are to be using Achilles as our heroic archetype and there are indeed arguments that he is surpassed by others in many respects. Achilles is the prince of the Myrmidons, has come to Troy with the Greek army, and most importantly, is considered their finest warrior (Nagy 26–34). Though Achilles does not even appear in the bulk of the work, he is nevertheless the driving element of the plot, and The Iliad is generally considered to be chiefly “about” him and his conflict with Agamemnon as the first line reads, “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles. I will also argue that this is compelling because human beings are, by and large, used to impacting only matters of equal or lesser importance than their own lives, a mold that the epic hero breaks.Īchilles (alternately, Akhilleus or Achilleus the first is used here, for consistency and because it is more common in modern discourse) is the central figure of The Iliad, the 24-book poetic work attributed to the (possibly apocryphal) Homer. I will attempt here to make the case that these two characters ably represent their entire archetype-the epic warrior-hero-which I believe exists to present an example of idealized, “superhuman humanity,” and a fantastic ability of rare individuals to influence events far greater than themselves. The Iliad of Archaic Greece and 18th century Mesopotamia’s The Epic of Gilgamesh are two of the best-known works of epic literature, and they describe two of the genre’s best-known heroes: the fleet-footed warrior Achilles, and the godlike king Gilgamesh.
The poem speaks to the anxieties and life-experience of a human being, and that is why modern readers find it both profound and enduringly relevant.The Epic Hero as Force Majeure in The Iliad and The Epic of Gilgamesh Among its timeless themes are the friction between nature and civilization, friendship between men, the place in the universe of gods, kings and mortals, and the misuse of power. The emotional struggles related in the story of Gilgamesh are those of no collective group but of the individual. The glorious exploits it tells are motivated by individual human predicaments, especially desire for fame and horror of death. In its final and best-preserved version it is a sombre meditation on the human condition. The poem's subject is not the establishment of a Babylonian nation nor an episode in that nation's history, but the vain quest of a man to escape his mortality. Some early Assyriologists, when nationalism was a potent political force, characterized it as the 'national epic' of Babylonia, but this notion has deservedly lapsed. The poem falls into the category 'epic' because it is a long narrative poem of heroic content and has the seriousness and pathos that have sometimes been identified as markers of epic. The name 'Epic of Gilgamesh' is given to the Babylonian poem that tells the deeds of Gilgamesh, the greatest king and mightiest hero of ancient Mesopotamian legend.
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