As you know, the poet sings "the wrath of Achilles." But Achilles is a more complex character than that, isn’t he? The adolescent pique of book one is very different from the Achilles who deals with Agamemnon’s embassy in Book 9. The killing machine who stalks the plain after Hector’s killing of Patroclus is more like a force of nature than a possible human being, don’t you think? But all that unravels at Priam’s supplication of Achilles in Book 24. Or seems to unravel, anyway. Can you locate a coherent character for Achilles?
