In his article, Walling purports that the behavior and traits of Achilles, Homer’s magnificent poetic creation, represent diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder. Instead of formulaic verse, we now read about Achilles in formulaic diagnosis. When I told a classicist friend about this theory, he said, “Of course Achilles was antisocial—but he was also in the middle of a war!” Walling makes the mistake of conducting a cross-cultural comparison between our culture and one that is far removed in time, geography, and cultural values and was based on war, warriors, male domination, shame, and honor. The author also tries in a few pages to squeeze a young Greek warrior living some 3,000 years ago, a man told he is fated to die soon, into the cookie cuttermold of “antisocial personality,” a template arbitrarily defined, and periodically redefined, by predominantly 20th century Western European white men. Walling gives us a snapshot of a man who, as almost all students of Homer would agree (when they agree on little else), changes radically over the course of the 24 books. This psychological analysis of Achilles is not the first. Three other analyses—those of Graham Zanker, Jonathan Shay, and W Thomas MacCary—shed different lights on the intricately composed psyche of Homer’s hero. Zanker posits a “complexity of motive in Achilles.” He uses this allegedly antisocial hero as the paradigm of magnanimity, exemplified in the famous meeting (in book XXIV) of Achilles and Priam. Achilles has just killed, intentionally mutilated, and disgraced Priam’s son Hector to avenge the killing of Achilles’ dearest friend, Patroclus. Hermes escorts Priam deep behind Greek battle lines to Achilles’ tent in an effort to convince him to release Hector’s body for proper burial. In the scene, Priam invokes the memory of Peleus, Achilles’ own dead father, and the fiercest warrior in the war proves capable of compassion and tears and a change of mind that we previously thought inconceivable. Achilles’ generosity at this point in the poem is astounding given his recent display of wonton bloodshed and wrath (commentators of the Iliad point to this word in the first line of the epic as indicating where our proper attention belongs) against all things and persons Trojan. Using philosophical vocabulary more familiar to other critics of morality in Homer than it is to us, Zanker concludes that this generosity is a result of Achilles’ proximate motive of loyalty, his ultimate guilt-based motive for cooperative behavior, and his inner motives of affection and fair play. p137 For Shay, a psychiatrist with vast experience interviewing and treating veterans of the war in Vietnam, Achilles is a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He acts like one “already dead,” p52 suffers survivor guilt p70 and suicidal thoughts, p72 and eventually evolves into a rage-filled warrior of the type Shay terms a “berserker,” p77 a transition that forever changes a person. p98 In a masterful comparison of his experiences with Vietnam war veterans, The Iliad, classical texts, and relevant secondary materials on the conflict in Vietnam, post-traumatic stress, Homer, and related classical works, Shay builds a cogent argument for Achilles being the victim of the machineries of war. He describes the denouement of the reconciliation between Achilles and Priam as one of “mourning, not reassurance,” p183 a sad reminder that, in the life of humans and in great literature about humans, especially humans at war, all does not, usually, end happily ever after. MacCary adopts a psychoanalytic approach to Achilles and The Iliad. After carefully laying the theoretic groundwork for an argument based onHegel and Freud, he then proposes his apology for Achilles as a pre
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Jul 1, 2003
Holly Bannish + 1
Open Access