'How heroic do you find the character of Achilles?'

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‘How heroic do you find the character of Achilles?’

A hero is more than just a character that it especially noble, courageous, self-sacrificing etc. A hero is also a protagonist, a character to whom we can relate, and with whom we can sympathise. Ultimately a hero is a character with which we can identify, and an example which each of us wishes to follow.

Achilles often appears to be such a character. Of all the Homeric heroes, he is by far the most passionate and emotional. When begging his mother to help him in book 1 he speaks “with tears falling”. His protection of Briseis and his honour is extreme. He goes to the lengths of withdrawing from the fighting, even though “his heart yearned for battle”, he causes and endures the suffering his fellow Argives, and his speaks affectionately of Briseis as his “wife” – in stark contrast to Agamemnon’s relationship with Chryseis, whose purpose Agamemnon describes as to “serve my bed”.

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Achilles is also a great man, and has a god-like status within his army. It is Achilles who calls the assembly to discuss how to end the plague in the Greek camp and it is Achilles who protects Kalchas from Agamemnon.

But the character of Achilles in book 9 is anything but heroic. His ears to deaf to three impassioned pleas of his dear friends Odysseus, Ajax and Phoinix, his tutor. He is offered all that has been taken from him: his girl, Briseis; women from Lesbos, the island which he captured and from which Agamemnon took the ...

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