/lit/ - Literature

Invincible except for the heel.

He's actually invincible, except for obviously his heel.

I think

>>3424567
So then what the fuck was up with the whole "Brad Pitt isn't invincible, he's just a good fighter"/other storylines that don't make him invincible.

I realize that this movie was mad probably 2000 years later, but in all honesty, you can't take away the basic power that makes Achilles Achilles.

No. He's a man, but so famous and powerful, that he has ascended above the poleis (the state). He is known in all lands of greece. This makes him a semi-god. And gods are jealous. So the hero is bound for a tragic fate, yet immortality.

Remember that Achilles could have chosen the life of a normal man but did not.

>>3424583
It's when they try to make it "realistic".

>Later legends (beginning with a poem by Statius in the 1st century AD) state that Achilles was invulnerable in all of his body except for his heel. As he died because of a small wound on his heel, the term Achilles' heel has come to mean one's point of weakness.

In the Homeric epics he's just really really rad at killing shit. Probably in most or all of the Homeric Cycle, too.

>>3424595
There were no poleis either in the time the poems harken to or when they were composed.

>>3424606
True. But my argument still stands. It's hubris though isn't it? He thinks himself more than a man.

Especially when goes to sob the entire battle.

>>3424622
The way I always heard it described was that he was a man with an excess of otherwise noble qualities, given the Greek obsession with moderation/means. He had infinite kleos and time, but that meant that Agamemnon taking even a tiny bit of his treasure (manifestation of kleos, which should be visibly demonstrated) turned him into a huge self-absorbed sulk and made him abandon his oaths and friends. Later he's so given over to grief (over you-know-who) that he forsakes everything but revenge, and so given over to revenge that he goes apeshit and cares only about slaughter, disregarding the proper customs after he kills the dude. He's a man of complete extremes of passion and emotion, too "great" for his own good, a cautionary parable about sophrosyne.

Why am I avoiding spoilers in a thread about the Iliad?

There's nothing in the Iliad about the styx or heels. Instead he just has a fate - if he fights and kills Hector he's doomed to die and never see home but he'll have eternal glory. If he leaves the war and goes home he'll have a happy life but fade from history.

>>3424645
Thank you for this useful insight. I've just about started to dig depper into the greek world. Do you think that Achilles could be a symbol of mans insatiable hunger and desire for consumption. The gloryful needs more glory. The rich more riches. The obese more food. And the inevitable downfall it leads too?

>>3424657
you've conceived a theme and now you're trying to fit it over the Iliad. stop it pls.

>>3424653
I think you take the book way to literal. The greeks saw their gods as fantasy, and their stories as myths.

>>3424664
No, that is the story and tragedy of Achilles. The entrance to the temple in delphi was inscribed with "Know Thyself and Nothing in excess".

The greek obsessed over moderation and hubris.

>>3424622
>He thinks himself more than a man.
he is more than a man.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/365852>The greeks saw their gods as fantasy, and their stories as myths.
nice citation. I guess that explains the store they set by auguries and such then.

>>3424672
what makes you think Achilles' story is tragic? Greek heroes die. Achilles actively chooses to die.

>>3424671
Now, the Judeo-Christian story, as I think of it — by the way, the word "story" is a translation or it means the same thing the Greek word muthos, our word, myth. A myth, in this sense, according to the Greeks, is just a tale. It can true, it can be false, and so on. Anyway, the Judeo-Christian story says, in the beginning, men were innocent. Innocent was the same as ignorant because knowledge gets in the way of their innocence and they have solitude, living in paradise. What destroys their happy, permanent condition is the sin of pride and the consequence of that sin is society, corruption, pain, and death because they knew neither pain nor death while they were in Eden. Salvation is available, and with it immortality, but it comes from God and it doesn't come in the world in which we live, but in some other world to be achieved in the future. That, I think, is a very thumbnail sketch of the Judeo-Christian story.
(cont.)

>>3424698
The Greek story is quite different. War is right at the center of it, and war itself requires political and social organization. There can be fighting without war but there can be no war without an organization that makes it something more than just plain fighting. It requires political and social organization. The search for honor and glory are at the root of why men fight and why they do many, many other things in their lives, according to this view. The Greeks did have a notion that in a way resembles some of the things I've said about the Judeo-Christian story. They had a concept called hybris, to be translated as something among these terms, excess, arrogance, violence. I think the fullest grasp of it, I think, might be rendered best by violent arrogance.

(cont.)

>>3424698
this is stupid faggot shit. get fucked.

>>3424705

Some notion of being above yourself and thinking yourself more than a man with the implication that you are approaching some kind of divinity by being more than a man, and acting accordingly, which usually requires that you use violence to achieve what you want. The sort of the standard picture in Greek ethics runs this way. A man is granted too much, he is too well off, he is too rich, he is too strong, he is too beautiful, so much so that he becomes too arrogant and is ready to step beyond his human condition.
At that point, the gods don't like it because like the Judeo-Christian god, they want to have some boundary between the two, but for them it's very important, because the boundary is far from clear. So what happens to the man who has too much? He is afflicted with hybris, which leads him to take the violent action. Onto the scene then comes the goddess Ate, which might be translated moral blindness. In other words, he no longer can think straight and so he will do something dangerous, harmful, and very ultimately bad for himself, and when he does whatever it is, he is struck by Nemesis, the goddess of retribution.

- Professor Donald Kagan

http://www.academicroom.com/video/troduction-ancient-greek-history-se-polis-lecture-4-24

His mother dipped him in the Styx, which made most of his body unassailable. But where she grasped him on the heels, his flesh was mortal since it made no contact with the water.

