“Achilles: dismeasure figuration”

Abstract

In the complex framework of the heroic figures of Greco-Latin mythology, Achilles appears as one of the most relevant references in antiquity. This exceptional popularity, which allowed the character to survive the erosion of oblivion and to exert on the imaginary incomparable influence, is due to the fact that Homer chose him as the protagonist of the Iliad, and guided the peculiar angle of view of the Trojan War, which antiquity considered the greatest historical event of Humanity, by the passionate intensity of his anger. Although the narrative of the Odyssey already centres on the figure of Ulysses, the double evocation of the warrior of sudden rage, of superlative feats, and of the obsession with honour, already dead in Hades, in Od. XI and Od. XXIV, contributes to underlining in the poetic message a much more positive and optimistic moralising tone, which transcends the tragic determinism of the Iliad.
We know that the hero’s appeal already exercised itself on the Greek imagination before the regular and universal knowledge of Homeric poetry had referenced him as a heroic paradigm, because the set of the so-called Cyclic Poetry - particularly the Cypria, with the details of the background of the Trojan War, and the Aethiopis, with the list of the facts that followed Hector’s funeral - offers many of the traditional details about Achilles to which Homer alluded only discreetly. Taking the Homeric Poems as a starting point, we propose to approach the narratives of the poetic reworking of the Trojan Cyclic Poems, widely documented still in the ceramic paintings of the Classical period. This comparative perspective will allow us, in synthesis, to propose different models of symbolic approach to the heroic figure of Achilles.