Just humor us, Achilles: The ever-changing reception of Achilles in media.
Achilles is, indisputably, one of the most enduring and multifaceted figures to have ever existed. As the central hero of Homer’s Iliad, instead of being simply a warrior or a mythic figure, he becomes a symbolic intersection of paradoxes; war and humanity, mortality and immortality, divine wrath and human tenderness.
The fixation of Achilles does not, however, stem from Homer alone, and Achilles is continuously reinterpreted to reflect the anxieties, and philosophical inquiries of each age. This essay, thus, aims to explore the different extremes through which Achilles is viewed from the birth of his myth to the latest interpretation of it in different mediums; books, dialogues, and music. These differing receptions are proof of Achilles’ timelessness and his thematic elasticity. Whether portrayed as wrathful demigod, tragic lover, or suicidal man, Achilles becomes a prism through which we explore glory, grief, intimacy, and heroism still.
In classical Athens, dramatists like Euripides talked of the psychological costs of heroism, while philosophers such as Plato discussed ideal virtue and moral education. In modernity, especially through works like Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, Achilles is now a figure of emotional intimacy and queer love, showing a clear shift in cultural perspectives; from glory to vulnerability and from conquest to companionship. Across these centuries, what remains constant, however, is the fascination with Achilles’ dual nature: the godlike warrior who cannot escape grief, the embodiment of rage who learns to weep. In every era, Achilles becomes a mirror of honour, selfishness, strength, sorrow, myth and mortality.
In a postmodern world increasingly suspicious of binary moralities and rigid archetypes, Achilles offers a complex model of identity that is constantly ‘becoming’. His evolution across time reveals not only the eternal myth but the changing mindsets of those who retell it.
I. Achilles, best of the Achaeans, in Homer’s Iliad.
Achilles, the central figure of Homer’s Iliad is a hero of the Greek world as well as an enduring archetype who is complex, wrathful, and wholly human. The story begins in the final year of the Trojan War that was fought between the Greeks (Achaeans) and the city of Troy. Achilles, son of the mortal king Peleus and the sea-nymph Thetis, is the greatest warrior on the Greek side. Yet when the Greek commander Agamemnon insults him by seizing Achilles’ war prize, the enslaved Briseis, Achilles withdraws from battle in an act of proud protest. This personal grievance brings devastation to the Greek army at an alarming rate and forms the foundation of the Iliad.
The poem begins with an invocation that establishes mēnis, or divine wrath, as the epic’s central force; “Sing, Goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans…”. Achilles’ rage is sacred, destructive, consuming, and transformative. It is a wrath that fractures the Greek coalition, causes massive deaths, and tips the balance of war. In this light, Homer writes Achilles not just as a skilled fighter, but as a person whose personal emotions influence history. He is divine and yet disturbingly human. Trojans fear him and the Greeks depend on him making him both salvation and ruin.
To Homer’s ancient audience, likely 8th-century BCE Greeks, lived in a world of warrior-kings, shifting alliances, and oral performance traditions. Achilles, thus, would have represented the ultimate exemplar of kleos, or glory won through heroic acts. His martial excellence was admired, but his moral ambiguity also begged for reflection. Achilles refuses the collective good for personal honour. He disrespects authority, hates compromise, and indulges in grief so total that it becomes madness. In his refusal to fight, he lets his comrades die. He is, in Homer’s world, both necessary and dangerous.
And yet, Homer never flattens Achilles into just an engine of destruction. His character arc is quite introspective. When Hector kills Patroclus, Achilles’ beloved companion, Achilles returns to battle for vengeance. The death of Patroclus is what reignites Achilles’ wrath but eventually transforms it into grief. In a moment of catharsis, he slays Hector and then, in defiance of all codes of honour, drags his corpse around the walls of Troy for days. But this act offers no healing.
It is in quiet sorrow that Achilles becomes fully human. When Priam, the Trojan king and father of Hector, enters the Greek camp to beg for his son’s body, Achilles is shocked. He sees in Priam his own father, Peleus, frail and destined to grieve a son;
“Then Achilles remembered his own father and was moved. Taking the old man’s hand, he gently pushed him away. Both men remembered. Priam huddled in grief, and Achilles wept for his father and for Patroclus.”
