Islamist terrorists and Achilles? Please don't compare them at all!

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Date published: 7/6/2004

THE JUNE 26 op-ed by Edward Hudgins, director of the Washington Objectivist Center ["Myth-Ridden Greeks previewed the brutality of today's Islamists"], was well-intended and essentially correct in opposing the radical Islam culture of hate and prejudice to the rule of reason cultivated by the Western world. But its main example was ill-conceived and the pictorial juxtaposition of Brad Pitt's Achilles to the group of masked terrorists about to behead their hostage was, to say the least, misleading.

There is no legitimate way to equate the noble and valiant hero Achilles, an inspiration of a great many generations of Western youth, to the sneaky murderous gang of terrorist kidnappers. Any reader of "The Iliad" knows that the celebrated "wrath of Achilles," when his upper-in-command Agamemnon takes the captive maiden Briseis away from him, stems from the issue of personal honor, fairness, and manliness, and the hero's reaction was, in fact, retreating from the battle rather than blind violence. "Why should I fight the Trojans," he says, "who have done me no wrong?" (Iliad 1, 180.)

The death of his friend Patroclus (or Patroklos; not "Petraclos," as in Hudgins!) spurs Achilles' rage against the Trojans, and he does, indeed, lose himself in the fit of murderous revenge. But the visit of old King Priam brings out the best of Achilles, as the old king and the young man embrace each other's miseries in their profound realization of the common human fate, and, moreover, of their mutual interdependence. Not only did Achilles "become human again, recovering his sense of decency" (Hudgins), but, as a result, he ascends to the new level of humaneness and personal introspection.

Perhaps a better analogy to modern-day terrorists would be the post-Iliadic figure of the son of Achilles, Pyrrhus, who joined the Greek army after his father's death: a ruthless, cold-blooded slaughterer with no redeeming qualities of Achilles' personality. As he murders King Priam on the last night of Troy (Virgil, Aeneid 2, 540), the old king scolds the insolent youth in his last words: "Achilles, whom you falsely claim your father, was nothing like you: he knew shame and respected the rights of parenthood, taking pity of the supplicant enemy Priam, when he returned Hector's corpse to me, and sent me back to my kingdom."

Date published: 7/6/2004