The peculiarity and the severity of the breech, I shall hold here, is drawn out and deliberately submitted to examination by the author in several stages: (1) Through the dramatic resolution of Agamemnon’s ate, culminating both in his proper “seeing” of his errors, and his offer to give proper restitutions and honors to Achilles (2) Achilles’s refusal to be reconciled (3) Phoenix’s appeal against the hard heart of Achilles, buttressed with a listing of precedents of formal reconciliations wrought under the most trying time (e.g., the wrath of Meleagros), and a cosmogony of Ruin and the Prayers which mythically ties wrath and return among men to the divine order of Zeus (4) Ajax and Diomedes concise addenda, which go towards the purpose of suggesting that there is something bizarre and abnormal about Achilles’ thumos. It is examination of Achilles heart, which opposes all reconciliation with men, and, to paraphrase the philosopher Eric Voegelin, oozed a great black void into the already fragile themis among men. In its construction, the book opposes Achilles’ fine cholos with precedents of greater yore. Book IX of The Iliad can be read as an enucleation of Achilles’ wrath.
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