Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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      ‘The man who is incapable of working in common, or who in his self-sufficiency has no need of others, is no part of the community,’ wrote Aristotle. Such a man is ‘like an animal or a god’. Achilles, who has divorced himself from the fellowship of the army, who looks to Zeus alone for the validation of his claim to honour, has made himself independent of his fellow men. He re-enters the battle not to save his compatriots, but in pursuit of a private revenge. In the cataclysmic battle that follows he is both subhuman and superhuman, both bestial and divine. He is likened to a forest fire, to a massive ox threshing barley, to a lion (repeatedly), to the Dog Star that rains down pestilence, to the frenzied god of war. He kills and kills and kills until the earth is drenched with blood and the river that flows before the walls of Troy is choked with corpses. His rampage is outrageous, so transgressive in the extremity of its violence that earth and heaven alike are angered by it. The river rises up against the desecration of its waters: a tremendous tidal wave threatens to engulf Achilles and sweep him away. The god Hephaestus, to protect him, hurls a great fireball down from heaven. The blaze races across the plain, blasting trees and corpses and scorching the river banks until the river is all but dried. The conflict is elemental, apocalyptic, and at its centre Homer places Achilles, a figure from a nightmare, trumpet-tongued, gigantic, shrieking out his rage, his sharp-hoofed stallions trampling on corpses, sending up sprays of blood, blood on his wheels, blood on his chariot’s handrail, ‘bloody filth splattering both his invincible arms’.

      In this war the Trojans are at home. At night they retire from the battlefield to well-built halls, to wives and children. They belong to a polity. Even the bravest warrior among them must defer to the civil authority, King Priam. They have temples and priests. The landscape in which they do battle with the Greeks is one they have tamed and made productive. Their horses have grazed the earth that is now slippery with blood. The spring past which Achilles chases Hector has been their washing place. Their babies wave to them as they advance through the Scaean Gates. Their parents and elders line the city walls, watching the fighting from a position of security. Hector is husband, father, son, and brother, as well as being the protector of his home and his fellow citizens. In the frenzy of battle he may become, like Achilles, as fierce as a wild beast, but he is essentially domestic. On the day of his death his wife Andromache sits weaving as she waits for him, within earshot of the fight, and her women have the water heated ready for his bath.

      The Greeks, by contrast, are far from home, from family, from women, from the sources of their culture. They may have come from a civilization, but they are no longer part of it. For nine years and more they have been encamped on the windy plain with the grey sea behind them. They are cut off from parents and children, isolated from the continuum of generation. All male, all adult, only a few of them old, they form, as any army does, a pathologically unbalanced community. They are raiders, cattle rustlers: they neither grow nor produce anything. Homeless and predatory, they circle the walls of Troy like hungry wolves.

      This existence, the life of a vagrant marauder, of a dangerous and perpetually endangered outsider, is what Achilles chose when he picked the path that would lead to his early and glorious death. The Trojans fight because it is their civic duty to do so, to ‘form a wall before our loving parents, wives and sons/To defend Troy’. Achilles fights because he has a lust for ‘the bloody grind of war’. Freud would recognize Hector as a devotee of Eros, the creative deity ‘whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, in one great unity, the unity of mankind’. In battle he is courageous and terrible, but his fighting is a service performed for the sake of the community. It is a function of the relationships by which he defines himself. Achilles the loner, by contrast, is an agent of Thanatos, the force that divides man from man and which drives its acolytes to seek their own and others’ deaths. He is one of the wild ones, one who has rejected the restrictions as well as the rewards of civilian life, whose readiness to risk his own death has accorded him unlimited licence. At large on the plains outside the Trojan walls he is a terrifying apparition, the personification of cruelty and brute force. But he is also, always, even when crazy-eyed and cloaked in others’ blood, dazzlingly beautiful.

      Everything about him is exciting, even when (especially when) he is at his most psychotic. He is the first of the lordly delinquents, the charismatic outcasts by whom law-abiding citizens have always been fascinated as well as scared witless. Off the battlefield, arguing in the assembly or in his tent, he exhilarates by his uncompromising integrity and his emotional extremism. In the thick of the fighting he generates a related but darker response. His titanic energy, his lethal skill, his pitilessness, ring out like another, harsher, kind of truth-telling. ‘Come friend,’ he says to a Trojan prince who clasps his knees, unarmed, abjectly begging for mercy. ‘You too must die. Why moan about it so?/ … Look, you see how handsome and powerful I am? … Even for me I tell you/Death and the strong force of fate are waiting./There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon/When a man will take my life in battle too.’ This is the truth. The coolness with which Achilles faces it is connected with the deplorable but intoxicating fury with which he slaughters his fellow men.

      Such courage and such rage are not human. ‘The salt grey sunless ocean gave you birth/And the towering blank rocks’, Patroclus tells him, reproaching him for his indifference to his fellows’ fate. Before their final duel Hector proposes a pact binding the winner to return the loser’s corpse to his own people for decent burial. Hector is dressed in the armour he stripped from Patroclus’ dead body, the armour of Achilles. He looks just like Achilles; he is nearly his equal in arms; he is what Achilles might be if he chose to respect the conventions governing human intercourse and rendering its useful continuance possible. Achilles answers by disowning any connection between his wild self and his civilized double. ‘Don’t talk to me of pacts. There are no binding oaths between men and lions.’ He acknowledges no obligation now to anyone or to any power other than his own rage. He is ready to shuffle off his humanity altogether, to become completely bestial. He would like to eat Hector’s flesh. He is unconstrained by any inhibition, any law. He has already consented to his own death, a decision of inhuman bravado which has emancipated him even from what Tacitus called ‘that hindrance to all mighty enterprises, the desire for survival’. Death may be immortality’s opposite, but it confers a similar invulnerability. Death-dealing and bent on dying, Achilles has achieved absolute freedom.

      Panic-stricken, the Trojans flee before him, racing for the security of the city. At last only Hector is left outside the walls. The two champions confront each other. Achilles is deadly as the Dog Star, brilliant as the blazing sun. Hector, the noble, all but invincible Hector, loses his nerve and runs. Three times the great runner Achilles chases him round the walls of Troy. Hector is humiliated, pathetic, as feeble as a cringing dove. At last he turns to fight and be killed. With his last breath he foretells Achilles’ own death, but Achilles, as impervious to fear as he is to compassion, taunts him: ‘Die, die! For my own death, I’ll meet it freely.’ As soon as the Trojan is still the rest of the Greeks run up. In a scene of horrible frenzy each one of them stabs Hector’s corpse, until Achilles calls them off. He, the killer, will also be the prime desecrator of Hector’s body. He pierces the tendons in the Trojan prince’s ankles (the tendons later to be known by his own name) and lashes them to the back of his chariot. As he whips his horses to a gallop and races over the plain back to the Greek camp Hector’s head, so handsome once, is dragged bouncing in the dust behind him. From the walls of Troy the watchers, Hector’s parents among them, scream out their horror and their despair.

      This agent of mass slaughter and perpetrator of atrocity, this ‘monstrous man’ as Priam justly calls him, СКАЧАТЬ