This is the Iliad’s final major scene. The narrative does not end with Achilles’ triumph or death. It ends with this shared, deeply private moment of recognition. Grief becomes mutual. The rage-filled hero becomes the mourner. And it is precisely this change from violent fury to emotional recognition that makes Achilles timeless.
Reception scholars such as Austin argue that Achilles’ violence is a performance of grief’s futility, not a solution to it, that Achilles’ actions show a condition of insatiable pothē as a longing that cannot be satisfied, even by avenging. “Killing Hector,” she suggests, “does not purge Achilles’ pain; it enacts it.” His mourning is not a temporary emotional reaction, but a consuming and transformative feeling that renders traditional heroic frameworks inadequate. Achilles’ tragedy, then, is not that he dies, but that he becomes deeply aware of the limits of revenge, glory and the lack of Patroclus.
Thus, the Iliad’s Achilles is not merely the "best of the Achaeans"; he is the first literary model of a deeply flawed, deeply felt human being. He bleeds, mourns, rages, and realises. These actions continue to resonate not because they are grand, but because they are, profoundly, human.
II. Achilles, the tragic lover, in Aeschylus’s Myrmidons.
There is a radical evolution of Achilles’ reception in Aeschylus’ Myrmidons is evident despite the play surviving only in fragments. Aeschylus was the earliest of the three great tragedians of classical Athens who helped in shaping the writing of the tragedy in the 5th century BCE and Myrmidons was likely a part of one of his lost trilogies. Unlike Homer’s Achilles, a demigod consumed by pride and rage who is led to his eventual catharsis, Aeschylus’s Achilles was a more interior, emotionally devastated one, whose heroism is shown through the lens of personal love and heavy guilt. In this retelling, Achilles is a man broken by love lost, not a wrathful warrior. He is simply an erastes mourning his fallen eromenos.
Myrmidons shows the historical moment during its inception perfectly. Aeschylus wrote for a democratic Athenian audience where ideals of male bonding, particularly in the form of pederastic warrior relationships, were the norm and valorized. Achilles and Patroclus’s relationship in Homer is intimate but never explicit. Aeschylus, however, transforms the two into tragic lovers in the most explicit Greek tradition. The love between erastes and eromenos was idealised in Athens as a moral bond that shows a spiritual union that prepared men for both politics and war. Aeschylus used this cultural motif to show Achilles not as archetype of divine wrath but a man overwhelmed by erotic grief.
The fragments of the Myrmidons are incandescent with emotional charge. Fragment 135 reads: “O thou most ungrateful for my many kisses!”—a startlingly sorrowful outburst for a character that should embody god-like fury. In these words, Achilles reveals that Patroclus’ death feels like betrayal. He accuses the corpse of ingratitude, conveying that if Patroclus could have loved him better, he would have stayed longer with Achilles and resisted death for him. Fragment 136 further supports this: “For I love him.” The use of the present tense (“love,” instead of “loved”) defies death itself. Patroclus’ body may be lifeless, but Achilles’ desire remains alive still.
Most heartbreakingly, he declares: “I am bereft of everything.” This line shows the total collapse of Achilles' inner world. The man who once defined his worth through his honor, whose status depended on the reputations of his strength and pride, now defined himself through absence. Patroclus’s death therefore felt like the loss of the only bond that grounded him.
While Homer’s Iliad moves toward resolution with Priam and Achilles’ shared moment of grief, Aeschylus seems to offer no such closure. In the Myrmidons, Achilles’s eventual revenge is drained of meaning, focused only on his tactile agony of embracing Patroclus’ corpse. The battlefield with all its triumphant purpose recedes and the drama becomes domestic and private. Achilles does not care for vengeance, his thirst is his Patroclus’s presence and love.
The Aeschylean Achilles therefore introduced an Achilles that would continue to be received for centuries alongside Homer’s Achilles. Aeschylus influenced classical conceptions of male-male relationships by setting a precedent for the future of Achilles’ reception of the hero as a tragic, erotic figure. Even Plato, writing a century later in the Symposium, refers to Achilles as the lover willing to die for his beloved. The seeds of that idea were clearly planted in Myrmidons.
Modern audiences find in this version a more psychologically compelling Achilles. The 21st century has seen a newfound interest in queer classical reception, and Aeschylus’ Myrmidons provides a lot of thought for the same. Works like Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles owe their existence to this interpretation that drew on the emotional vocabulary first mentioned by Aeschylus, from the kisses to the laments and the inability to let go.
