The Triumph of Self 3
will not take, no deed he will not attempt, to attain what he hopes
for: immortality. Achilles does not wish to live forever on earth or
in some agreeable afterlife. Though he is the son of a goddess, he
knows that he will someday die; and the afterlife according to the
Greeks is a gray and dismal state. Homer’s Achilles wants to attain
eternal life in the minds and hearts of other men, warriors in
par tic u lar. What matters to him is his reputation as a fi ghter, and
he will risk anything to enlarge it. When Agamemnon challenges
Achilles in open council and tells him that he is not, as he believes,
the best of the Greeks, Achilles faces a crisis. He must prove that
he is the warrior he takes himself to be.
Hector, the greatest of the Trojan warriors, seeks reputation too,
but it is not the most im por tant goal in his life. Hector is the model
for what later generations will call the citizen soldier. His fi rst aim
is the defense of his city and his people. Though he is a formidable
warrior, Hector is also an accomplished statesman and a loving hus-
band and father. At one point in The Iliad, Hector confesses that
he had to “learn” to step out onto the battlefi eld and go face to face
with his enemies. To Achilles the spirit of war came naturally.
Hector must acquire it— which to many only makes him more
human and more sympathetic. In the entire city of Troy there are
only two men who treat Helen, the ostensible cause of the war, with
kindness. One is Hector’s father, King Priam, the other Hector
himself.
Do we as a culture still res pect the two Homeric archetypes, the
citizen soldier and the fearless warrior who seeks the fi rst place?
Res pect, perhaps; but how few young men and women with real
choices in life are now ready to emulate either one of them? Some
members of the ser vice academies no doubt understand the Ho-
meric standard. But even for some of them, the military is a career
path, a source of steady, secure employment. And the sons and
daughters of the middle class generally refrain from volunteering to