As
we grow older/ The world becomes stranger,the pattern more complicated/ Of dead
and living. Not the intense moment/ Isolated, with no before and after/ But a
lifetime burning in every moment/ And not the lifetime of one man only/ But of
old stones that cannot be deciphered.
--T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
An
elucidation of the meaning of the Homeric hero is a task fraught with peculiar difficulties.
The several modern transformations of “the hero” notwithstanding, there is even
in the Greek “ἥρως” (haeros)
a dynamic history of meaning to be considered. In early Greek, “
ἥρως”
underwent a process of generalization, in which it came to mean “warrior in
general,” whereas before it specifically meant those Greeks before the time of
In
keeping with this movement towards the past, the meaning of the hero takes on
an earlier resonance as the poem progresses. A notable instance of this arises
in Book IV when Agamemnon, after proclaiming his desire that Nestor –revered
for his past, apparently unmatchable heroism—should have the youth of “some
other of the fighters”, is inspired to rally his most capable warriors by way
of playful invective. Upon approaching the last, and arguably most outstanding
of these other fighters, namely Diomedes, Agamemnon spurs him on in the
following words:
What’s this?—
you, the son of Tydeus, that skilled
breaker of horses?
Why cringing here? Gazing out on the
passageways of battle!
That was never Tydeus’ way, shy behind the
lines—
he’d grapple enemies, bolting ahead of
comrades…
Now there was a man, that Tydeus, that
Aetolian.
But he bore a son who’s not the half of him
in battle.
(IV. 370-400).[1]
Implicit in
Agamemnon’s light-hearted rebuke is the notion that a true warrior (hero in the
common sense) is measured by the glory of his father (hero in the earlier
sense). This is accentuated by the fact that to such
a rebuke the great Diomedes responds in silence and in deed, while Sthenelos, a
man of incomparably less stature in battle, retorts with the boast that both he
and Diomedes are greater than their respective fathers (IV.410).
It
is, of course, an observation of no great perspicacity to remark upon the importance
of patrimony for the warriors of the Iliad; nearly all fighters are epithetically identified as sons of their fathers, and
often, when death looms near a particular hero, the reader is made aware at
some length of his lineage, sometimes through that hero’s own mouth. What is of essential importance, however, is
the way the Iliad links the general
meaning of the warrior and his patronymic origin to an even deeper source: war
is not only the place where death and destruction reign, but where things are
born. To steer us away from taking this as an empty truism, we might cite what
Heracleitus says on the matter:
polemoς pantwn men pathr esti, pantwn de
basileuς, kai touς men qeouς
edeixe touς de
anqrwpouς, touς men
dolouς epoihse touς de
eleqerouς
(War
is Father of all, and of all it is King, and it has shown some as gods and others
as humans, it has created some as slaves and others as free).[2]
In the Iliad too, war is not in the first place
a violent conflict between men, war is poihsiς (poiesis);
it is the creative unveiling of the deepest distinctions, of who the gods truly
are, and of who men truly are. As polemoς (polemos),
war is that which holds together the most divergent poles ---an irruption of the hidden unity at the center of polar opposites. The “warrior in the
general sense” is therefore not to be thought of emptily as “a fighter” but
rather as a sign which points to its origin, or better, as one who actively
retains the image and likeness of the one who has begotten him: the pathr pantwn, polemoς. In this way both meanings of hero converge: the “hero as
warrior” is truly heroic only in so far as he participates in war, i.e., in the
poetic revelation of his father, pathr
polemoς.
This
uniquely Greek understanding of polemoς, if it is to be properly grasped, must be
set firmly against the backdrop of the Homeric gods. For the fact remains that
there is no god by the name of “War” in the Iliad;
there is only the god of war, Ares
---and it is not Ares but Zeus and Zeus alone who could possibly merit the
epithet “Father of all.” Not only must this fact be conceded, but it is
prerequisite to understanding polemoς
properly. For Heracleitus does not
identify polemoς as a god, but precisely as that which shows
(deiknumi) who the gods truly are ---and only in this sense is it father
even of them. What is it that makes polemoς
such a father? What assurance can be
had that this connection between Heracleitus’ oracular pronouncement and
Homer’s understanding is no haphazard and arbitrary connection?
The answer to these questions is hinted at in
Hegel’s discussion of Homer in his Philosophy
of History. There he makes the astute observation that for the Greeks “Fate
[is] a pure Subjectivity appearing superior to the gods”[3].
