Does that mean he was reborn? Or twice born?
That's just some stupid shit the greeks say.
“Do you want to know what really happened to Achilles?”
“He died.”
“Sure. But when?”
“Well we’re just gonna have to get into a lot of history and archaeology and fragment—”
“What fragment?”
“Fragmenta/oi, the lost letters and pieces of their writings, it was an oral tra—”
“An oral tradition? Hah! And what do you know of the oral tradition?”
“Well I, uh… No one knows! It was oral, it’s all lost and we all just have fragments. Even the larger works are a fragment of the totality of—”
“The Tradition? What makes you so sure that the Illiad was a gift from God, a written, surviving, lost-but-found text? How are you so sure that…”
“—Everyone had it! Even Alexander kept a copy under his pillow.”
“Because over the pillow held the true knowledge behind the story.”
“What are you saying? One half of…”
“One half? You think two lowly of yourself,” The SC laughed off.
“Try a third. Try a fourth, even.”
“Huh? Wait what does this have to do with what really happened to Achilles?”
“Of what are you asking? Do you claim to know the true voice of Αχλλως?”
“Ι τηινκ τηατ’σ τηε ςρονγ ςαυ το σπελλ ι μεαν σαυ ιτ”
The SC was getting tired of the dialectic.
Do you know what was happening to Achilles in that tent? In the tent where only Patroclus went, and Ulysses, and whomever else they added afterwords? Do we think Patrocles died out there? Did he, so brave and loving a commandante, bear up the arms of Achilles as himself, and fail to prove his dignity?
Wow, that’s a surprisingly flowery way of putting it.
It is. It was.
What makes you so sure that it was not the nightmare of the Greeks, that their one true Achilles really did go out there and get murdered by *skims repressed Classic memories* Euphorbos, then Hector?
What? No it can’t be, Patroclus is my He…
HAHAHAHA HA…
What makes you so sure that Achilles did not die that day, that Patroclus was He, who withered away on the battlefield?
“I would turn away in fright!”
Did not Agamemnon keep his people safe, and true? Did he not know the phobos in his ranks, the shades that might appear, if people found out that Their Hero has died? Or would they rather have him never die in the first place? No matter, Achilles has been in his tent for too fucking long, and we all even forgot what he looks like. Let’s just send my most promising boy, some unknown ranger within the ranks, some unknown beast of burden. I’ve seen him train, I know he’s well, I know his teachers and peers don’t listen to him.
The real Achilles went out that day and got absolutely slaughtered. But that was truly his uppity fortune, this crybaby bastard. Let them think that my son is Achilles reborn, that that other loser was a mere squire. Let them, think the best boy, who they’ve never seen— Let them praise him as Achilles. That shall do.
And it was like their Hero had never left.