This morning I woke up thinking, among other things, about Achilles. Like most, you likely think of him as a fierce warrior, the greatest of the Greeks by general agreement, killed treacherously from a distance by an arrow.
But the tale told in both the Iliad and the Odyssey can be read quite differently. He had been given two fates: one a long, uneventful, and forgotten life, and the other the one which he actually lived, in which his fame–his “Kleos” (if I’m spelling that correctly) would live forever.
He had chosen the quiet life. He had decided that the goals of his culture–roughly fame and fortune–meant nothing if they could be taken away on a whim. They were not intrinsically a part of who he WAS, and thus he had decided he need not participate in this system any longer, need not draw his sense of self from the reflection of himself he saw in the eyes of others, but rather from his own experience. This, at any rate, is what I understood.
What changed this sober and rational decision was powerful emotion brought on by the death of Patroclus, and if memory serves the desecration of his body.
So he fought as no Greek has before or since. And he died.
Then we see his shade in the underworld, in the Odyssey, where he says he would rather be a slave to the worst of masters than be king of all the dead. He is proud to hear his son fought well, but it’s hard not to hear in this a final rejection of all the things which Greeks, then, held dear, even though on their lights he was first among them.
One senses that he would have been very content to be reborn as a sailor, or fisherman, or farmer, devoid of all heroic qualities, but capable of enjoying life in the most mundane tasks. I see him taking special pleasures in the breezes blowing by him, the rising and setting of the sun, and in his family.
What do you value? Why? Do you feel you have gotten to the root of anything? Would you want to?