Though Hegel is constrained by his metaphysical position to think of Fate as a
“subjectivity” (a notion arguably foreign to the Greeks), he nevertheless
touches upon the essential reason why polemoς
is accorded its privileged paternal
role. polemoς is the encounter with Fate par excellence.In a manner unparalleled
by any other event, war displays the mettle of mortals in the face of their
uncertain, yet certainly and swiftly approaching, fate. The brilliance of the
warrior is a “brilliance darkly showing”, it is an illumination of what refuses
all unveiling, an illumination of the unbearable, if inscrutable, presence of
fate. For mortals, fate comes in the
form of death, and the paradox of death consists in this: when death comes, it
disappears. The appearance of death’s disappearance is frequently remarked upon
in the Iliad, in the all too familiar
---and thus easily overlooked ---phrase that when a warrior meets his end, “a
mist comes over his eyes.” That blindness, understood as a consummate
non-appearing, befalls a warrior at that moment when his previously unseen fate
finally comes to meet him is a detail by no means unrelated to the poetic nature
of war to which Heraclitus has given utterance. Indeed, for Homer, as for the
Ancient Greek world as a whole, the connection between the excess of fateful,
poetic vision and blindness is testified to in such preeminent figures as
Oedipus, Teiresias, Demodokus, and Homer himself.
If
in the Iliad the heroic patrimony and
the poetic nature of war resolve themselves to a single origin governed by the
mysterious ‘appearance’ of fate, this does not occur merely through the subtle
indications of Homeric imagery, and even less through the distant sound of disembodied,
abstract themes—waiting as it were to be seized upon and rescued by philosophic
reflection. Rather does this resolution in the meaning of the hero occur
through the singular character to which all indications and background themes
refer, and this is unmistakably Achilles. As Glenn Arbery has convincingly
argued in his Soul and Image: The Single
Honor of Achilles that the entire Iliad
cannot receive a proper critical treatment if it is not read with the story of
Achilles’ birth firmly in mind; for it is here, in the account of Achilles’
half-divine lineage, that patrimony and the poetic strife between men and gods
are fused into the mark of Achilles’ fate: unparalleled
mortality. Paying careful heed to the bitter union with mortal man which
Thetis, Achilles’ mother, was made to endure, Abery finds justification to
characterize Achilles in the utterly unique image and likeness of his parents,
a characterization which at once hearkens back to Heracleitus’ polemoς while
drawing upon Heidegger’s thought of “dif-ference”:
[Achilles]
is the human form of what Heidegger, in accounting for the relation between
“world” and “things” in his essay “Language,” names the “dif-ference” (the word
is broken at the point of its joining of two meanings— “bearing’ and “apart”).…Achilles
has the kind of reality in the imagination that brings men and gods together by
holding apart—with the whole pain of
his being—the middle where they can be at one.[4]
Achilles, sprung
from the bitter union of Thetis and Peleus, is a living image of the union
between men and gods, and for this reason he is the boundary stone, the threshold of pain over which it seems
neither man nor god has ever crossed and fate has trod but once. It is perhaps of
some significance that Heidegger’s thought of the dif-ference is first
articulated in his meditation upon Georg Trakl’s poem “A Winter Evening”—not
only because this articulation is the fruit of a reflection on poetry but, more
to the point, because it arises in the course of considering, in Trakl’s poem,
the specific line, “Pain has turned the threshold to stone”.
Trakl’s
pain-begotten threshold of stone[5],
as it is interpreted by Heidegger, is not only a most fitting image for the
dif-ferent position in which Achilles stands; its significance is far weightier than a mere vehicle in which
Homer’s insight can be conveniently situated and passed along into contemporary
discussion. Instead, the need to give voice to the enigmatic nature of stone,
observed in Trakl’s line, is already found in one of the deepest regions of the
Iliad, the region in which the
Homeric transformation of the meaning of the hero—a transformation which not
only roots the later meaning in the older one but even locates both in a still older meaning—is consummately accomplished.
The
turn toward this final moment of transformation is prepared for in that scene of
Achilles’ final conversation with his beloved companion, Patroklos—a scene which
may be said to initiate or set up Achilles’ turn of heart away from the mourning of
his mortal fate toward the profound
depth of his mortality as it is illumined in battle and projected toward Hades.
