“Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles.”
With this powerful invocation, Homer opens The Iliad, placing the hero’s wrath at the heart of the narrative. It is with fury—not with love, honour, or courage—that the foundational song of Western literature begins. The Trojan War, with all its mythological grandeur, is merely the backdrop to a much more intimate tragedy: that of a man who does not know what it means to be happy.
Across its 24 books, The Iliad does not recount the entire war, as many believe, but just fifty days of its tenth and final year. We do not witness the famous tale of the wooden horse, nor the fall of Troy, but rather the slow self-destruction of a man consumed by disordered passions. What is truly at stake is not the fate of the walled city, but the fate of Achilles—and with it, the portrait of a human type that remains all too familiar to us.
Achilles is the greatest of warriors. Son of the nymph Thetis and the mortal Peleus, raised by the centaur Chiron, invincible in battle, endowed with supernatural speed and strength, he is everything a hero is supposed to be. But he is also vain, impulsive, proud, cruel. His life is marked by a tragic choice: to live a long, anonymous life, or to die young and win eternal glory. He chooses glory. And in doing so, he condemns himself.
For this essay, we will not delve into the broader context of the war—the flight of Helen with Paris, or the Greek alliance to besiege Troy. Our narrative begins when Agamemnon, king of the Achaeans, seizes Briseis, the young woman awarded to Achilles as a war prize. Wounded in his pride, the hero withdraws from battle.
His anger is not directed solely at the Greek king but at the very system that betrayed him. He retreats to his tent and watches from afar the carnage that follows, as the Trojans, led by Hector, begin to triumph. Without Achilles, the Achaeans are on the verge of defeat. But he does not return. His wounded honour weighs more heavily than any collective duty.
During this period, other figures emerge to enrich the human drama of The Iliad. Hector, for instance, is the opposite of Achilles. He fights out of duty, not for glory. He is a loving husband, a devoted father, a respectful son. He defends home, city, and the ordinary life. In his final conversation with his wife Andromache, we see he is fully aware he will die. Yet he remains. His heroism is more human, more restrained, and therefore more tragic.
The greatest tragedy, however, is yet to come. Patroclus, Achilles’ dearest companion—depicted in some translations as a cousin and in others even as a lover—dons his armour and leads the Myrmidons in a desperate attempt to save the Greeks. He manages to hold off the Trojan advance but is killed by Hector. Only then does Achilles return. But now, he is no longer driven by honour, but by grief, guilt, and the thirst for revenge. The war he once rejected becomes his only outlet. His wrath turns to despair, and the battlefield into a stage of unrestrained fury.
The duel between Achilles and Hector is one of the climactic moments of The Iliad. Hector, abandoned by the gods, is deceived by Athena and slain before the walls of Troy. Achilles is not content with killing him. He ties Hector’s body to his chariot and drags it for days before the eyes of his family and the city’s people. Here, the hero crosses the line into barbarism. His pain knows no bounds. The glory he sought can no longer console him. Neither victory, nor vengeance, nor slaughter brings his friend back.
Then, in the final book of the epic, the unthinkable occurs. Priam, the aged king of Troy, ventures alone into the enemy camp to beg for his son’s body. He kneels before Achilles, kisses the hands that killed Hector, and pleads, out of pity, to be allowed to honour the dead. At that moment, something breaks. Achilles, consumed until then by relentless rage, is faced with a man as broken as he is. And he weeps. He weeps for Priam, for Peleus, his own father, for Patroclus, for himself. For the first time, Achilles feels compassion.
But is that enough to make him happy?
The answer, almost inevitably, is no.
Achilles was not happy. He did not even know where happiness might lie. At every turn, Homer shows us a man living in expectation: of glory, of revenge, of redemption. But glory, as he discovers, is silent. Revenge is hollow. Redemption is fleeting. Achilles is a man forever chasing something that never fills him. And it is not for lack of courage or love. He loves Briseis, he loves Patroclus, he mourns the absence of his father. But these affections have no place in his heroic journey. He is condemned to forsake ordinary life in pursuit of an ideal that ultimately destroys him.
This is where an inevitable comparison arises between two heroes of that saga: Achilles and Odysseus. Though Odysseus appears in The Iliad only as a clever counsellor, in The Odyssey we encounter his true story: he wants to go home. Odysseus resists sirens, cyclopes, seductive goddesses, and countless temptations because he knows what he desires. His happiness lies in the ordinary: his wife, his son, his home. Achilles, on the other hand, rejects the common life. And pays dearly for it.
This contrast between the two heroes is not merely a matter of literary taste. It strikes at the core of our modern experience. How often do we exchange the peace of a simple moment for the promise of something grand yet to come? How often do we sacrifice present love for an ideal of success or recognition that may never materialise? Achilles is, in this sense, a mirror. He represents the youth who would rather burn bright and die than grow old beside a beloved. He also represents the modern professional who accumulates titles and accolades, yet never truly lives. Achilles is the myth of performance that never satisfies.
Great twentieth-century thinkers have pointed this out. Simone Weil, in her essay The Iliad or the Poem of Force, argues that the true protagonist of the epic is not Achilles, but force itself—an entity that turns men into things. Rachel Bespaloff, for her part, sees Achilles as the tension between inner freedom and tragic destiny. George Steiner calls The Iliad the absolute tragedy, one where even final compassion cannot change the course of destruction. And Harold Bloom notes that Achilles is the most self-aware of heroes: he knows he is choosing death, and chooses it nonetheless. Is glory worth more than life?
It is tempting to think Homer answers yes. After all, Achilles is celebrated, sung, immortalised. But Homer is subtler than he seems. He shows us that even at the height of glory, Achilles is alone. When Priam kneels before him, the hero is no longer invincible, no longer untouchable. He is a wounded man, tired, vulnerable. And this late, beautiful, but melancholic humanity does not undo the tragedy he has wrought.
If we look closely, we see that Achilles fails not from lack of strength, but from lack of virtue. He is not temperate, for he is ruled by emotion. He is not prudent, for he spurns advice. He is not just, for he places his own honour above the lives of all. And he is charitable only at the last moment, when he has lost everything he loved. His vices—anger, pride, vengeance—prevent him from being whole. And where there is no wholeness, there is no happiness.
In the end, Achilles is the image of a man who had everything—except what truly matters. His fame endured through the centuries, but he never tasted the simple peace of life. He died young, yes, and glorious. But also incomplete. He died never knowing what it meant to be simply a man, with affections, mistakes, and bonds—free from the burden of being the greatest of all.
And that is why, at the close of The Iliad, we do not celebrate victory—we mourn the void. Because, among all of Homer’s heroes, Achilles was the brightest, and perhaps for that very reason, the saddest.