III.5. The Weeping Body of Achilles

Achilles embodies all of the main heroic qualities that are accorded singly to other heroes. [1] He is beauty, strength, and excellence all at the same time. If, in a certain way, the Iliad exalts human energy during times of misfortune, [2] it is not surprising that Achilles embodies, by himself, almost all of the suffering in the poem. “Achilles is among the Homeric figures who experiences the most pain. And it is important to make clear that the ‘eternally striving youth’, with the radiance of his power and beauty, is also for us, on the threshold of Western culture, the figure who felt the most pain, a figure who is capable of great suffering,” writes Walter Schadewaldt. [3] And while the Iliad is indeed the story of Achilles’ anger, it is also the song of his sorrow.

Iliad 16.162 marks the close of a sequence: Achilles puts an end to his anger [4] and authorizes Patroclus to go into battle with his armor. His fate from then on is upended, and the last third of the poem especially paints the image of his grief. The fiction of an Achilles adakrutos ‘without tears’, which Thetis dreams for an instant, is impossible. “Would indeed that you had lived your span free from all sorrow at your ships,” [5] says his mother. It is precisely because he is the “best of the … Achaeans” [6] that he cannot be “without tears”; the lot of the heroic Achilles is necessarily bound to tears. His destiny is misfortune and the adjective apēmōn ‘he who knows no pain’ [7] reinforces adakrutos.

In leaving his anger behind, Achilles finds grief. Before examining the expression of his suffering in the Iliad, note the degree to which the death of Patroclus and the pain of Achilles are inextricably interwoven, if not equivalent.

A certain number of paradoxes and permutations warrant attention as well. In a gesture identical to the one Patroclus makes before convincing the son of Peleus to let him fight—that is to say, let him die—Achilles “struck his two thighs” (Iliad 16.125 and, for Patroclus, 15.397); this gesture always comes just before the death of the person who makes it. [8] Then, when he sobs upon the announcement of Patroclus’ death, it is he who, in a sense, occupies the place of the corpse. The real Patroclus is still on the battlefield, surrounded by the Trojans, and yet the gesture that Thetis makes toward Achilles is one reserved for the deceased: “She laid her hand upon his head and forced out a shrill cry, saying …” (18.71–72). She weeps for her living son with the gestures and words of funerary lamentation (18.54–60). [9]

One final note on a last analogy between the dead Patroclus and the suffering Achilles: the corpse of Patroclus is protected by Thetis, who instills nectar and ambrosia into his nostrils (Iliad 19.38–39); it is also nectar and ambrosia, poured by Athena into Achilles’ chest, that preserve his strength and energy (Iliad 19.347–348, 353–354).

As in our approach to courage, we will consider the question of the expression of heroic suffering from the standpoint of the warrior’s body, [10] focusing on the case of Achilles, since in the Iliad Achilles embodies the perfect warrior. In sobbing as well the hero’s body is enhanced, and qualities similar to those that are exalted in the practice of combat are used to describe the crying warrior.

The correspondences, however, are not so simple. Suffering in the epic is situated at the intersection of different categories of thought: biological necessities like food, rest, or sleep, psychological notions like erotic desire or courage, and aesthetic and moral values like the ideal of a beautiful heroic death are tightly interwoven by the poet when he presents heroes in the throes of pain. An attentive reading will determine the operational similarities between these different themes, but also—and more interestingly—the moments of interference where these different symbolic planes collide, as if the activity of weeping were a specific form of life, an autonomous physical and psychological condition, sufficient unto itself, that temporarily fuses together the different moments in the life of the epic hero.

Recalling the observations on the limbs of warriors, the knee, in particular, is a key component of the hero’s body. The joint of bravery, the knee—depending on whether it is stiff or flexible, firm or loose—expresses several of the warrior’s states of being.

Grief manifests as a slowing down of physical and social life. [11] When Achilles is grieving, he no longer participates in meals: he is separated from the social life of the banquet. He does not eat until he kills Hector, refusing meals each time they are offered by the Achaeans (Iliad 19.205, 209–210, 304, 306–307, 319–321, 346). Once he is in possession of his new armor, his only concern is to rush to the battlefield (19.206–210):

Achilles does not need to be comforted with meals; he burns with a desire for revenge and a suffering stronger than hunger: “if any comrade will hear me, bid me neither eat nor drink, for I am in great heaviness, and will stay fasting even to the going down of the sun” (19.306–307). In his particular condition, food—the poet says explicitly—is incompatible with his tears and the battle that somehow takes the place of meals. Achilles’ suffering isolates him from the rest of the army and makes him lose his common sense, but Odysseus takes it upon himself to offer his wisdom (19.160–163):

Food provides not only strength for the body, but also courage, menos and alkē. [12] For Achilles, sobbing may be equivalent to having a meal; while the Greeks dine, he cries (Iliad 23.3–4, 124–125). In his grief, he oscillates between two extreme attitudes toward food: on the one hand, he falls into an animal-like state when, at the height of his rage, he imagines shredding Hector to pieces and devouring him raw (22.347); on the other hand, he tends toward the divine, as the nectar and ambrosia he receives are not human foods (19.353–354).

