Rage or Return: Achilles, Odysseus, and the Poetics of Suffering

What Homer's heroes teach us about tragedy.

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The Dying Achilles statue in Achilleion Palace - Corfu, Greece

Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds.

The Iliad, Book I

So begins Homer’s invocation to the Muse in his epic battle tale, The Iliad. In these few lines, translated here by Robert Fagles, Homer traces the main action of his story: Achilles’ boundless rage, the mênis (μῆνις) that holds him hostage while the gods make sport of the unfolding tragedy between Trojans and Achaeans¹ on the windswept battlefield of Troy.

Achilles’ wrath is first ignited when the Achaean Commander, Agamemnon, is forced by Apollo to surrender the young woman who was his war prize, and compensates his loss by seizing Achilles’ cherished prize, the beautiful Briseis. Enraged, Achilles withdraws from battle to weaken the Achaeans and give satisfaction for his injury following the petty but ruinous logic of “I’ll show them!”

It is not until the Trojan warrior Hector slays Patroclus, Achilles’ closest companion, that his mênis reawakens with god-defying fury and propels him back onto the battlefield. Achilles’ renewed rage reverses the tide of war in the Achaeans’ favor, leaving a wake of destruction and mutilated corpses. Achilles’ killing spree eventually culminates in Hector’s death and desecration but still he finds no satisfaction for his grief. His mênis finally exhausted, Achilles is moved to a surprise act of mercy toward Hector’s bereaved father, Priam, in the poem’s beautiful final scene:

[Priam’s] words stirred within Achilles a deep desire
to grieve for his own father. Taking the old man’s hand
he gently moved him back. And overpowered by memory
both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely
for man-killing Hector…as Achilles wept himself,
now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,
and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.

The Iliad, Book XXIV, lines 592-599

A Simple Story of Suffering

Aristotle calls The Iliad a “simple story of suffering.”² We should not understand him to mean, however, that Homer’s epic lacks the expansive vision of world-class literature. To the contrary, writes Northrop Frye, epic poetry traditionally spans an “encyclopaedic range” of themes, from Heaven to Hades and everything in between.³ Aristotle's point is structural: the poem’s unity lies in its unrelenting depiction of destructive action—woundings, tortures, deaths in plain view.⁴

The Iliad abounds in bloodshed, of course, as anyone who has spent even an hour with it knows. But this only partly accounts for its tragic tone. I think what ultimately makes Homer’s poem “a story of suffering” is that it depicts so acutely Achilles’ irreversible trajectory towards self-inflicted isolation and untimely death, the literary definition of tragedy.⁵

The Odyssey: Suffering as Endurance

In Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Iliad and the Odyssey, Eva Brann contrasts Achilles’ experience of suffering in The Iliad with that of Homer’s other great character, Odysseus, in The Odyssey:

Both men know suffering…though one is temperamental and the other enduring. And both, in their way, are twice-dead: Achilles lives in a virtual Hades, and Odysseus visits the real one. But Achilles really dies and Odysseus returns alive from the abode of the dead, and that is the crux of the antithesis about which the two poems pivot.⁶

Brann is alluding to Book XXI of The Odyssey where Odysseus journeys to the underworld and spies mournful Achilles, lamenting his brief life which he exchanged for kleos (κλέος)—immortal glory. “No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus” protests Achilles’ shade to his former comrade-in-arms. “By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”⁷

Odysseus departs from the underworld to find his way back to Ithaka, the long-forsaken home to which he will return more ragged than a “dirt-poor tenant farmer,” determined to achieve not kleos but nostos (νόστος)—a hero’s homecoming.

Homer’s Heroes in Dante’s Hell

Odysseus’ descent to Hades calls to mind Dante’s similar journey through Hell in the first book of the Commedia. This is no surprise, of course, because Il Sommo Poeta is merely following the literary tradition of both Virgil and Homer. This time, it is Dante’s turn to muse on the fates of Achilles and Odysseus (known to Dante by his Latin name, Ulysses).

Given Achilles’ history of temper tantrums, you might expect to find him in the Fifth Circle of Hell, where the wrathful are punished. In fact, Dante assigns him to the Second Circle with the lustful sinners and those who died for love. (We’ve already met one of them, the faithless Francesca da Rimini.) Commentators like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow read this in light of a popular Greek legend about Achilles’ death (of which Homer is silent): “Achilles, being in love with Polyxena, a daughter of Priam, went unarmed to the temple of Apollo, where he was put to death by Paris” with an arrow to his mortal heel.⁸ Realizing he had been duped, Achilles’ ghost returns later to demand that Polyxena be sacrificed on his tomb. So much for love.

The Sacrifice of Polyxena, by Giovanni Battista Pittoni (1733-1734)

What these stories reveal is that Achilles’s true weakness, his “tragic flaw”—hamartia in Aristotelian terms—is not his exposed heel but his passionate nature. Both Achilles’ martial fury and violent grief find their source in his unbridled thumos (θυμός)—the emotive force comprising one’s heart or spirit—rather than reasoned reflection. In this sense, even though Achilles is a man of relatively mature years (presumably in his mid-thirties), he is emotionally an adolescent, according to Brann:

What is young is his passionate pride, his all-concentrating wrath, the mênis, [which is] that deeply mindful, minding, remembering anger at an insult and an injustice to which his poem is devoted.⁹

In contrast, cunning Odysseus is Achilles’ elder in both years and emotional maturity. He displays a mastery of mêtis (Μῆτις), the measured, tactical foresight for which he is best known. It is his plan of deception that finally defeats the Trojans and brings the decade-long war to an end. But Odysseus, too, receives a sinner’s reward in Dante’s Inferno, as we’ll explore in the next post.

What should we make, then, of Homeric heroism in Dante’s world? Achilles’ unrestrained thumos terminates in sins of passion. Odysseus’ resourceful mêtis borders on base trickery. Both are eventually undone by the famous qualities that once defined their greatness.

Dante offers a sobering conclusion: glory detached from virtue earns no true laurel. In this world or the next, passion without measure, cunning without conscience, leads not to eternal reward but to ruin.

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1. I.e., the Greeks

2. Aristotle, Poetics, 1459b 15.

3. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 318.

4. Aristotle, Poetics, 1452b 10-15.

5. Cf Aristotle, Poetics, 1452b 10-15, and Frye, Anatomy, “First Essay: Tragic Fictional Modes.”

6. Brann, Eva. Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad. Kindle Edition. (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Paul Dry Books, 2002), 44.

7. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, Deluxe Edition. (New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 1996), 265.

8. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Inferno 5.65,” Dartmouth Dante Project, accessed March 19, 2025, https://dante.dartmouth.edu/search_view.php?doc=186741050650&cmd=gotoresult&arg1=1.

9. Brann, Homeric Moments, 42.