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If Athena hadn’t tricked Hector could Achilles beat him fair and square?
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Achilles cleared the battlefield in a day. If he was that good why did it take ten years for the Greeks to win the war?
This is going to turn into one of those Batman vs. Spider-Man threads, isn’t it? I think we can turn to the movie TROY for our answer.
IIRC, because Achilles didn’t have to. After Patroclus was killed, he snapped. Before, he was squaring off against Agammemnon over who got to be the alpha male (if not necessarily leader).
Because Achilles spent ten years being a whiny little crybaby, more or less.
Achilles was dipped in the river Styx as a babe which rendered him nigh invulnerable. Any fight with Achilles just wasn’t all that fair to begin with.
Before the ships set sail for Troy all the omens pointed to it taking 10 years for the walls of Ilium to fall. During that time they must have attacked areas around Troy as they had recently captured women like Chryseis and Briseis.
Marc
MGibson, I had totally forgotten about the Styx thing. Thank you.
Chronos, was the agrument really ten years long? Maybe I missed a line or two, but it seemed to me the events of the Illiad took place within a few days.
The arguement only covered the last few days or maybe weeks of the war. At the start of the Iliad it was the 10th year of the war.
Marc
Probably. He had better armor (Hector was wearing Achilles’ old armor, which he had stripped off Patroclus’s body, but Achilles was wearing brand new armor forged by the god Hephaestus), plus stronger motivation–he was out for revenge (for Patroclus’s death) and would show Hector no mercy. And then there’s his near-immortality, as discussed above. Hector was an excellent warrior, but he wasn’t a match for Achilles.
Well, one factor in the Iliad is certainly the gods. Although it was preordained that Troy would fall, the fall couldn’t happen until Zeus allowed it. A lot of Achilles’ victories were attributed in part to assistance from certain gods (especially Athena and Hera), while other gods were determined to protect Troy–Apollo is said to have played a hand in Achilles’ death (and Patroclus’s too), and saved Hector on a couple of occasions.
Also, for most of those 10 years, the Trojans just stayed inside the city instead of meeting the Greeks in battle. The city was nearly impregnable, the walls almost impossible to scale, hence the need for the Trojan Horse–in the end, the Greeks could only get inside by tricking the Trojans. While they weren’t camped out on the beach, the Greeks were raiding nearby, poorly-defended cities during those first 9 years.
The most significant battles took place in the last year (the Iliad covers approximately 51 days), and during this time, Achilles sulked a lot. When he finally did return to the battlefield, he was almost unstoppable (even taking on the river god Scamander). But really, Achilles just didn’t fight that much at Troy–most of his contribution to the war took place in a fairly limited time-span, beginning with Patroclus’s death and ending (obviously) with his own death. That’s about 25 days, and even during that time-span, most days Achilles isn’t fighting–he’s too busy taking care of Patroclus’s funeral, abusing Hector’s corpse, and then there’s an 11-day ceasefire for Hector’s funeral (after Priam ransoms Hector’s body).
Achilles’ fate was bound to Hector’s–it was ordained that Achilles would die not long after Hector died–so he only lived a few days after Hector’s funeral (with which the Iliad ends). For his remaining days, he’s a terror to the Trojans–but by the end of each battle, the Trojans would retreat back behind their walls. The next day, a great Trojan ally (like Memnon and the Amazon Penthesilia) would show up, raise Trojan morale, they’d march out of the city, get slaughtered by Achilles, and the survivors would flee back to the city. The process repeated for a few days until Paris (with Apollo’s assistance) finally slew Achilles.
During those few days when Achilles was actually fighting and not sulking or mourning, he did manage to kill scores of Trojans and their allies.
So, I guess the short answer to question #2 is: a.) Troy was too strongly-fortified, and b.) Achilles just didn’t apply himself fully.