ACHILLES’ EDUCATION ON THE LIMITS OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE
The individual who follows most clearly the path from trusting in divine providence to relying on human providence is Achilles. To begin with, Achilles seems to trust in the justice of the gods, confident in the belief that, “If a man obeys the gods, they heed him greatly as well” (1.218).
Accordingly, when Achilles single-handedly saves the Achaians from the terrible plague of Apollo by inducing Agamemnon to return his captive mistress, the daughter of Chryses, the priest of Apollo, to her father, and Agamemnon responds by punishing Achilles, with the acquiescence of all of the Achaians, by depriving him of his captive mistress, Achilles first resolves to kill the unjust king confident that the gods will support him (1.188-205). When Athena intervenes and informs him that Hera forbids him from attacking Agamemnon since she loves both men equally, Achilles obeys this divine command but is shaken and troubled by this apparent example of divine injustice (1.206-218, 1.348-356). Nonetheless, he looks to Father Zeus to right this wrong and prays to him, through his mother, to punish Agamemnon and the Achaians (1.407-412). However, when Zeus delays his punishment of Agamemnon and the Achaians for their injustice toward Achilles, Achilles dares to wonder whether the gods do truly reward the just and punish the unjust. When Achilles' friends beg him to forgive Agamemnon and return to battle to save the Achaians, Achilles dares to ask whether those who sacrifice themselves for others are ever rewarded either by men or by gods. As he remarks,There is an equal portion for the one who stays back and if someone fights hard. The evil one and the noble one are held in single honor. He still goes down to death, the man who has done no deeds, and the one who has done many. Nothing more is laid up for me, once I suffered pains in my spirit, always risking my life by fighting.
(9.318-322)Achilles here suggests that, even though the gods are believed to reward the virtuous and punish the wicked, they in truth leave all humans to fend for themselves, to suffer on their own, and eventually to perish on their own.
Later in the poem, Zeus appears to meet Achilles' demand for justice by bringing Agamemnon and the Achaians to the very brink of destruction. But Zeus also unjustly allows Achilles' dearest and most virtuous companion Patroclus - the man who saves the Achaians from destruction and is hailed by Menelaus as the best of the Achaians (17.689) - to be killed by Apollo, Zeus's own son, and by Hector. Achilles concludes from this apparent injustice that, given their immortal nature, the gods are simply incapable of caring about or understanding mortal beings.[192] As Achilles remarks at the end of the poem to King Priam, who is grieving over the death of his own son, “there is nothing to be accomplished by numbing lamentation. For such is the way the gods spun for miserable mortals, to live in grief; but they themselves have no sorrows” (24.524-526). Achilles highlights here not only the common mortal condition that he shares with the Trojan king, but also the gulf that separates them, as mortals, from the gods. Because humans are destined to suffer all the painful longing and the painful grief that mortals must suffer, humans must accept their suffering and their mortality with a measure of calm resignation rather than endless, excruciating lamentation. But because the gods inflict such sorrows on humans, and because the gods themselves have no sorrows, humans must not look to the gods for relief from their sorrows; for the carefree gods, Achilles suggests here, neither care for humans nor understand them.
Achilles goes on to act on this insight into the indifference of the gods by displaying a sublime humanity. Priam has come to Achilles to beg for the return of his beloved son’s corpse. The gods have ordered Achilles to return Hector’s corpse.
But after agreeing to return the corpse, Achilles offers the noble and virtuous Priam a great gift. Achilles asks Priam how many days he would like to celebrate the funeral of Hector. When Priam asks for 12 days of peace to bury his beloved son, Achilles vows to hold back the Achaians during all that time (24.650-672). Now, this benefaction - this gift of a 12-day truce - is entirely free on the part of Achilles: The gods do not command it and even Priam had not dared to ask for it. Achilles would seem to derive no benefit from it whatsoever, no honor, for example, from the Achaians or from the gods. This, the noblest and most compassionate act in the poem, is entirely independent of the gods, an act of human rather than divine compassion, an act of human rather than divine providence.[193]To be sure, Achilles’ doubt in the gods is not thoroughgoing or complete. Even though he warns against trusting in the gods for assistance, he still holds out some hope that Zeus may bestow some “noble” reward upon humans (24.527-530). Still, more than anyone else in Homer’s poems, Achilles articulates and acts upon the insight that an unbridgeable gulf separates the immortal gods from mortal humans. Therefore, his final act in the poem is an act motivated by compassion and admiration for a fellow human being rather than an act of piety.
One may object that Homer’s other great hero, Odysseus, moves from trusting in the gods to recognizing how unreliable they are. As we have seen, after basking in the singularly open care of Zeus’s daughter Athena while at Troy, Odysseus suffers the terrible anguish of being suddenly abandoned by both Athena and Zeus and even suffering at their hands, for ten long years after the fall of Troy.[194] Moreover, he displays a tremendous capacity for self-reliance by brilliantly and effectively saving himself and his men from the monstrous Cyclops.[195] His experiences evidently bring him face to face with the harsh truth that the gods are fundamentally unreliable because they are fundamentally indifferent to humans, and therefore that one should rely on human ingenuity and the help of human beings rather than the gods.
And yet, Odysseus clearly recoils before that truth.[196] For, especially once he returns to Ithaca, Odysseus returns wholeheartedly to his trust in the gods and relies entirely on Athena, rather than his own wits or the aid of his surpassingly wise wife, to vanquish the suitors and recover his kingdom.[197] As Odysseus acknowledges to his son Telemachus, he has no clear plan to overcome the 118 men oppressing his family - the suitors along with their servants - and the even larger number of their angry relatives, other than an emphatic dependence on the not-so-dependable gods.[198] Now, Odysseus’s trust in the gods is apparently crowned with success and he ends the poem happily. In his final reference to Odysseus in the poem, Homer says “Thus spoke Athena, and he obeyed her, and he rejoiced in his spirit” (24.545). Indeed, as we have seen, Odysseus is said to be happy in Homer’s poems far more than any other character.[199] In this way, through the story of Odysseus, Homer appears to teach that the life based on trust in the gods is the happy life. Yet Odysseus’s happiness is based on a willful delusion, since his own experiences have clearly demonstrated to him that the gods cannot be trusted. In Homer’s account, Achilles suffers much more than Odysseus, but he faces the truth about the gods more squarely than does Odysseus. Insofar as Achilles experiences happiness, it is a more stable happiness than that of Odysseus, since it is based on singing thoughtfully about human beings rather than on relying thoughtlessly on the fundamentally unreliable gods (Iliad 9.185-191, 24.525-527).i°1196
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201 For accounts of Homer’s thought that stress the superiority of Odysseus to Achilles, see Clay i983;Benardete 1997, 2005. Consider as well Zuckert 1988, 19-20; Deneen 2000; Kundmueller 2019. For accounts of Homer’s thought that are more critical of Odysseus, see Bolotin i989; Ruderman i995, i999. For accounts of Homer’s thought that emphasize the thoughtfulness of Achilles, see, again, Bolotin 1989, and Burns 1996. Consider as well Saxonhouse 1988; Lutz 2006.