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Sulking in his Tent: The Anger of Achilles
Achilles is the central character in Homer's Iliad. As a member of the warrior class, his primary values are honor and killing, privilege and power. The values associated with process thought - compassion and humility, non-violence and forgiveness - would make no sense to him. They would seem weak. So would the idea that God is open and relational: a fellow sufferer who understands. The Achilles presented in the Iliad comes from a different culture and different world: that of iron age Greece with its warrior societies. We need not critique this Greek world; that would be anachronistic. To the contrary, we best recognize that there's some Achilles in all of us, if not in our capacities for violence, then at least in our capacity to sulk and nurse grievances.
For much of the poem Achilles is sulking in his tent because he has not been given the honor he considers his due. He is angry because the leader of the Greek forces, King Agamemnon, takes a captive woman named Briseis from him. His pride has been wounded, and he sulks.
But sulking is too soft a word to name what is really happening. Achilles' anger is not mere crossness or irritability, says Anthony Verity in the video below; he is not suffering from a mere spat with Agamemnon. His anger is vengeful anger, almost godlike in its fury. It "goes to the very center of his being," consuming him.
Only at the end of the Iliad, after his anger has been unleashed in violence, it is transformed into pity and shame. He realizes that someone he has killed, Hector, and whose body he is mutilating, is the beloved son of King Priam, and that this son matters as much to the king as do those about whom he cares. He becomes more human and more humane.
Achilles' transformation will be well understood by process theologians. They - we - believe that there is a spirit of creative transformation at work in the world which can indeed transform hearts into something close to love. For us, love is much more valuable than privilege and power; we see love as stronger than vengeful anger, albeit in a quieter, less flamboyant way.
But Achilles' anger will also make sense to us, not because it is laudable but because it is understandable. Influenced by Whitehead's cosmology, we believe that intense emotions, positive and negative, pro-social and anti-social, are at the heart of human life. We human beings are inwardly propelled and often consumed by powerful emotions such as rage and wrath. Like Achilles, we can be enslaved to these emotions, even as we might not consider it slavery. Often, we feel justified in our wrath, deeming ourselves victims.
Process theology adds that anger can be shared. We can "feel the feelings" of others, including their anger, and be swept into it, such that we become collectively wrathful. We can believe that, collectively, we are victims and perhaps also that one person represents our victimhood. This person can be a "hero" to us, and we can turn to the person as a liberator from our victimhood. He becomes our warrior-hero.
If we are consumed by wrath the only hope is that, like Achilles at the end of the Iliad, we can come to see that others suffer, too, and that our own actions have led to their suffering. We take responsibility. This taking of responsibility is the beginning, but not the end, of creative transformation.
Jay McDaniel, 11/18/22
The Anger of Achilles: BBC
The Escalating Anger of Achilles
"The Iliad can be difficult for modern readers, because it tells of an archaic, heroic, violent world whose values are strange to us and whose heroes behave badly by our standards. The Iliad is a violent poem about brutal men, none more brutal than Achilles. Their excellence is in their pursuit of fame and honor, in their intelligence, leadership and friendships, and in their killing skills. Their anger is passionate, brutal, at times whipped into mad frenzy by the gods. Homer describes battles in carefully anatomical, formulaic detail; the spear goes in the liver and out the nostrils, the body drops to the dust, the corpses pile up, men die over one priceless, worthless, woman, Helen, who ran off with the worthless Trojan Prince Paris.
The Iliad is about escalating anger and its final bitter resolution. It starts with the pointless, impious anger of Agamemnon at the priest Chryses, who tries to ransom his daughter with appropriate treasure. Next is the righteous anger of Chryses at Agamemnon for refusing to accept the ransom and return his daughter. Chryses invokes Apollo, who starts the plague, which kills the Greeks. Then there is the mutual anger of Agamemnon and Achilles as they quarrel over redistributing war-prize women, the petulant anger of Achilles as he withdraws his men from the fighting, and Achilles' murderous fury when Hector kills Patroclus. The anger eventually spreads to the elements (fire and water) and the gods, who enter the battle as eagerly violent as the human beings. Only when Zeus declares “enough,” do gods and humans let go of their anger and resume an orderly, civil life."
- Dr. Diane Thompson, Northern Virginia Community College, "Introduction to the Iliad" in the Homer Study Guide
The Iliad: A Scholarly Discussion
The Anger of Achilles: Forward forward to 5:20
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great epic poem attributed to Homer, telling the story of an intense episode in the Trojan War. It is framed by the wrath of the Greek hero Achilles, insulted by his leader Agamemnon and withdrawing from the battle that continued to rage, only returning when his close friend Patroclus is killed by the Trojan hero Hector. Achilles turns his anger from Agamemnon to Hector and the fated destruction of Troy comes ever closer.
Edith Hall Professor of Classics at King's College London
Barbara Graziosi Professor of Classics at Princeton University
Paul Cartledge A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow and Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture at Clare College, Cambridge
Jonathan S. Burgess, Homer (I.B.Tauris, 2014)
C. Emlyn-Jones, L. Hardwick and J. Purkis (eds), Homer: Readings and Images (Open University/Duckworth, 1992)
Robert Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Barbara Graziosi, Homer (Oxford University Press, 2016)
Jasper Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (Oxford University Press, 1983)
Homer (trans. Robert Fagles), The Iliad (Penguin, 1992)
James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Duke University Press, 1994)
Seth L. Schein, The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad (University of California Press, 1992) Jenny Strauss Clay, Homer's Trojan Theater: Space, Vision and Memory in the Iliad(Cambridge University Press, 2011)