By Elisa Penha
Edited by Elim Chan and Alloe Mak

The prophetic perfect is a grammatical structure used in books of the Bible and similar religious texts that describes future events in a past tense, as they are so sure to happen, you may as well speak about them as if they already did. My friends and I made a joke out of this:

One of us will say, “I need to pass this test.”

And the other, “You already have! You have passed the test. Perfect prophetic.” 

My friends and I deal a lot with prophecy. Let me tell you some of my favourite ones. 

Achilles is born dead. In Greek, his name means “the sorrow of a people,” or something along those lines. The distress of soldiers. The grief of a nation. I wonder why they let him get away with becoming so famous with a name like that. You see, normally, Greek heroes use names like omens—as weighty as an oracleian word, to give a hint or prayer as to what they might be or become. Heracles (Roman, Hercules) was named by his fearful mortal parents to appease the queen mother goddess Hera, who, sure to be upset by yet another extramarital offspring of her husband Zeus, would be slightly less upset to hear the child had been named the glory of Hera, so on, so forth. Why the Greeks even let the sorrow of a people, the distress of soldiers, and the grief of a nation pick up a sword in the first place is beyond me as I imagine it was beyond them. Achilles’ name, in a purely interpretative way, is perfect prophetic. A grief so sure to come that you might as well refer to it (him) as having always existed. 

Prophecy clung to Achilles like a hangnail. He was born out of prophetic wedlock to a nereid (water goddess), Thetis, and a humble yet tortured king, Peleus, but only after brothers Zeus and Poseidon had been vying for Thetis’ affection. However, when Zeus received a prophecy that a son of Thetis would be greater than his father, the brothers relented from their chase. They would not risk it. It was, after all, a similar prophecy that led to their Titan father, Kronos, eating all his children at birth. Prophecies are a lot like tumours or weeds; they like to regrow and strike twice in the same place. 

It was at the wedding of Thetis and Peleus that the conflict which resulted in the Trojan war began, meaning Achilles was born into the war that would kill him. Achilles was only one of seven sons had by Thetis and Peleus who did not die in infancy. You see, technically, the prophecy about a son of Thetis could have been about any of those dead babies just as much as it could have been about Achilles. I cannot stress to you enough how unspecial he was. How even his prophecies weren’t his to keep. 

The next time Achilles met with prophecy was this. To protect him from the Trojan War, which had begun by then, his parents hid him away dressed as a young girl on the island of Skyros. In the meanwhile, Odysseus, a wily and heroic general, heard from a prophet that Troy would never be captured without the help of Achilles, and so he came to Skyros and unveiled Achilles’ disguise, convincing him to join the Greek army. Here is a (very amateur) drawing I made to try and illustrate to you how this prophetic timeline works. 

When Achilles makes a decision, the prophecy has already been fulfilled, and thus, he has already joined the Greek army. He already captured Troy, and then everything else (Odysseus hearing the prophecy and unmasking Achilles on Skyros) happens after that, linearly, in an attempt to bring us back around to what has happened in the past. Perfect prophetic. But here, note, that the prophecy was not that Achilles will fight in Troy, the prophecy was that Greece will not win without him, and he very well could have told Odysseus “no.” Like with the last one, Achilles’ abidance to prophecy was wholly incidental. He did not try to evade the prophecy only to have it come back in some unprecedented, monkey’s paw, type of catch. His plight was not Oedipal. 

One of my favourite literary tropes is the refusal of the call, which is the typical second, reactionary step to a Chosen One discovering they are a Chosen One: they, understandably, do not want to take the job. However, to paraphrase an old Tumblr post, the (likewise) typical follow-up to the refusal of the call is the call knows where you live and it will solicit at your doorstep until you give in. But the call has no power over Achilles, and his free reign makes him Greece’s biggest threat to fate. 

This is nowhere clearer than Achilles’ third dalliance with prophecy; his ill-fated halfway-romance with Troilus. 

Troilus was a Trojan prince, the youngest of King Priam’s five children. He was one of Troy’s leading fighters, and thus, many prophecies wound his prowess with the good fortune of Troy, saying that if Troilus should reach twenty years, the city of Troy would never fall. And so, the Greeks, now joined by Achilles, decided to ambush him; to meddle with what had been foretold; to ensure their victory. 

What they did not count on, or plan for, was Achilles falling deeply in love with Troilus, stricken by his beauty. Achilles made ardent sexual advances towards Troilus, who refused Achilles and was then decapitated at an altar-omphalos of Apollo. In other accounts, Troilus is killed by Achilles himself, sometimes during an ambush, and sometimes accidentally, during sex. At any rate, the boy dies, and in either interpretation, it is Achilles’ undeniable fault. 

Troilus was the younger brother of Hector, the man who would go on to kill Achilles’ better-known (and reciprocated) lover, Patroclus. This is the sort of karmic justice that should, by all means, appear in prophecy. It does not. Achilles sewed his karma through his impulsivity.

