Achilles

Neoptolemus

We have already met him. Neoptolemus arrives on Lemnos as the younger man Odysseus brings to retrieve Philoctetes and the bow of Heracles. He resists the deception Odysseus requires. That is Neoptolemus at his best: resistant to manipulation, not yet corrupted by the compromises of war. Sophocles gives him dignity in that moment of resistance.Continue reading “Neoptolemus”

Odysseus

Odysseus did not want to go to war. When the oath he had devised to bind the other kings was called due and the kings of Greece gathered for Troy, he attempted to escape it. He yoked an ox and a donkey to the same plow and drove them in erratic lines across the field,Continue reading “Odysseus”

Achilles was the man who would cause his father to outlive him. Everything else follows from that. Thetis knew first. Her son faced what the Greeks called a dilemma. A long life without a name, or a short life the singers would not let die. Both draw blood.[1] She had been bound to that. WrestledContinue reading “Achilles”