In that final encounter, before assuming the guise of Achilles through the
aspect of his armor, Patroklos must first identify his friend anew, speaking
from a surmise that has slowly been growing in his own heart:
Pitiless:
the rider Peleus was never your father nor was Thetis your mother, but it was
the grey sea that bore you and the towering rocks, so hard is the heart within
you. But if you are drawing back from some prophecy known in your heart and by
Zeus’ will your honoured mother has told you something, then send me out at
least, let the rest of the Myrmidon people follow me, and I may be a light to
the Danaans. (XVI. 33-39)[6]
With his desperate
appeal to Achilles’ unapproachable heart, Patroklos unwittingly touches upon
the meaning at the heart of the Homeric hero. Patroklos, whose very name refers
to the “glory of the father” (what we have ventured thus far to call by the
name “patrimony”), speaks with a sudden boldness --as if by a word inspired --and,
in what should not be mistaken as mere hyperbolic metaphor, he finds the
audacity to renounce Achilles’ well known parentage in favor of a truer—if more
obscure—origin. Because of the petrified
likeness he perceives in his friend’s heart, Patroklos is moved to trace
Achilles back to the “hliabatoi petrai”, the “towering rocks”. The only other
possibility that Patroklos can conceive of in order to account for his friend’s
almost inhuman reticence (a possibility which he immediately announces so that
the abrasive nature of his first address might be ameliorated) concerns a
prophetic message from the gods regarding Achilles fate. But Patroklos is
speaking from a greater wisdom than he himself knows; what he does not perceive is the way his two
proposals are essentially linked, namely through one of the most unseen gods in
the entire poem: Hermes.
Patroklos’
fate falls far short of the final lines of the poem, where the veracity of his
obscure insight is revealed; for it is only in the twenty-fourth book that
Hermes makes his most significant contribution to the poem (namely, guiding
Priam safely into the camp of the Myrmidons to redeem the body of his beloved
son), and it is there that the intimate relation between Achilles and Hermes is
displayed. They are related as an original and its reflection in a mirror, both
of them sites of dif-ference, yet neither of them ever crossing into the world
of the other. There are in support of this pairing several discussions of no
negligible length concerning the door of Achilles’ shelter, which only Achilles
himself and Hermes are known to be capable of opening alone, and which Hermes
will not cross to meet his double face-to-face.
Hermes
is the one god who accompanies fate through the threshold, he is the god of
crossings, a messenger between gods and men, and the sole companion of each man
to his ultimate fate in the underworld. As Marc Froment-Meurice has written:
Hermes,
the proper name of a god of paths, of accesses granted or refused, takes his
name from a simple pile of stones (in Greek “ermaion” [(hermaion)]), the significance of which
we do not know.[7]
Through his likeness to Hermes the threshold-god, Achilles is also
likened even further back to stones in need of interpretation, of, as it were,
a herme-neutic. To say that Hermes is the key to, indeed, that he leads the way
to the meaning of Achilles is to recognize Homer’s implicit demand upon his
listeners that, if they would seek the deepest region in which heroism can be
found, they must, like Priam, receive an immortal escort.
Though
traditionally Achilles has served as a figure of emulation for the Greek world
as well as the Western world that issued from it, the Iliad does not ultimately offer in Achilles a paradigm for
imitation in human action, but rather a terribly inimitable presentation of the
mystery of mortality. The proper response to such a heroic spectacle does not
in the first place consist in the call to action, but in the courage to listen,
when all action has become futile, for the coming of the god in the ringing of
the poetic word.
[1] Trans.
Fagles
[2] Fragment 93.
[3] Pg. 250, Trans. J. Sibree.
[4] Pgs. 38-40 in The Epic Cosmos. Ed.
Louise Cowan. Dallas , TX
[5] Lest it
be objected at this point that we remove ourselves by three degrees from
discussion of the Iliad if we pursue
an inquiry into the source material for the source material of a single
commentator on the poem, it should be observed that the “stone threshold” in
connection with pain is by no means foreign to our primary text. It appears,
once, in book XXIII, line 202: Iris, who first arrives in the Iliad “bearing her painful message, ”
and makes her final appearance in it standing “poised at the stone threshold”
of the house of Zephyr (the West Wind). Here the threshold is a site of
urgency, the ground on which one may stand—once, for a moment—who must also be
elsewhere.—Ed.
[6] More or less a word-for-word translation
[7] See his “Hermes’ Gift” in That is to
Say. Trans. Jan Plug. Stanford ,
CA Stanford University