In contrast to the Homeric archetype of rage (mēnis), this Achilles is defined by mourning. His tragedy is an emotional paralysis rather than a delay in returning to battle. In stripping away the grandness of war and focusing on the intimacy of love and grief, Aeschylus reconfigures Achilles for a new age where the hero is pitied for suffering instead of being worshipped for his conquest.
III. Achilles, the model of noble sacrifice, in Plato’s Symposium.
In Symposium, Plato offers a reception of Achilles that is neither Homer’s hero nor Aeschylean’s tragic lover. Instead, Symposium talks of Achilles as a boy whose death for his beloved Patroclus becomes the purest form of virtue, making him into a model of ethical sacrifice. Though Phaedrus in Symposium emphasises honor and courageous love, later Platonic conception of eros, in Diotima’s speech in particular, ends up framing love as force that elevates the soul toward truth, beauty and immortality. Within this broader philosophical framework, Achilles’ choice to die for Patroclus becomes a moral and spiritual ascent rather than an act of personal loyalty, honor-driven heroism, or rage-induced vengeance.
In Phaedrus’ speech, love (eros) is described as ‘the oldest’ and ‘most honored of the gods,’ capable of inspiring heroic acts and moral greatness. Achilles, though both younger and more beautiful, is framed as the eromenos (the beloved) who chooses to die for Patroclus. Phaedrus criticizes Aeschylus for portraying Achilles as the erastes, believing this reverses their true roles. This inversion born out of Phaedrus’ own interpretation, challenges traditional Athenian paiderastia norms where the older erastes was expected to act sacrificially and is not a consistent tradition in the Iliad. Achilles’ act thus becomes exceptional in the lens of Platonic dialogue as he not only defies marital danger but also social expectation by placing the sheer power of love over all conventional hierarchies and wins the admiration of the gods, or as Phaedrus puts it:
“They did not honour him (Orpheus) as they did Achilles, son of Thetis, whom they sent off to the Isles of the Blessed, because when he had found out from his mother that he was to die after killing Hector, but if he did not do this, he would return home to die in old age, he had the courage to choose to come to the aid of his lover Patroclus; and in avenging him not only to die for him, but also to add his own death, once Patroclus was already dead. Hence the gods, with greatest admiration, honoured him especially, because he valued his lover so highly.”
Plato’s Symposium thus marks a crucial moment in the classical reception of Achilles’ legacy where it is not just tied to the battlefield of Troy, but in love wherein love becomes the crucible of character, and his death for love becomes the highest form of virtue.
V. Achilles, personified collapse of classic ideals, in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.
In Troilus and Cressida, William Shakespeare presents a scathing reception of Achilles in the classical tradition. The Iliad’s glorious and emotional Achilles in Shakespeare’s ink becomes grotesque, vain, and dishonourable. Shakespeare’s Achilles is a relic of a once-idealized past, reduced to hollow praise and petty sulking in the face of war. This portrayal reflects the broader Renaissance disillusionment with the classical ideas of honor, loyalty and martial virtue.
From the beginning, Achilles is characterized by self-indulgence. In Homer’s Iliad where withdraws in rage over the loss of Briseis, in the Shakespearean play, it is out of petulance. His dialogue is full of egotism: "My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirred; / And I myself see not the bottom of it." This line suggests an internal unrest that is narcissistic introspection that is simply a performance of depth instead of existential or ethical conflicts.
Patroclus, too, is described with overt sexualization. Ulysses sneers at Achilles' inaction, accusing him of lounging in his tent with “his masculine whore.” The phrasing here is pointedly degrading and reduces their relationship to lust rather than intimacy or loyalty. By framing Achilles as a man unmanned by pleasure and vanity, Shakespeare refers to early modern worries about masculinity and virtue. There is no marital or romantic devotion. The homosocial bond that was ambiguous in Homer and idealised later is simply mocked by making Achilles into a passive object of scorn. Furthermore, Achilles’ eventual return to violence completes his moral descent instead of redeeming him. Shakespeare does not make Achilles challenge Hector to a noble duel, but turns it into an offstage killing. “So, lion fall thou next! Now, Troy, sink down!” And later, “On, Myrmidons, and cry all you amain/‘Achilles hath the might Hector slain.’” These lines refer to a calculated onstage killing, not a heroic-dueling act. To choose to set Hector’s murder offstage comes from a Greek technique used in tragedies for acts too gruesome or shameful to display. This might be a way to highlight the moral revulsion Shakespeare intended by turning Achilles into an object of shame.
