Achilles, His Armor, His Psyche

Someone recently asked, what was it that sent me after Achilles, led me to the Hare book, and restructured his entire existence to finally - after three thousand years of poets and writers not getting it - explain him correctly? It was an encounter of the kind that only a writer can understand.

There I was, merrily banging away at a final outline for Ajax, when he suddenly woke up and said to me, "Your whole theme is the brotherhood of arms, isn't it?" 
"Yes, so?"

"Achilles died when he went secretly to Priam to make private peace."

"Yes, so?"

"By going there, Achilles violated the brotherhood pact, right?"

"I hadn't thought that far but okay, yes, so?"

"Everyone believes that I died because my brothers in arms violated the brotherhood pact by allowing Agamemnon to give Achilles' armor, which I thought I was entitled to, to Odysseus, right?"

"Yes, so?"

"But Achilles walked into our enemy's house to betray us all, right?"

"Yes, so?"

“So," he said, with his own ponderous patience, "Why would I even want it?"

"Oh shit."

Walter Friedrich Otto and the Greek Gods

"Warrior" is getting further shaping with my reading of another book, "The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion" by Walter Friedrich Otto. The issue I - and most others - have had with those gods is that they seem so silly, light and irrational in contrast with the powerful realism of most Greek thought. It is easier to ignore them and go back to pre-deistic beliefs, as I did with "Peryton" rather than have to try to take them seriously.

But Otto says that this is wrong. In fact he writes. "The ancient Greek religion comprehended the things of this world with the most powerful sense of reality possible, and nevertheless - nay, for that very reason - recognized in them the marvelous delineations of the divine. It does not revolve upon the anxieties, longings, and spiritual broodings of the human soul: its temple is the world, from whose vitality and movement emanates its knowledge of the divine."

Well, okay then. Let's try that.

Achilles

It's interesting how a story one plans meticulously can suddenly rise and stride away on its own course, and there is nothing to do but follow and take notes.

While Odysseus is still the master manipulator, Achilles (Ajax's parallel cousin) has suddenly come to full, chilling life with my reading of "Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us" by Robert D Hare. This book explains everything that Achilles did, before and after the events of The Iliad. And that explanation does not flatter him.

From his hiding among the girls to avoid being called by Agamemnon to go to Troy, to his wailing for his mother for help, to his fury over the loss of Briseis and Patroclus, to his death while negotiating a secret peace with the Trojans, all is explained by Dr Hare.

Brothers in Arms

The film "Fury" captures beautifully the power and complexity of the 'brothers in arms'  phenomenon, which is further explained in the trailer on the DVD, and here.

The Bowe Bergdahl story is part of it. The reason why the men in the unit that he walked away from were - and still are, in many cases - so ambivalent about it. Even if their brother abandoned them to the point of costing several of them their lives, how could they turn against him? There is no room in the code for such a thing.

Many suicides among military and former military members are part of it, too. 'Real life' is flat, dusty, boring, meaningless, after that intensity. What's the point in it? Jobs, spouses, children are nothing by comparison.