Luke Normile

Honors 1003.03

September 28, 2010

Lecture Review: Prof. Michael Davis’ “The Soul of Achilles”

Professor Michael Davis’ lecture on “The Soul of Achilles” presented an exploration of

human condition based on the characters of the Iliad. Davis began his lecture by explaining that

he chose to explore the soul of the Greeks because he wished to see the soul in a more natural

way that was not affected by the influence of Christianity in the West, and because the Greeks

sought to understand soul themselves. He then argued that the human soul is necessarily

imperfect, but longs for perfection, giving rise to the tragedy of life exemplified in the Iliad.

Achilles, he said, exemplifies the Andres, “he-men”, who strive for immortality by means of

attaining glory. The tragedy of this endeavor is that the soul is necessarily mortal- the gods are

not said to have souls in the Iliad- and so a struggle to make one’s soul immortal is, by

definition, a futile endeavor.

The only part of a person that may live forever, Davis argued, is a sign of a person, the

words that are spoken about his glory after he is gone. And these idealized versions of a person,

tragically, do not really reflect the person himself, but only present a shell of him. When Hector

is in his armor, he becomes “Hector,” the ideal of Hector. But this idealized version is not

human, as shown when Astynax is frightened by his father in armor. Davis even argued that

Achilles, in killing Hector in his own armor, was actually trying to kill the immortal part of him,

his shell.

I feel that there was something lacking in Davis’s argument about the immortality of the

heroes of the Iliad. Although I agree that it does show a futility in searching for immortality by
means of a shell, an idealized version of self, one should realize that the poem itself is not merely

presenting the shell of Achilles. I believe that by the depth of the poem’s explorations of his

character, Homer transmits to his audience the whole of Achilles’ being. In some ways, the soul

of Achilles is preserved in the Iliad because we know not only what Achilles did, but who he

was. And if this does not make Achilles immortal, I believe that it would at least put his mind at

ease to know that thousands of years after his death, people would understand who he was and

what he struggled with. Extending this idea, I feel that Homer himself is also immortalized in

his poems. It is not a shell of Homer that we see in his writings. In fact, we do not even know

anything about the writer of the Iliad besides his name, and even that we know uncertainly.

However, Homer’s poems give us a deep understanding of who Homer was and how he

understood the world. The reader feels a connection to Homer, senses the workings of his mind,

as he reads his works. And when we read Homer, we may come to love him, in a sense. We do

not love Homer or Achilles because they fit an ideal, but because they are who they are. This,

argued Davis, is true love. And if to be loved means to live, Homer and Achilles are most

certainly alive.