The hero who suffers then is in a sort of vegetative state, nourishing himself on pain alone, “eating” his heart and not bread: “My son, how long will you keep on thus grieving and making moan? You are gnawing at your own heart” (Iliad 14.128–129). [13] It is in this setting that the active grief of Achilles comes to an end. In fact, after the intervention of Thetis, once the idea of returning Hector’s body has been approved, Achilles accepts the second phase of his destiny, and his actions become normalized. Consuming food marks a transitional stage, followed by a reinstatement of the norm.

When Priam arrives at the camp of the Myrmidons, he finds Achilles who “had but just done eating and drinking, and the table was still there” (Iliad 24.475–76). The refusal or the need to eat provides then a tempo for his periods of weeping. Through a beautiful reversal, it is Achilles who invites Priam to share his meal. Like Achilles, Priam fasts at the peak of his heartache; once the ransom for Hector’s body is accepted, he can think of eating. Achilles offers consolation [14] and reconciliation to Priam, and this reconciliation passes by way of commensality. [15]

As he remembers the meal, Achilles puts an end to his grief; it is an identical recollection that he offers to Priam when urging him to share his table. The example he selects to convince the old king is worth lingering over (Iliad 24.601–604, 610–620): In this complex sequence, the last major speech by Achilles, it is possible to identify several layers of meaning. [16] First, there is the parallel between the stories of Niobe and Priam. The anger of Apollo is the root cause of the death of Niobe’s children, just as Achilles’ anger causes Hector’s death. If the gods prevent the funerals of the Niobids, whose bloody bodies lie dead, Achilles for his part refuses to return Hector’s body and grows more obstinate every day. Niobe weeps nine days for her children before they are buried by the gods themselves; Priam asks Achilles for a truce for Hector’s funeral preparations—nine days to weep for him and one day to bury him—and Achilles himself places the body on the bier (Iliad 24.589). And finally, Niobe ruminates on her sorrow (kēdea pessei), and Priam does the same (kēdea muria pessō, 24.639). Grief has the properties of a food: it is cooked and digested (pessō). [17]

Niobe’s story condenses three principal, inextricably linked themes: maternity, memory, [18] and “self-satiating” grief. Niobe wanted to rival Leto, through the proxy of her offspring. Niobe’s “achievement” as the mother of many children diminished the prestige of Leto, who only had two herself. Punished for wanting to compare herself to a goddess, [19] she becomes a symbol of maternal suffering. Her fasting and her rigid inflexibility may be poetic ways of saying that a mother dies a little when her children are gone; thus Niobe is a kind of monument to eternal pain. [20] She is like a funeral stele, preserving the memory of her dead children; the image of a stele also characterizes Achilles’ horses when they cry hot tears for Patroclus (Iliad 17.434–44). [21] The rigidity of stone, like the continuous flow of tears resembling a spring, [22] suggests the permanence of remembrance, the eternity of memory. Niobe is the symbol of maternal suffering and, in this sense, the ultimate reference for all pain; it is this example that Achilles chooses to urge Priam to end his crying and feed himself.

Achilles eats after avenging and burying Patroclus, Niobe after the funeral for her children, Priam after accomplishing his mission to Achilles (24.641–642):

Just as Achilles does not eat, he does not sleep during his suffering: he cries for Patroclus every night “and sleep, before whom all things bow, could take no hold upon him” (Iliad 24.4–5). True solace does not come until after the reconciliation with Priam. In fact, Achilles only falls asleep for two—very brief—moments, and each time he is awakened quickly, once by the shadow of Patroclus and once by the Achaeans. [23] His futile attempt to embrace Patroclus’ shadow wakes him with a jolt (23.101). After the cremation of the body, he once again spends the night weeping. At dawn, exhausted, he falls asleep (23.232) at the same moment when the Achaeans are noisily gathering around him. His sleep only lasts a few moments (23.235). In both cases, this interrupted sleep seems to indicate a need to go further into the rituals of mourning: he must burn Patroclus’ body and build a monument before returning to sleep. However, Achilles will not return to the normal cycle of his life until he shares a meal with Priam, “reconciles” with him, and recovers both his ability to sleep and, at the same time, his love of Briseïs.

Just as Achilles goes without sleep until the end of the funeral ceremony for Patroclus, Priam is unable to eat or sleep until he recovers Hector’s body: “Never once have my eyes been closed from the day your hands took the life of my son,” he says to Achilles (Iliad 24.637–638). [24]

In the end, Achilles will be cleansed of the blood that covers him only after he lays Patroclus on the pyre and cuts his own hair (Iliad 23.44–46).

