Late in the Iliad, the Trojan Lycaon begs Achilles to spare his life on the battlefield. Achilles refuses his supplications:
Come, friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so?
. . . And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am?
The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life
a deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell you,
death and the strong force of fate are waiting.
There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon
when a man will take my life in battle too—
flinging a spear perhaps
or whipping a deadly arrow off his bow.
Achilles exemplifies the Ancient Greek morality of struggle and victory, wherein glory cannot exist apart from winners and losers, killers and their slain. Vitalist thinkers from Nietzsche down to Bronze Age Pervert have found in this portrait of pagan warrior virtue a compelling antidote to the enervating force of modernity, which they blame on Christianity. Indeed, as moderns, we are conditioned within a Christian humanist paradigm of solicitude for victims. Under this paradigm—at least in its current, grotesquely swollen form—we aren’t supposed to see anything glorious in an Achilles exerting himself over weaker men. But we need not spurn empathy or embrace an ethic of “might makes right” for this scene to resonate, and even inspire.
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