In Troilus and Cressida, a problem play, every hero is tainted but Achilles is tainted the most. This Shakespearean reception is an example of a broad trend: the classic figure becomes a vessel for contemporary critique. Where Homer idealised Achilles, Shakespeare satirized him by breaking the illusion of uncorrupted heroism, where reverence becomes irony.
VI. Achilles, the queer and tender hero, in The Song of Achilles.
In The Song of Achilles (2011), Miller rewrites The Iliad from the perspective of Patroclus who becomes Achilles’s lover, companion and our narrator. Achilles, in Miller’s reception, becomes less of a wrathful Demi-god and more of a boy who is vulnerable and in love, by subverting the classic’s central values of martial honor, masculine stoicism and heroic glory.
Achilles is the archetype of heroic masculinity, whose rage or “μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ,” launches a thousand deaths. His love for Patroclus, while acknowledged by some ancient commentators, becomes central to Miller’s book. Patroclus states; “He is half of my soul, as the poets say.” This mythologized phrase, drawn from both Homeric imagery and Sapphic poetics shows the reclaiming of emotional bonds in a bold, yet tender manner.
Miller uses the tools of classical reception to excavate and expand the existing in the ancient texts instead of simply inventing romance. Achilles’s grief over Patroclus’s death is an intense episode in the epic wherein he states:
“For my heart has no desire to live on among men
unless Hector is hit by my spear first, losing his life
as compensation for despoiling Patroclus, son of Menoetius.”
This suggests that Achilles’s existence is now defined by Patroclus’s absence and Miller writes this grief as the culmination of a love story. Patroclus adds to this, stating in the middle of the book: “I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth,” linking love to the body in a way that the classics avoided but placing the divine in sensual knowledge as well.
The Song of Achilles therefore performs transformative reception, which is a creative engagement that rewrites the source material in relation to contemporary concerns rather than offering a direct translation or adaptation. One of these concerns is queer-visibility. In Ancient Greece, male-male love existed in various forms, but modern categories like “gay” did not apply. Miller, aware of this, writes the relationship in affective terms and thus, she contributed to the broader cultural movement of “queering the canon.” Readers have embraced Miller’s Achilles as the embodiment of emotional vulnerability, love, and love. The phrase, “I would know him in death, at the end of the world,” has become iconic, echoing somewhat distantly the Homeric underworld where Achilles and Patroclus are ultimately reunited.
Moreover, the novel’s reception shows a clear postmodern shift from ‘kleos’ or glory that is achieved through violence and remembered through song with ‘pathos’ by framing glory as devotion. Patroclus states, “When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him,” and leaving readers with thoughts of love lost rather than war won. Her novel, thus, becomes an act of reclamation of the word ‘heroic’ in which it is rooted in love and memory.
VII. Achilles, the abuser, in Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls.
In Pat Barker’s 2018 novel The Silence of the Girls, Achilles is recast as a figure of domination and violence, whose brilliance rests on the erasure of others. Retelling the Iliad through the eyes of Briseis, a captured Trojan woman, Barker focuses on the margins of the war.
The novel opens with Briseis, our narrator, recalling Achilles’ chilling appraisal to her capture: “Cheers, lads,” he said. “She’ll do.” This line, modern and casual, dismantles any poetic elevation associated with Homer’s Achilles. Homer calls Briseis his γέρας, his war prize, a term that dishumanises but still honors. Barker shows the same commodification in much starker terms, reducing Briseis’s existence to her sexual utility.
Barker’s Achilles is aloof with his brutal prowess and charisma turning him into a threat that Briseis’s commentary reveals, enhancing the dangerous atmosphere. When Priam enters the Greek camp to beg for Hector’s body. Priam says:
“I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.”
It is a vulnerable moment that echoes Homer’s emotional climax but Briseis overlays it with:
“And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”
Where Homer centers pathos through grief in this moment, Barker refuses to let the reader ignore the gendered related horrors that become the norm. Priam’s act is extraordinary whereas Briseis’s is routine. Classical reception becomes, in Barker’s hands, a means of interrogation: how much suffering is ignored from the myth to keep it grand?
