Ερημίτης 🇬🇷 nag-retweet
Everyone's fighting about Achilles again.
Whatever side you're on, most of the takes are flattening him into a meme. Let me remind you who he actually was.
Achilles was raised by Chiron, the wisest of the centaurs, who taught him medicine, music, and philosophy alongside war. He could heal wounds and play the lyre. He was never just a killer.
His mother, the sea goddess Thetis, knew the prophecy. He could live a long, peaceful life at home in obscurity, or die young at Troy and be remembered forever.
He chose Troy. Knowing.
When his best friend Patroclus was killed wearing his armor, Achilles' grief broke him. He tore his face. He poured ashes on his head. He refused to eat. Homer gives him the most devastating mourning scene in Western literature, and then Thetis appears and confirms it: if you go back to kill Hector, you will die soon after.
He went back anyway.
But here's the scene people forget, the one classicists call the moral heart of the Iliad.
After killing Hector and dragging his body around the walls of Troy, Achilles is visited at midnight, alone in his tent, by Hector's elderly father, King Priam. Priam, the father of the man Achilles killed, kneels and kisses "the terrible, man-slaying hands that had killed so many of his sons."
And Achilles weeps. They weep together. He lifts the old king up, feeds him, gives him a bed for the night, and returns Hector's body for burial with full honors. He even pauses the war so the Trojans can mourn.
That's how the Iliad ends. Not a duel. Not a sack. An act of mercy between two grieving men.
This is why, six centuries later, Alexander the Great sailed to Troy, anointed himself with oil, ran a footrace around Achilles' tomb, and slept every night with a dagger and a copy of the Iliad under his pillow.
This is why the Greek word for hero, hērōs, was practically synonymous with his name.
He chose to die for his friend. He wept with his enemy's father. He's been a hero for 2,700 years for a reason.
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