The Hero 23
Mo ther!
You gave me life, short as that life will be,
so at least Olympian Zeus, thundering up on high,
should give me honor— but now he gives me nothing.
Atreus’ son Agamemnon, for all his far-fl ung kingdoms—
the man disgraces me, seizes and keeps my prize,
he tears her away himself!
(I, 416–422)Achilles is legitimately confused. How could events have come to
this pass? He does not understand it, try as he might. If he were to
go onto the battlefi eld in this state he would be a far less eff ective
fi ghter. Self- consciousness in war can be fatal when it reaches too
high a degree, and the true hero learns to be wary of it, much as the
athlete does.
The athlete, like the warrior, must become one and not, at least
in competition, split into two. In Homer, when you speak with a god,
as Achilles does to his mo ther, Thetis, you are often entering the
realm of self- consciousness.
The Homeric warrior believes that he lives in a cosmos that re-
fl ects his values. He affi rms courage and beauty and so does the
natu ral world around him. He is committed to a life of striving for
preeminence and so is every other form of life he encounters. In his
fragment “Homer’s Contest,” Nietz sche notes that in the heroic
Greek world envy can be a virtue. It is possi ble to say that a man
does not strive hard enough, is not suffi ciently eager for the fi rst
place, that he lacks the power of envy to goad him forward.
Homer corroborates the heroes’ vision of the world in a number
of ways, most immediately through his depiction of the gods. The
Iliad begins with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon,
but on Mount Olympus gods are quarreling, too. Hera and Zeus are