First & LastName
Professor Martin
ENGL-2332-3W1
19 June 2008
Plato Does No Justice to Achilles 
	“Young men make wars, and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage and hope for the future.” The memorable quote from the 1960s epic film, Lawrence of Arabia, extols the glory of war, bringing out the best traits of a battle-tested warrior. With respect to Homer’s epic, The Iliad, the protagonist Achilles certainly exemplifies numerous virtues of a warrior – passionate, fearless, and respected. However, Achilles’s brilliant merits are overshadowed by his egregious flaws, namely his deficiency to act with justice. By Plato’s criterion of justice as delineated in The Republic, one can ultimately conclude that Achilles’s character and actions utterly fail in upholding the virtue of justice.
	Plato’s comprehensive definition of justice goes beyond a formal dictionary definition. Plato’s treats justice almost as if it were a school of philosophy, and his arguments in The Republic are constructed to prove how justice should be mirrored in society and the individual, how justice is not simply the advantage of the stronger, and that justice, independent of exterior motives, is inherently desirable. Although Plato lived centuries after the events in The Iliad, his concept of justice through the aforementioned three arguments can be applied to demonstrate that Achilles is the epitome of injustice.
	The primary theme of The Iliad revolves around the rash nature of Achilles, and as it turns out, Achilles’ trademark trait directly correlates to a form of societal and individual injustice. According to Plato, in a just societal structure, everyone must play only their specific role, and not intrude or take over roles that were not designed for them. Thus rulers rule, the warriors protect, and the laymen keep everyday life rolling along. Achilles initially upheld such a form of justice. As the greatest warrior of the Achaeans, Achilles does his duties to fight under the order of his ruler, Agamemnon. Yet a turning point for the worse occurs in the opening lines of the epic, when Achilles contends “what a worthless, burnt-out coward I’d be called if I would submit to [Agamemnon]…never again…will [he] yield to Agamemnon” (Book I, 343-347). In other words, Achilles steps outside his role’s boundaries and rebels against Agamemnon’s wishes to take the ill-gained Briseis. Moreover, Achilles’s decision to abandon his comrades for selfish reasons is a radical deviation from his role as warrior. Although Agamemnon’s selfish desires do not not exactly fit Plato’s ideal of a just leader, Achilles’s mismatch of his role creates  dire consequences “that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls…but made their bodes carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds” (Book I, 2-5). As eloquently put by the muse’s invocation, all of the soldier’s bright futures that ended in futile losses can be directly attributed to a single man who misunderstood his position in society.  In essence, Plato’s philosophy reveals that Achilles has created an imbalance in society, which leads to turmoil and suffering. Furthermore, Achilles fails yet again in “individual” justice.  Similarly to societal structure, an individual’s desires consist of a thirst for knowledge (for the rational rulers), honor (for the brave warriors), and material lust (for the laymen). Therefore, a just individual’s desires should also correspond to their role in society. The warrior Achilles, already dear to the gods and renowned for being swift-footed, already establishes that he can successfully seek glory. Yet once more, Achilles steps outside his role’s boundaries and intrudes upon the rational role with his irrational actions. His thoughts come to be so uncontrollable and self-centered that he even requests help from the gods “to help the Trojan cause… even mighty Atrides can see how mad [Agamemnon] was to disgrace Achilles” (Book I, 485-490). Thus, Plato warns that if one loses control of one’s societal or individual role and/or takes the role he is not to play, society and individuals will crumble. Plato’s warning is in fact the theme of the Iliad, and applies to all time and cultural contexts, spanning from literature as early as Gilgamesh to modern classics such as The Great Gatsby.
	Plato’s philosophy continues to denigrate Achilles’s injustice in asserting that justice is not merely the advantage of the stronger. An opposing school of thought, the Sophists, argue that morals and the law are mere formalities that can be disregarded. The heartless reasoning is justified by a gain in advantage and power, and thus clever opportunists rather than the self-conscious deserve to rule. Incidentally, Achilles seems to fit the Sophist concept of justice. In a disgusting manner, Achilles is infuriated over Agamemnon’s demand for Briseis. The ill-gained maiden has no obligation to Achilles; she is purely a wartime prize seized at an opportune moment. Yet Achilles goes as far as to threaten that “[Agamemnon] will soon pay for his arrogance with his life” (Book I, 239-240) based on shallow reasoning.   Indeed, Achilles abuses his power, with the justification that he is advantageously powerful and that no weaker being can change that. Falling into deeper depths of a moral void, Achilles begins disregarding human life itself, as exemplified by the brutal massacre of Hector and the desecration of the fallen warrior’s corpse. Achilles seems to be devoid of any trace of humanity when he denies Hector’s plea to “give [his] body to friends to carry home again, so Trojan men and Trojan women can do [him] honor with fitting rites of fire” (Book XXII, 403-405). Even the woes of Hector’s weeping parents and spouse cannot make Achilles feel any sense of remorse. Because Achilles has the brute strength and fury to control Hector’s fate, he falls under the Sophist philosophy that the advantageous can leave the disadvantageous to suffer without consequence. Ironically, the “great” warrior’s egregious actions are so extreme that perhaps even the selfish Sophist notion of justice cannot fully describe Achilles’s injustice.
	Furthermore, Achilles fails to understand Plato’s concluding point of The Republic - justice is good in itself, and requires no immediate advantage to pursue. For instance, the reader may sympathize with Achilles’ resolution to avenge Patroclus’s death. However, Achilles seeks justice in the form of satiating his thirst for revenge. In fact, most of Achilles actions stem from pursuing “justice” dependent on selfish goals. To elaborate upon his concluding argument, Plato compares the tyrant, whose actions for some despicable purpose hearken a lifetime of psychological torture, to the just ruler, whose justified acts embolden a balanced state of mind. Applying Plato’s philosophy to The Iliad, the reader observes that the consequence of Achilles’s tyrannical actions is an endless psychological roller coaster. For instance, Achilles exemplifies his violent nature before killing Hector, asserting that “[his] rage, [his] fury would drive [him] now to hack [Hector’s] flesh away and eat [Hector] raw” (Book XXII, 408-409).  Psychologically unstable, Achilles looks to his excessive emotions rather than the inherent goodness as a means to pursue justice. Achilles’s only seems to begin understanding Plato’s justice in the epic’s closing paragraphs when King Priam talks of Hector’s loss from a father’s standpoint. Finally, Achilles puts his irrational emotions aside to act for a justice independent of a selfish motive.
	The underlying theme of The Iliad, Achilles’s impetuousness and its ominous consequences, has a high correlation with Plato’s arguments on justice in The Republic. By analyzing Achilles in the contexts of societal and individual justice, justice as not the advantage of the stronger, and justice as independent of self-motives, one concludes that up until the final lines of The Iliad, Achilles is the antithesis of Platonian justice. If Plato read the Iliad while writing The Republic, he might as well have added another book to warn against injustice, using Achilles’s actions as a model.