>>3424707
Donald Kagan (born May 1, 1932) is an American historian at Yale University specializing in ancient Greece, notable for his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War. 1987-1988 Acting Director of Athletics, Yale University. He was Dean of Yale College from 1989 to 1992. He formerly taught in the Department of History at Cornell University. In a review in The New Yorker, critic George Steiner said of Kagan's seminal four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War: "The temptation to acclaim Kagan's four volumes as the foremost work of history produced in North America in this century is vivid." At present, Kagan is considered among the foremost scholars of Greek history.

sure bro,

>>3424711
>ad hominem

>>3424698
>>3424705
>>3424706
Isn't this verbatim from his Yale Intro to Ancient Greek History course?

>>3424717
Yes.

>>3424698
>>3424705
>>3424706
Wait, so how did the greeks view the stories of the Iliad and Odyssey?

Only Homer is canon. He's a human son of a goddess and the greatest of the Greek champions. He isn't invulnerable. The Iliad would make little sense if he was.

>>3424750
I'm sure that learned anon will be very keen to tell you (!)...

>>3424753
He can't die until he kills Hector. It's fate, not divine magic that decrees it.

>>3424762
So, in that case, is Hector invincible too? Until Achilles kills him at least? Because if someone else kills him, Achilles will never fulfill his fate, and therefore be immortal forever?

>>3424759
Why are you so angry? You asked for a citation and I clearly gave you one. If you think i'm wrong, then bring forth your argument.

>>3424750
The Illiad and Odyssey lay as the foundation for greece society. They view the stories with reason and pragmatism. They knew of course there were no giant monsters, or that calypso held Odyssey for several years. He was telling a tale, a tale were great lessons still could be learned.

>>3424772
>So, in that case, is Hector invincible too?
In that no one can kill him except Achilles, yes.
>Achilles will never fulfill his fate, and therefore be immortal forever?
Achilles has two fates, he can go home or stay, kill Hector and die of old age.

>>3424773
your 'citation' offered no proof that 'Greeks' regarded 'myth' as only metaphorical.

>>3424784
Actually he kind of did.

>>3424762

I don't see fate as making a statement that he can't die before killing Hector, but as a statement that he won't die before killing Hector. There's a subtle difference and the analysis must stop there.

>>3424772

You're over thinking it. Greek myth isn't sci-fi.

>>3424791
>There's a subtle difference and the analysis must stop there.
What difference, in the context of the Homeric universe governed by inexorable fate, is there?

>>3424784
No, but what world do you live in? The black and white? When a friend comes home from Iraq and tells you his warstories? Do you actually take them for facevalue, the absolute truth? Do you even take the news for absolute truth? You'd be an idiot to think that the greeks saw the Illiad or the Odyssey the same way as todays biblethumping fundamentals might do.

Why? Because the Illiad and the Odyssey circulated for years as an oral tales from mouth to mouth.

Or we can take wikipedia:
While the Homeric poems (the Iliad in particular) were not necessarily revered scripture of the ancient Greeks, they were most certainly seen as guides that were important to the intellectual understanding of any educated Greek citizen. This is evidenced by the fact that in the late fifth century BC, "it was the sign of a man of standing to be able to recite the Iliad and Odyssey by heart."

In antiquity, the Greeks applied the Iliad and the Odyssey as the bases of pedagogy.

>>3424807
it's cute that you're trying to present what I said as a claim that the Iliad was religious text. I don't think I'll bother speaking with you given your irritating attempts at misrepresenting my posts.

>>3424797

To the Greeks it is as though everything happens as it will, except that the fates have foreknowledge of everything that will happen. It is meaningless to speak of Achilles being invulnerable prior to his fated death, because everyone's death is fated as is his. He simply knows what the fates know.

>>3424817
>The greeks saw their gods as fantasy, and their stories as myths.

You reacted to this. Didn't you?

>>3424750

As the greatest literary works they possesed imbued with a wisdom that transgressed generations. Some refer to them as the Ancient Greek bible, but that would be somewhat innacurate since the Greeks knew they were literary inventions and not as "holy" or spiritual works.

bump

>>3424675
Because in death he was made a judge, and found it hellish compared to his mortal life.

>>3425005

Hello, I had classical studies so I can explain this whole "Achilles problem"a bit. But please forgive my not-so-good english.

First of all, Achilles is a demi God. He is born from Peleus, king of the Mirmidons, and Thetis, one of the daughters of Proteus, a Nereid.

When he was a child, he was dropped in the river Styx, grating him the power on unvulnerability, expect for his heel. Other stories claim that he was bathed in ambrosia. His invulnerability was never claimed in Homer though, he even talks about a wounded Achilles (Iliad, book XXI).
When he grow up, he was trained by Chiron, the most skilled centaur, who made Achilles the most fearsome warrior.
So, i wouldn't say he was invincible just beacue of the styx, but because he was the most skilled warrior. Also, his semi-divine status helped him in becoming the greatest warrior ever.

>>3425069
pls forgiv my english

>where were you wen ankiles die?
>i was in troy wen diomedus call
>aklies is die
>no
>et tu brutes?!?!

>>3425118
And thus rose the sun over the atlantic sea. Odysseus looked upon the hideous monstrosity
Just as it waltzed out from McDonalds.
Hissing out of sheer terror: "Amerucah"

>>3425118
tell me this irl, not online and see what happens
amerikan basterd u want mirrion doolar
too bad hers cheesburges

>>3425118
OP here.
What the fuck just happened in here.