Lia’s Reviews > The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad > Status Update

Because his life will be short, his dishonor at the hands of Agamemnon is initially seen to be all the more important; later, with Achilles' increased perspective on what it means to have a short life, honor from Agamemnon will have no value for him.

the mainspring of Achilles' developing sense of values is his consciousness of the brevity of human life, and especially the extreme brevity that the war enforces. He finds the meaning of any situation by measuring it against the irreducible fact of the brevity of life. In the course of the poem, the value that he assigns to such meaning will be transformed.

it has been shown that the reference to the wall built by the Achaeans in Iliad 12 evokes a complex myth of destruction to which even the myth of the Flood has been assimilated; yet we would have no awareness of such a myth without the Cypria and the Hesiodic Catalogue, as well as comparative evidence from the Near East.

the Iliad all but ignores that not inconsequential piece of Iliadic prehistory, the Judgment of Paris; and yet, as we discover in Book 24 although not until then the Judgment of Paris is indeed known to Homer, but carefully contained in a brief reference.

the Aethiopis is especially interesting for the student of the Iliad, featuring as it does an alternative development of the theme of the hero's acquisition of immortality through his mother.