Fair Use Blog

Now available thanks to bkmarcus at lowercase liberty:

In The War That Killed Achilles, author Caroline Alexander makes the same comparison I think of every time I read Book I of the Iliad.

First she quotes Achilles’s speech to Agamemnon. She quotes her favorite translation, by Richmond Lattimore. I will instead use my own favorite translation, by Stanley Lombardo:

Achilles looked [Agamemnon] up and down and said:

"You sorry, profiteering excuse for a commander!  
How are you going to get any Greek warrior
To follow you into battle again?
You know, I don’t have any quarrel with the Trojans,
They didn’t do anything to me to make me
Come over here and fight, didn’t run off my cattle or horses
Or ruin my farmland back home in Phthia, not with all
The shadowy mountains and moaning seas between.
It’s for you, dogface, for your precious pleasure —
And Menelaus’ honor — that we came here,
A fact you don’t have the decency even to mention!
And now you’re threatening to take away the prize
That I sweated for and the Greeks gave me.
I never get a prize equal to yours when the army
Captures one of the Trojan strongholds.
No, I do all the dirty work with my own hands,
And when the battle’s over and we divide the loot
You get the lion’s share and I go back to the ships
With some pitiful little thing, so worn out from fighting
I don’t have the strength left even to complain.
Well, I’m going back to Phthia now. Far better
To head home with my curved ships than stay here,
Unhonored myself and piling up a fortune for you."

Alexander comments:

It is a great gauntlet-throwing speech, particularly remarkable for occurring at the very outset of the epic. What Achilles is challenging is the bedrock assumption of military service — that the individual warrior submit his freedom, his destiny, his very life to a cause in which he may have no personal stake. In modern times, the speech finds its counterpart in Muhammad Ali’s famous refusal to fight in Vietnam:

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger… I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder, kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people.

Like Ali’s, Achilles’ words are particularly dangerous in that one can assume he is speaking aloud words that other, less charismatic men had long thought.

Read the whole thing at lowercase liberty.