There are three phases then that clearly establish the end of Achilles’ grief and his reintegration into the community of the Achaeans: 1) having killed Hector, he can once again take part in meals; 2) having led the funeral rites, he cuts his hair and is purified (Iliad 23.141); 3) he then regains his ability to sleep, and Briseïs sleeps by his side (Iliad 24.675–676).

When he cries, the hero is entirely within his pain, as if isolated temporarily from the rest of life. He must go all the way through to the end of his aching in order to break free from it. Wholly consumed by his desire to cry, he will be sated by his tears, as the poet’s own words show. This vocabulary of sobbing is the same as that used to describe pleasure [25] —pleasure of sleep, of love, of eating, of the song of the bard. Achilles experiences a pleasure in playing the lyre (Iliad 9.186), just as he does when he is “sated with grief” (24.513).

The desire for tears can be set off by an external event (“Thetis stirred within them a still deeper desire for sobbing,” Iliad 23.14), by words (the lament of Achilles makes the Myrmidons cry, 23.108), by a gesture (Achilles leaving a lock of his hair on the body of Patroclus, 23.153); it can be provoked by seeing a loved one (the shade of Patroclus, 23.98; and of Anticlea, Odyssey 11.212), or the memory of someone who is absent (Peleus, 24.507).

More significantly, this desire is like hunger: it can be satiated. The formulaic verse αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ πόσιος καὶ ἐδητύός ἕντο (“as soon as they had had enough to eat and drink,” Iliad 1.469; 2.432; 7.323, etc.), [26] which so often describes a meal in Homer, finds an echo in the contexts of weeping. Before leaving for the Greek camp, Priam speaks of the moment when he will “have taken my son in my arms and satiated my desire for sobbing” (24.227).

This is the pleasure of consuming tears: one might say that heroes are sated on sobs, as they are, at other moments, on meat and wine. This is the meaning of the verbs korennumi and aō ‘to be satisfied, gorged, or disgusted by’, which are frequently used to depict sobbing. In the Iliad, a warrior can “gorge” himself on tears, just as he gorges himself on meat, combat, and war. [27]

But sometimes, when mortally wounded, he will in turn satisfy Ares with his blood and the dogs and birds with his flesh. His parents, in their grief, will then hope to gorge themselves on tears. The death of Hector provokes the following reaction in Priam: “Would that he had died in my arms, for so both his ill-starred mother who bore him, and myself, should have had the comfort of gorging ourselves on tears and mourning over him” (Iliad 22.427–428). [28]

A man who cries surrenders to the shuddering of his sobs, is satiated by them, and finally, once he has cried enough, he is liberated from them: the desire for tears, which enters into the body through pain, escapes when the pleasure-suffering has been satisfied (Iliad 24.513–515): Achilles, seated, and Priam, crouched at his feet, cry at length, the one for Patroclus and Peleus, the other for Hector. Once Achilles has worn out his sorrow, the desire for tears leaves, at the same time, his heart and his body. The fading of the desire to cry sets the body in motion: right away (autika, 24.515) the hero passes from a prostrate to a standing position. Though verse 514 may well have been athetized by Aristarchus, this does not seem to pose a problem. We have seen, in effect, that flash, that fatigue, that anger seep into the body of the warrior; [29] on the contrary, the fact that sobbing is incorporated deep inside the hero’s limbs confirms our hypothesis. For the warrior, to live out suffering in and through the body is one of the signs of his heroic character. It is this coinciding of emotional pain and its physical expression that controls the gestures of tears.

In the Iliad, the explosion of emotions is expressed in terms of physical transformation. Observe Achilles at the moment of the announcement of Patroclus’ death (Iliad 18.22–27): In a sense, Achilles merges with the corpse of Patroclus: he is in the same position, he disfigures himself (with dust); he tears out his hair, a symbol of his youth—and therefore a symbol of life [31] —as if he were participating momentarily in a state of death.

During most of his grief, Achilles remains lying down. Stretched out on the ground he weeps for his friend (Iliad 18.26–27, 170, 178 [keiso]); lying like him in the dust, Achilles holds Patroclus in his arms (19.4); he turns in all directions, moaning (24.5, 10–11); he paces and crawls around Patroclus’ funeral pyre (23.225).

₪

Thus, in moments of suffering, foregoing food and sleep, lying down, and temporarily disfiguring the body are ways of mimicking death. This travesty of death in combat—“he now lies in repose stretched on earth in the bitterness of his spirit” Thetis says to Hephaestus, exactly as she would say if Achilles were dead (Iliad 18.461; cf. 18.20)—as well as the analogous black cloud of grief that envelopes Achilles (18.22), further tightens the connection between tears and war. Furthermore, the extraordinary violence of Achilles’ gestures and the terrible moaning sound as he cries out (smerdaleon d’ōimōxen, 18.35) [32] are also reminders of the immense force inside his warrior’s body. In his tears, mingled with anger and grief, Achilles is, once again, “like a lion” (Iliad 18.318, 323).