Summary of answer: Yes.
Yes, he does predate the Iliad, and he was an existing mythological character.
The name Achilleus is attested in Bronze Age Greek: a dative form a-ki-re-we (~ Ἀχιλ(λ)ηϝεῖ) in PY Fn(1) 79, and nominative a-ki-re-u (~᾿Αχιλ(λ)εύς) in KN Vc(5) 106. That doesn’t mean we have Bronze Age references to Achilles: it just means it’s not a unique name that was invented for the legendary character. These Achilleses are aren’t the legendary Achilles, any more than Harry, Ron, and Hermione in this 1973 issue of New York Magazine are characters from a famous series of novels.
It is widely taught that the Homeric epics are snapshots of a centuries-long tradition of storytelling, and this conception of them carries an implication that the characters existed within that tradition before the snapshot was taken. On one level, this is a simplification — that model is more about crystallisation over time, rather than a snapshot of one moment in an ongoing tradition — and on another level it’s actually rather debateable. The formulaic language of Homer certainly is traditional, to an extent, but that doesn’t automatically imply that the content of the Iliad itself is; and there are legitimate linguistic doubts even over the age of the formulaic tradition. One 2002 study by Dag Haug suggests that the majority of the formulaic tradition might be no more than a century older than the final form of the Iliad (which dates to the second quarter of the 600s BCE). Conversely, many philologists would put the origins of the formulaic tradition all the way back in the Bronze Age — with the bonus that that supposedly licenses them to think of the poem as a record of Bronze Age events (it isn’t). Some elements of formulaic language do unquestionably go back to the Bronze Age, but how old the formulaic tradition as a whole is, isn’t nearly as clear as someone like Gregory Nagy might want you to think. There’s a difference of emphasis on this which is very much an anglophone-vs-mainland-European thing.
The most compelling reason we can be confident that he existed in Greek legend before the Iliad came along is that his story in the Iliad is a variant on a story pattern that we can see elsewhere, and the story that we see elsewhere is the more fundamental form of the story pattern, with Achilles still in the main role. And that indicates that Achilles’ story in the Iliad is secondary, and the more fundamental version is primary.
The pattern looks roughly like this:
- Thetis prophesies that A will die after killing B
- B kills C, A’s sidekick
- A attacks B
- Zeus weighs up divine scales to represent the duel’s outcome
- A kills B
- A attacks the gates of Troy
- D kills A at the gates of Troy with divine aid
- battle over A’s corpse; E (+F…) recovers the body
- funeral games for A
- Thetis and nymphs lament
The full pattern played out in the lost epic the Aethiopis. We know this thanks to a plot summary, and to several bits of incidental information that are reported in many places as early as Pindar.
In the Iliad this pattern plays out twice, but only partially each time: different bits of the pattern are distributed between different characters. Jonathan Burgess gives a full analysis in his 2009 book The death and afterlife of Achilles.
Briefly, the three instances of the story look like this:
The ‘Patroclus sequence’ is where Patroclus attacks the gates of Troy and is killed by Hector with the aid of Apollo (book 16), there’s a battle over his corpse, Menelaus plays a key role in recovering the body (book 17), Thetis and the Nereids lament (book 18), and there are funeral games (book 23): elements 6 to 10 in the pattern outlined above. You can also add elements 1 and 3 if you play with the material a bit loosely (Achilles warns Patroclus of his death; Patroclus’ duel with Sarpedon) as Burgess does, but you don’t have to.
The ‘Achilles sequence’ is where Thetis prophesies Achilles’ death after killing Hector, Hector kills Patroclus (book 16), Achilles attacks Hector, divine scales represent the outcome of the duel, Achilles kills Hector, and Achilles seriously thinks about attacking the gates of Troy (book 22): elements 1 to 6 in the pattern outlined above.
And the full pattern plays out in the Aethiopis, as I said. Achilles’ death is prophesied, Memnon kills Antilochus, the divine scales are whipped out, Achilles kills Memnon, then immediately attacks the gates of Troy where Paris and Apollo kill him, Thetis + Nereids + Muses lament, and there are funeral games.
The reason we can be confident that it’s the Iliad storylines that are secondary is because the whole point of the story is that Achilles dies. The prophecy of his death is a key framing device; so’s the lamentation by Thetis and the Nereids. And both of those things happen in the Iliad, which shows how important they are (in book 18 they’re lamenting for Achilles, not for Patroclus, even though Patroclus is the one who’s died), but the dénouement — Achilles’ death — does not happen. And that shows that it’s secondary.
The upshot is that yes, Achilles is a traditional character, and the Iliad poet essentially sampled elements of a pre-existing story; and that pre-existing story later appeared in a more faithful form in the Aethiopis.
There is however a secondary implication: and that is that, while Achilles did exist before the Iliad, it’s perfectly possible that Patroclus and Hector didn’t. Or if they did, they may have looked quite different. In Dictys of Crete — a 1st century novelisation of the Trojan War, which may have taken some inspiration from the Aethiopis or a later version of it — Achilles’ killing of Hector has nothing to do with Patroclus, but takes place when Hector goes out to welcome Penthesileia and her Amazons to Troy. Could that be what happened in the Aethiopis? We’ll never know, but it looks quite possible.
Further reading: from an analytic point of view the best further reading on this is Burgess’ 2009 book The death and afterlife of Achilles, chapter 6. It’s a focused version of some ideas that were first expounded in Wolfgang Kullmann’s 1960 book Die Quellen der Ilias, which is about how the Iliad draws on legendary material that survived in alternate forms in the Epic Cycle. If you find that the list-of-motifs kind of approach I’ve used here seems artificial, then a better choice of reading would be Laura Slatkin’s 1991 book The power of Thetis: same idea, but much more emphasis on the interplay between different stories, and the extra layers of meaning that the Iliad gains by drawing on external material.
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_MonsacreH.The_Tears_of_Achilles.2018.
Leave a Reply