Can Achilles really be the first great hero of our literature? He seems a fool, an infantile narcissist. The first word of Western literature is menin — in old Greek, “rage” or “wrath.” Homer means Achilles’ rage, the kind of rage that has an element of divine fury in it and that destroys armies and breaks cities. But to us (though not to the early Greeks), Achilles’ anger seems less divine than vain and egotistical. His war booty has been stolen by another man, and he sits sulking in his tent. Is the immense size of his anger not absurdly out of proportion to its cause? Yet Achilles dominates the poem even as he withdraws; his moody self-preoccupation is part of what makes him fascinating. He creates an aura, a vibration of specialness. We understand something of who he is from Marion Brando’s glamorously sullen performances in his youth. A greater destiny flows from Achilles’ angry will than from the settled desires of simpler men.
He is very young, perhaps in his early twenties, fearless, tall, fleetfooted, strong, a compound of muscle and beauty with so powerful a sense of his own precedence that he is willing to let the war go badly when his honor is sullied. The Trojans, led by their stalwart, Hector, kill many Greeks and come close to burning the Greek ships and cutting off their retreat. Hoping to stem the tide, Achilles’ tentmate and beloved friend Patroclus enters the battle. He dons Achilles’ armor, and in that armor — as a substitute for Achilles — he is slain by Hector. Achilles’ withdrawal now comes to an end. Enraged, inconsolable, he prepares at last to enter the battle (we are deep into the poem, and we have not yet seen him fight), an event accompanied by a cataclysmic rending of the heavens and the seas. The sky darkens, the underworld nearly cracks open. Huge forces, unstoppable, move into place. Achilles begins to fight, expelling his anguish in a rampage. As Book XXI opens, he is driving the Trojans back toward Troy:
But when they came to the crossing place of the fair-running river
of whirling Xanthosa stream whose father was Zeus the immortal,
there Achilleus split them and chased some back over the flat land
toward the city, where the Achaians themselves had stampeded in terror
on the day before, when glorious Hektor was still in his fury.
Along this ground they were streaming in flight; but Hera let fall
a deep mist before them to stay them. Meanwhile the other half
were crowded into the silvery whirls of the deep-running river
and tumbled into it in huge clamour, and the steep-running water
sounded, and the banks echoed hugely about them, as they outcrying
tried to swim this way and that, spun about in the eddies.
As before the blast of a fire the locusts escaping
into a river swarm in air, and the fire unwearied
blazes from a sudden start, and the locusts huddle in water;
so before Achilleus the murmuring waters of Xanthos
the deep-whirling were filled with confusion of men and of horses.
But heaven-descended Achilleus left his spear there on the bank
leaning against the tamarisks and leapt in like some immortal,
with only his sword, but his heart was bent on evil actions,
and he struck in a circle around him. The shameful sound of their groaning
rose as they were struck with the sword, and the water was reddened
with blood. As before a huge-gaping dolphin the other fishes
escaping cram the corners of a deepwater harbour
in fear, for he avidly cats up any lie can catch;
so the Trojans along the course of the terrible river
shrank under the bluffs. He, when his hands grew weary with killing,
chose out and took twelve young men alive from the river
to be vengeance for the death of Patroklos, the son of Menoitios.
These, bewildered with fear like fawns, lie led out of the water
and bound thcir hands behind them with thongs well cut out of leather,
with the very belts they themselves wore on their ingirt tunic
sand gave them to his companions to lead away to the hollow ships,
then himself whirled back, still in a fury to kill men. (XXI, 1-33)
Homer didn’t have to tell his listeners that the leather thongs, tightening as they dried, would cut into the flesh of Achilles’ Trojan captives. Nor did he have to explain why Achilles later kills a Trojan warrior, an acquaintance, who begs for mercy at his knees. But how is the American reader supposed to respond to this? He comes from a society that is nominally ethical. Our legal and administrative system, our presidential utterances, our popular culture, in which TV policemen rarely fail to care for the victims of crime, are swathed in concern. Since the society is in fact often indifferent to hardship, it is no surprise that irony and cynicism barnacle the national mood. By contrast, the Greek view was savage but offered without hypocrisy. Accepting death in battle as inevitable, the Greek and Trojan aristocrats of the Iliad experience the world not as pleasant or unpleasant, nor as good and evil, but as glorious or shameful. We might say that Homer offers a conception of life that is noble rather than ethical — except that such an opposition is finally misleading. For the Greeks, nobility has an ethical quality. You are not good or bad in the Christian sense. You are strong or weak; beautiful or ugly; conquering or vanquished; living or dead; favored by gods or cursed. Here were some of Tayler’s “binary opposites,” but skewed into matching pairs alien to us, in which nothing softened Homer’s appraisal of quality.
Academic opponents of courses in the Western classics constantly urge readers to consider “the other” — the other cultures, odd or repugnant to Western tastes, which we have allegedly trampled or rendered marginal and also the others who are excluded or trivialized within our own culture: women, people of color, anyone who is non-white, non-male, non-Western. But here, at the beginning of the written culture of the West (the Iliad dates from perhaps the eighth century B.C.E.), is something like “the other,” the Greeks themselves, a race of noble savages stripping corpses of their armor and reciting their genealogies at one another during huge feasts or even on the field of battle. Kill, plunder, bathe, eat, offer sacrifices to the gods — what do we have to do with these ancient marauders of the eastern Mediterranean?
[From "Does Homer Have Legs?"]
Zemeckis’ film deals with the guilt of the father. The human women are chattel, as one would expect in an epic, but they are sympathetic and strong, demanding respect from the heroes. (There is a scene where one of Beowulf’s men — who we know is married — tries to have his way with a girl. She says “no” and struggles out of his grasp, delivering a final slap across his face before leaving. Cool.) Grendel’s mother is the most interesting: she is the demon of a heroic age (I can’t help but think of Circe, the sirens, Helen, Eve, Medea, Dido…) that has a magical influence over even powerful men. She desires a son, too, like a king — an heir to her kingdom. She represents disorder to the patirarchs Beowulf and Hrothgar, but she also has a potency that neither can resist.
