Achilles And The Iliad: Early Greek Humanism and Heroism

Like Gilgamesh, Achilles is partially divine and partially human.  His divine mother, Thetis, was married to the mortal king, Peleus, in a plot by Zeus head off a prophecy: that Thetis' son would be more powerful than his father -- thus creating a god that would threaten Zeus' own power.  For similar reasons, Achilles is also fated to die young due to his own hubris: so that he cannot become too godlike (shades of Genesis 2 here, and the expulsion from the Garden to keep Adam and Eve from eating of the tree of life).  This struggle to balance his godlike greatness with his human mortality drives much of The Iliad, and is what we're most interested in in this class.

In this earliest, great Greek Epic we find the themes driving most all other Greek literature and laying the foundations of how today we still view heroes, heroism, and what it means to be a human being, what it means to be an individual living among other individuals.

Within the few chapters of this epic that we have time to read, we will find an amazing depth and breadth of thinking about what it means to be alive and, more specifically, to be a soldier.  Unlike Biblical literature, we'll quickly see that Greek literature is open ended and interested in offering a variety of perspectives -- war is both beautiful and brutally self destructive; it forces out both the best and the worst of humanity; Achilles is both treacherous and heroic etc.  Where the Hebrews seem to search for a single God ultimately defining a single Truth, the Greeks seem happy worshipping multiple gods that encompass a vast variety of multiple truths.

Consider, then the profundity of a story that celebrates AND grieves for AND questions war.  In many ways this piece of literature is vastly much more complex, wise and realistic than much of the literature, film and tv we consume today.

I'll argue that this makes for good art because it represents more accurately and realistically the human experience, in which each individual wrestles with the competing perspectives of all other individuals. It also draws the reader into that same experience, forcing him to develop his own perspective, rather than simply adopting the author's.

Few characters represent this Greek gift more than Achilles, who in many ways manages to capture the entirety of the human experience:

The First Individual?

For all of these reasons, philosophers and historians argue that Achilles represents a quantum leap in the evolution of human consciousness, here in this ancient story.  We don't mean that this character represents a revolutionarily new kind of literary character; we mean that this character, Achilles, as he is presented by this author, represents a massive change in the way human beings thought of what it meant to be alive; that is, Achilles (or this author) is perhaps the first "individual", ever, anywhere, who sees himself as a unique, discreet, entity able to exist separately from his tribe/clan/culture etc.

He shows a willingness to question the roots of the culture’s most basic assumption: that honorable behavior is simply keeping in line with the group/culture’s wishes.

He shatters all previous “ancient” ways of seeing death and grasping the deepest implications of mortality; his life exists uniquely and will end at death.

He is a man seeing himself as an individual alone, and existence separate from his culture’s codes and from his fellow men.  Whether he should abandon his clan is the question, but what is so revolutionary is that he realizes he can.

So much of the rest of The Iliad will support this individuality, for although hundreds die in battle each specific death is treated individually as a unique (and common) event; the author is not a chronicler of history but an individual who has known war, writing about the individual deaths of individual people, and each has value and meaning.  This is much of what we mean when we speak of "humanism".