Achilles’ Character as an Internal Critique of Warmongering Ideals in the Iliad

Abstract

In this paper, I show how Achilles’ faults work as a lens through which we more readily see the problematic nature of ideals that cast war – and especially an aggressive war of conquest – in a poeticized and desirable light. I argue that in Homer’s Iliad, idealized images of war, which promise super-human glory, in the end, serve to undo and waste human life. I do not mean to say that in this archetypal war epic we find an outright critique of war. However, I argue that the Iliad holds its poeticized images of war in tension with the gruesome, life-negating violence to which these idealized representations give way.