What kind of hero is achilles

He is semi-divine and wholly precious. Other men cannot even aspire to be like him. At his most resplendent, men cannot even bear to look at him.

He is just above and beyond. Achilles in short, is a hero and taps into a need that most of us have to worship and admire. I was recently listening to a very good Stanford lecture about the Iliad by Marsh McCall , where the genial professor suggests that baseball and American football players play a similar role in modern society. There is also a fantastic video of kids meeting their football idols , viewed more than 69m times on social media, which gives an idea of how primal and overpowering such reverence can be.

I also like to think of myself as rational and keen to judge on actual merit and not mythology. One of the many laments I could relate to, for instance, following the recent loss of David Bowie was the simple expression of incredulity that death could catch even him, that someone who had seemed so much bigger than life should actually have to go.

This human need to venerate was something Homer understood and exploited to glorious effect in the Iliad. Most obviously, and brilliantly, he does this by keeping Achilles off the scene. Why is Achilles important in the Iliad? Was Achilles really a hero? Why is Achilles a better hero than Hector? Was Achilles the best fighter? Who was the last King of Troy? How long did the Trojan war last? Each of the goddesses offered Paris a bribe in exchange for his vote. Unfortunately, the wife in question—Helen, the daughter of Zeus—was already married to someone else: Menelaus, the king of Sparta.

Menelaus vowed revenge. When the Iliad begins, the Trojan War has been going on for nine years. He has met with great success—in fact, he is undefeated in battle—but the war itself has reached a stalemate.

In a battle that took place before the poem begins, Agamemnon had taken as a concubine a young Trojan woman named Chryseis. Enraged, Apollo punished the Greek armies by sending a plague to kill the soldiers one by one. As his ranks thinned, Agamemnon finally agreed to allow Chryseis to return to her father.

Achilles did as his commander asked and relinquished his bride. He gathered his belonging and refused to come out of his tent. The Greeks lost one battle after another. That way, the Trojans would think that Achilles had returned to battle and would retreat in fear. He helped the Trojan prince Hector to find and kill Patroclus.

Achilles vowed to take revenge. Thetis asked the divine blacksmith Hephaestus to make a sword and shield that would keep him safe.

Achilles chased Hector back to Troy, slaughtering Trojans all the way. When they got to the city walls, Hector tried to reason with his pursuer, but Achilles was not interested.

He stabbed Hector in the throat, killing him. Hector had begged for an honorable burial in Troy, but Achilles was determined to humiliate his enemy even in death. In doing this, Achilles upsets the order of protocol; only Agamemnon can decide to call an assembly, but Achilles does so to try to return order to the Achaian camp. He succeeds, partially. He finds out why the plague is killing hundreds of Achaian soldiers, but in the process, he creates disorder when it is revealed that Agamemnon is responsible for the deadly plague.

Thus, Achilles' attempt to return order to the Achaian camp does little, ultimately, to establish order. Apollo lifts the plague, but after Achilles withdraws himself and his troops from the Achaian army, disorder still remains among the Achaians.

Agamemnon, of course, is as guilty of creating the ensuing disorder as Achilles is, but Achilles seems petulant and argumentative. He is undermining the little harmony that does exist. In his argument that Agamemnon receives all the best war prizes and does nothing to earn them, Achilles forgets the valuable prizes that he has received.

His rage even causes him to almost attempt to kill Agamemnon, but the goddess Athena saves him from this deed. It should be noted that Achilles does not leave the Achaian army without sufficient reason: Agamemnon demanded to have the maiden Briseis, Achilles' war prize, and Achilles saw this act as a parallel to Paris' kidnapping of Helen — he sees himself in the same position as Menelaos. Consequently, the quarrel between himself and Agamemnon is as righteous to him as is the war against the Trojans.

But even after Agamemnon offers to return Briseis, along with numerous other gifts, Achilles remains angry, indicating that one of Achilles' major character flaws is his excessive pride. The gifts that Agamemnon offers do not compensate for the public affront, the public insult Achilles believes he has suffered. A concern for gifts, the reader realizes, is far less important to Achilles than his concern for a proper, honored place in the world.