Achilles did not walk backward into his myth, nor was he a blind product of a classic, unavoidable, cyclical Greek narrative. Achilles ran headfirst off the path made for him and harnessed something much worse for himself and for everybody around him. Achilles is frightening because he does not fall into tragedy; he creates it. Achilles is a hurricane. No prophecy is large enough, omnipotent enough, to hold the power of his sheer emotion.

“Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses . . . ” begins the Iliad. What people have long gotten wrong about the Iliad, to no fault of their own, is believing it is a story about a war. It is not. It is set during a war, the last weeks of an ongoing, ten-year war, to be precise, but the Iliad is about anger. Murderous, doomed anger. Achilles, the titular hero, the strongest of all the Greeks, does not even fight until Patroclus is killed, deciding instead to stay holed up in his tent in protest over the removal of his concubine, Briseis. You can lead an invincible, epic hero to the frontlines of a war to preserve his people, but you cannot make him drink. It is ridiculous, yes, but it must be understood—all of Achilles’ errors are strictly his own.

And when Patroclus, fed up and afraid, dons Achilles’ armour and takes to the battlefield in disguise and is slain by Hector by a spear through the belly, Achilles rises, and the fallout is nuclear. Even the Olympians look on in fear at Achilles’ carnage, which shows distinctly that this was not how this story was supposed to go, if it was supposed to go anyway at all. Achilles flays the body of Hector and ties it to his chariot, circling the flaming city of Troy three hundred times. He kills and he kills and he kills. The Iliad calls him an animal, further from human or god than anybody has ever been. 

And then . . . 

Well, and then, Paris strikes Achilles in the heel, and he dies, furious. Achilles’ death isn’t actually part of the Iliad. The Iliad ends with Achilles agreeing to a momentary pause to the fighting with the Trojan king, Priam, so that they may have a funeral for their Hector. To me, the overly ambitious musing of a second-year classics student, this is an apology. There will never be another one like it, because Achilles will not be around to make them, and why would anybody else? No use apologizing for fate, unless, of course, you did not have one. 

In book eleven of the Odyssey, the second epic poem which follows Odysseus’ twenty-year journey home to Ithaca from Troy, Odysseus ventures into Hades (the underworld) and encounters his old friends from the Trojan war. Odysseus greets Achilles: 

“But you, Achilles, there’s not a man in the world more blest than you—there never has been, never will be one. Time was, when you were alive, we Argives honoured you as a god, and now down here, I see, you lord over the dead in all your power. So grieve no more at dying, great Achilles.”

And to this, Achilles tells him, “No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus! By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down here over all the breathless dead . . . For I no longer stand in the light of day—the man I was— . . . Oh to arrive at father’s house—the man I was, for one brief day . . . ”. 

To me, always, this has been the most striking point of the Odyssey, and the most tragic of Achilles’ story. This is regret, clear as day. Achilles realizes, after all is said and done, that he would have preferred to live. No nonsense about legacy, no musing on his memory. Plain and simply, Achilles wishes he had not listened and grown old instead of being Achilles; the sorrow of a people, the distress of soldiers, the grief of a nation. Achilles was not dead from the beginning; Achilles did not lead the life of a doomed hero, hurtling towards his destiny without cause. Achilles was just a boy, burdened with a sadness so vast, failed by all, who could have just as easily been somebody else entirely. 

Anybody who has spent any amount of time speaking to me knows that Achilles is my favourite Greek hero. He is stubborn and cruel, but I remain unabashedly fixated by him, and for a long time, I could not answer why that was. But now, I think, I know. The world was always just a little too big to catch him, and he fell through splayed fingers. His grief and his rage were purely his own. He is so damningly human despite being half divine, and nobody really knew what to do with it; with him. Nobody prophesied the depth of his sorrow. It doesn’t lie anywhere comfortable in the Greek mythological and moral canon, built to represent who the Greeks were or thought themselves to be. You can predict natural disasters, and patricides, and death, but you cannot predict what a brokenhearted boy will do with his heart after you take it away. Achilles was operating just left of fate the whole time, and it was terrifying to watch. Achilles was a clerical error; wrong place, wrong time. He chose glory over life and died to regret it. The thing about Achilles is that, if he had the choice to do it all again, he wouldn’t. His story would not repeat itself. He is tragic only because he would not be tragic if he knew better. 

Orpheus will always look back. Cassandra will never be believed. Icarus will always fly too high. But Achilles would not fight again. His story only gets to happen once. And it did happen, long ago, before anybody knew it was happening. And then it was over, and there is no second try. The grief will be ours, not his, because we weren’t there to stop him in time. You have been doomed by his narrative. Perfect prophetic. 

Author’s Note: quotes from the Iliad and the Odyssey used in this piece are from Robert Fagles’ translations.