VIII. Achilles, the disturbed, in ‘Achilles, Come Down.’
In Gang of Youths’ “Achilles Come Down” (2017), the myth of Achilles is torn from its ancient roots and replanted in the psyche of modern man, shaking with grief, alienation, and suicidal despair. The song does not merely reference Homeric tradition—it interrogates it. It reinterprets Achilles not as the golden warrior of The Iliad, but as a man on the verge of self-destruction, trembling beneath the armor of legacy.
In Gang of Youths’ “Achilles Come Down” (2017), Achilles is not the golden warrior or the lover, he is a man on the verge of self-destruction. The song’s title is a plea: “Achilles, come down,” showing an intimate confrontation of suicidal thoughts. Where the classical Achilles is defined by kleos aphthiton (imperishable glory), the song places Achilles not in a physical war but a mental one. The spoken French monologue in the song is taken from Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus
“Il n'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux : c'est le suicide.”
(“There is only one truly serious philosophical problem: it is suicide.”) Camus’ philosophy stated that meaning must be created despite life’s absurdity. The song asks Achilles to not “listen to what you’ve consumed.” While the consumption is both literal, it may also be the toxicity of heroism, or masculine endurance, dismantling the very ideals Achilles was built on.
In its classical reception, Achilles oscillates between extremes but is bound to Patroclus. Similarly, in “Achilles Come Down,” though the identity is ambiguous, the voice that pleads for Achilles’ life carries emotional intimacy echoing Patroclus as the emotional anchor to Achilles’ spiraling:
“Some of us love you, Achilles.”
The classical reception of Achilles has often focused on the tension between kleos (glory) and oikos (home/family). When Achilles chooses to stay and fight, he chooses death and legacy over a long, obscure life. Yet “Achilles Come Down” questions the cost of that choice. Has immortality denied Achilles the right to vulnerability? The song humanizes him, suggesting that kleos is not enough to take away a man’s sorrow.
Camus argues that one must imagine Sisyphus happy. In contrast, “Achilles Come Down” does not pretend joy is easy and the dual voices in the song both coax and condemn Achilles, externalizing his fractured self. The second voices coaxes him to “come down,” and is an act of philía, the Greek love rooted in friendship, tenderness, and duty to others.
Using the myth, philosophy, and psychology, Gang of Youths joins a long line of classic reception that seeks to understand Achilles rather than to glorify him. This transformation leads to an Achilles that it not dead, but dying, revealing that love, not glory, is what might save even a hero.
Conclusion
Achilles endures because he has become the most pliable of the myths, one in which each era can contribute. From Homer’s glorious hero to Aeschylus’s erotic mourner, from a satirical relic to a violent oppressor and finally, as a man on the verge of suicide, Achilles becomes an evolution. He becomes timeless because he never stays the same. As long as we talk of him, we end up revealing not only who Achilles is, but who we are.
Bibliography
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Fagles. New York: Penguin Classics
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Classics.
Austin EP. Grief and the Hero. 2021.
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Classics.
Aeschvlus. Myrmidons frag. 135. In: Collard CE. Cropp MA, editors. Euripides: Selectec Fragmentary Plays and Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2009
Aeschylus. Myrmidons frag. 136. Ibid.
Aeschylus. Myrmidons frag. 63. Ibid.
Plato. Symposium 179e–180a. In: Cooper JE, editor. Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett; 1997
Shakespeare W. Troilus and Cressida IIIl.ifi. 104-105. In: Wells S, Taylor GA, editors. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1998.
Shakespeare W. Troilus and Cressida II.iii.207. Ibid.
Shakespeare W. Troilus and Cressida III.iii. 322. Ibid
Shakespeare W. Troilus and Cressida III. ili. 333. Ibio
Miller M. The Song of Achilles. London: Bloomsbury: 2011
4 Miller M. The Song of Achilles. Ibid
15 Miller M. The Song of Achilles. Ibid.
Miller M. The Song of Achilles. Ibid
Barker P. The Silence of the Girls. London: Penguin; 2018
Barker P. The Silence of the Girls. Ibid.
Barker P. The Silence of the Girls. Ibid
Camus A. The Myth of Sisyphus. Vintage: 1991
Gang of Youths. "Achilles Come Down." On Let Me Be Clear [EP]. Sony Music; 2016.
Gang of Youths. "Achilles Come Down." On Let Me Be Clear [EP]. Sony Music; 2016.
