How are the epic verses of the Hesiodic Suitors of Helen relevant to Achilles in our Homeric Iliad?

Abstract

This essay picks up from where I left off in a succession of two previous essays (Nagy 2021.06.14, linked here, and Nagy 2021.06.21, linked here). In both those essays, I concentrated on evidence that I gathered from the surviving fragments of the Hesiodic composition known as The Suitors of Helen. On the basis of that evidence, I ended the second of the two essays by starting to think further about the implications of what we read in “our” Homeric Iliad about the single most important Achaean hero who, it is said clearly in the Hesiodic Suitors of Helen, was never a suitor of Helen in Sparta. That hero was Achilles, the best of the Achaeans in our Homeric Iliad. In the essay here, I offer some further thoughts about the idea of Achilles as a “non-suitor,” especially as reflected in Iliad 9, where the love of Achilles for Briseis, a captive woman whom he ‘won by the spear’—so he describes her—is contrasted with the love, which Achilles sarcastically questions, of Agamemnon and Menelaos for ‘their wives’.