‘Dog’, he replied, ‘urge not my ruth by parents, soul nor knees.
I would to God that any rage would let me eat thee raw,
Sliced into pieces, so beyond the right of any law
I taste thy merits. And believe it flies the force of man
To rescue thy head from the dogs. Give all the gold they can,
If ten or twenty times so much as friends would rate thy price
Were tendered here, with vows of more, to buy the cruelties
I here have vowed, and, after that, thy father with his gold
Would free thy self – all that should fail to let thy mother hold
Solemnities of death with thee and do thee such a grace
To mourn thy whole corpse on a bed – which piecemeal I’ll deface
With fowls and dogs.’He then fastens Hector’s body to his chariot and drags him away. For several days
at dawn he hauls Hector’s corpse three times around the funeral mound of Patroclus.
As she had said farewell to Hector, Andromache recalled how Achilles had
chivalrously reverenced the bodies of her family killed at Thebe (6, 414–428). How
far below his previous magnanimity has he now fallen: so far that his behaviour
becomes offensive to the gods, who put a stop to it (24, 1–92).
In the final book comes the second and fullest recognition scene in the meeting
with Priam. Here Achilles is restored to humanity by the pleas of Priam who reminds
him of his own aged father Peleus. In his gentle treatment of Priam there is true
magnanimity. Achilles looks beyond his own grief and anger, and comes to a calm
and steady recognition that men can do no more than bear the indiscriminate mixture
of good and bad that comes from Zeus. In the examples of Peleus and Priam he sees
the insecurity and incompleteness of human happiness; grief is of little use in the face
of the inevitability of human suffering (24, 518–551). The pathos of this great speech
is well conveyed in the version of Alexander Pope.
‘Alas! what weight of anguish hast thou known?
Unhappy prince! thus guardless and alone
Topass through foes, and thus undaunted face
The man whose fury has destroyed thy race?
A strength proportioned to thy woes you feel.
Rise then: let reason mitigate our care:
Tomourn, avails not: man is born to bear.
Such is, alas! the gods’ severe decree;
They, only they, are blest, and only free.Achilles shows a resolute acceptance here. How vulnerable and fragile this is before
the onset of passion is clear in the momentary anger that flares up in Achilles when
EARLY GREECE: HOMER AND HESIOD 19