If our critics studied him as Shakespearian students examine Hamlet or Macbeth, it is improbable that they could think the wrath of Achilles "a second-rate subject." It does not appear to me that his wrath about "a personal slight"—the loss of Briseis, is a fit of the sulks; that Achilles, as was said of Byron in one of his portraits, looks like "a great sulky schoolboy whom somebody has deprived of a plum-cake."
Consider what Achilles is; the son of a goddess: himself, in extreme youth, the recognised hero and nonpareil of the whole Achaean array. His one over-mastering passion is desire of renown:
"One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name."
He might live long, happy, and honoured at home with the father whom he so tenderly loves and pities, but he sets forth to Ilios, knowing surely that there he must inevitably perish in the flower of his youth. He chooses to pay with his life for immortal renown. In Hades he says that he would liefer be on earth the hind of a landless man, than king over the Dead, so fast is the hold of this earth upon his heart. But he could not love his life so much
"Loved he not honour more."
Now, in the opening of the Iliad he is to lose life and the sunlight, and also to lose honour. This is no mere personal slight; loss of the honour which he is buying with his life is no unworthy cause of anger in such a hero. He complains, again and again, that Agamemnon has, on every occasion, dishonoured him. The seizure of Briseis, his special "mead of honour," is only the last straw, the culminating insult. "In like honour," he says, "are held both the coward and the brave." He has toiled most hardly of all. "Even as a bird bringeth her unfledged chickens each morsel as she winneth it, and with herself it goeth hard, even so was I wont to watch out many a sleepless night, and pass through many days of battle, warring with folk for their women's sake." There is here, in Book ix., that tenderness of reference to the devotion of the maternal instinct which characterises Achilles in his relations with his own mother, a goddess of many sorrows, for the sake of him who has chosen his doom. To her, in the first Book, as on the death of Patroclus, he cries, in the spirit of the little child of whom he speaks so touchingly in Book xvi.: "a fond little maid that runs by her mother's side, and bids her mother take her up, snatching at her skirts, and tearfully looks at her." Homer puts such words in the mouth of none but the slayer of men, Achilles.
"Mother," he cries by the grey sea, in Book i., "seeing thou didst of a truth bear me to so brief a span of life, honour at least ought the Olympian to have granted me."
Is it not plain that "the personal slight" to Achilles—being what he is, saying, like the great Montrose in a note scribbled on his pocket Bible, "Honour is my life," is it not plain that the insult is deadly both to life and honour?
In this sense Homer understands the wrath of Achilles. He had fond of tenderness,—he ransomed his captives, while Agamemnon slew the prisoners to whom Menelaus was giving quarter. Again, as we shall see ("The Supposed Expurgation of Homer"), it was far from unusual, in Homeric warfare, for the slayer to mutilate the slain, cutting off his head, putting it on a stake, or even carrying it home as a trophy. But Achilles did not even, as usual, despoil Eetion of his armour, "for his soul had shame of that; but he buried him in his inlaid armour, and raised a barrow over him." In contrast with his natural clemency, the wrath of Achilles for Patroclus's sake is all the more monstrous; he far transcends the customary ferocities of dishonour to the dead. Achilles says (xxi. pp. 100-105): "Until Patroclus met his day of destiny, dearer was it to my heart to spare the Trojans; and many I took alive and sold over sea." But when once his honour, his life-price, is taken from him, his wrath will be sated by nothing—not by prayers or gifts of atonement, but by the slaughter of his comrades among their ships—then, indeed, they will know his worth. It is this moral tragedy, corruptio optimi, that inspires Homer in the Iliad.
Achilles is, of all the men in Homer, the most passionately affectionate. His love of Patroclus, like that of Jonathan for David, "passeth the love of women"; an affection for his elder, the playmate of his childhood, so pure and so strong that poets of historic Greece could not understand it. But when he is smitten to the heart by the loss of Patroclus his wrath again breaks, as in the ninth Book of the Iliad, through all measure; and he does cruel and evil deeds, his revenge is hateful to Gods and men. This is the moral tragedy of the Iliad; and that which wrecks the heart and soul of Hamlet, or that which brings to shame the honour and courage of Macbeth, does not go deeper.