teuma) bewitching the mind only to subject it even more helplessly to the fiat of necessity. With Homer we are still at a stage when the Good isn’t even mentioned: happy and unhappy, the poet’s warriors know only the many-colored weave of necessity and sate themselves with its splendor, which at the end of the day will destroy them. “The mortal cannot go intrepid through these many-colored beauties,” says Agamemnon, a few seconds before falling beneath Clytemnestra’s ax.
Agamemnon, ánax andrôn, “king of men,” is kingship itself. As such, he must preside over relations with heaven and with earth. It is on him that all exchanges converge. And at the origin of exchange there is always a death of some kind. Such is the shove that sets the wheel moving, that breaks “the silence of the winds.” For Agamemnon, this becomes clear with the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia. The person who controls the mechanism of exchange, the king, is that unique person who must sacrifice the uniqueness of every other, including his daughter. But this one master of exchanges, prince of substitutions, may in turn be attacked by uniqueness. When the priest Chryses asks to ransom his daughter Chryseis and, to replace her, Agamemnon demands that Achilles hand over Briseis, uniqueness rises in rebellion against exchange.
Achilles is kingship without a kingdom. He carries his grace within himself and does not need a hierarchical order to sustain it. It is in his grace, not his power, that Achilles is more kingly than the others. And that is precisely why Agamemnon is so determined to show him who is really king, as Nestor explains with near pedantic exactness: “Son of Peleus, don’t be so stubborn as to clash head on with a king: no prestige can equal that of a king who holds the scepter, a king to whom Zeus has granted glory. You are strong, your mother is a goddess; but he is even stronger than you, because he commands more men.” On the one hand, we have a king who is considered such because a whole society converges on his person; on the other hand, we have an individual who is kingly in his very isolation, in the uniqueness of his gift. With Achilles we witness, in Homeric radiance, the emergence of a quality that Vedic mathematics never guessed at: the unique, unsustained by the sacred, precarious, fleeting, irreplaceable, not exchangeable, entrusted to a brief appearance ending in death, and for this very reason incommensurable. That which exists only once, and for only a short time, cannot be measured against any other commodity.
Shut away in his tent, furious with Agamemnon, Achilles sleeps with Diomeda “of the lovely cheeks,” just as Briseis had been “of the lovely cheeks.” But still Achilles refuses to accept the substitution of Briseis. The elderly Phoenix, who loves Achilles as only an old servant whose chest the baby hero once belched wine over can, simply does not understand this absurd insistence. How can Achilles, “for just one girl!” turn down the seven girls of Lesbos, plus “some even better ones,” together with a host of other gifts Agamemnon is offering to keep him sweet. Phoenix, in his tribal devotion, can’t even conceive of the claim to uniqueness. But it is precisely to Achilles that the poem gives the speech that for the first time announces this discovery, this emotion that will put its stamp on history from that moment on and has survived intact to this very day: a foothold in the vast shipwreck of ideas, the only thing still self-evident to everybody, blasphemous and devout alike, in this age that no longer manages to be either blasphemous or devout. This is what Achilles says: “Fat sheep and oxen you can steal; cooking pots and golden-maned horses you can buy; but once it has left the circle of his teeth, the life of a man [andròs psych] can be neither replaced, nor stolen, nor bought.” Not only have these words never been confuted with the passing centuries, but they have gathered further intensity and urgency, as beliefs and principles withered away all around to leave them standing alone. Today, whenever somebody who doesn’t belong to any creed refuses to kill, Achilles’ words live on in him.
The aesthetic justification of existence was not an invention of the young Nietzsche. He was just the first to give it a name. Earlier, it had been the tacit premise of life in Greece under the Olympians. Perfection of the outward appearance was indissolubly linked to the acceptance of a life without redemption, without salvation, without hope of repetition, circumscribed by the precarious wonder of its brief apparition. Achilles is the son of a goddess, and this fact gives him a strength and grace unknown to others, but he chooses a brief and resplendent life, which is irrecoverable.
Rather than the life of one individual, the life Achilles chooses is an image of all life as Homer understood it. Later, in the underworld, Achilles comes out with a speech that offers a mirror image of the one he made when refusing Agamemnon’s gifts. The hero now appears as just one among many, “unfeeling shades of exhausted mortals.” All that’s left of life is a long weariness. Odysseus tries to call him “happy,” even among the dead, and claims to admire him because even here he has preserved his “great power.” But once again Achilles is ready with words that will prove unanswerable: “Don’t try to prettify death for me, noble Odysseus. I would rather live as a cowherd in the service of a poor peasant, with barely enough to eat, than reign over all these wasted dead.” It is only because life is irretrievable and irrepeatable that the glory of appearance can reach such intensity. Here there is no hidden meaning, no reference to, nor hint of, anything else, such as the Platonic tyranny will later impose. Here appearance is everything, is the essential integrity of what exists only for the brief period when it is present and visible. It is a fleeting figure briefly capturing the perfection of those other figures who live on unhindered, on Olympus.
On two occasions, before the beginning and after the end of the Trojan War, Agamemnon finds himself obliged to preside over the sacrifice of a virgin. The first time it is his daughter Iphigenia, whom he lures to Aulis by pretending to offer her in marriage to Achilles. The second time it is the Trojan Polyxena, whom Achilles thought he was going to meet and marry in the temple where, hiding behind a column, treacherous Apollo kills him. Iphigenia is sacrificed because the long, windless calm is preventing the Achaean ships from leaving; Polyxena is sacrificed because the long, windless calm is preventing the Achaean ships from returning. In the case of Iphigenia, the deceived bride, Achilles tries to oppose the sacrifice; in the case of Polyxena, Achilles, the deceived groom, reappears as a ghost to claim his victim.
Right from the beginning, the lives of Agamemnon and Achilles run in perfect parallel. Agamemnon is never the cause of the sacrifice, but it is always he who carries it out, with a watchful eye on the multitude who obey him and who are kept under control by these gestures. His concern is that murder should be sufficiently well camouflaged as sacrifice, until he himself is murdered like a sacrificial beast by Clytemnestra. There is a circularity in his destiny that allows of no deviation. Achilles opposes him every step of the way: it is he who is about to marry the victim of both sacrifices. The first time, alive, he rejects the sacrifice; the second, dead, he demands it. Agamemnon carries out the law of men; Achilles wants to escape the will of the gods, or to assume their role himself. Agamemnon does not touch the victim but gives orders for her to be killed; it will be Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, who actually plunges his knife into Polyxena’s throat. Agamemnon is death’s administrator; for Achilles, death is always either too attractive or too repugnant. At the two extremes of the stage stand the two heroes. In the center, in ceremonial silence, the two sacrifices that open and close the Trojan War are consummated.