Theme of Grief in The Iliad Essay Example

The concept of grief has an immense impact on the characters of Homer’s Iliad in a variety of different ways and still influences many individuals, like myself, through loss.

In the Iliad, mourning loss consisted of a lot of physical actions such as groaning, tearing out hair, and more. It visibly affected many characters throughout the poem as many characters begged loved ones or desperately prayed to the gods. When things seem to be going badly for the Greeks, Patroclus cries to Achilles, “That was how Patroclus, like a child / Begging for a toy, begged for death.” Patroclus begs Achilles for help because of the loss of many Greek soldiers on the battlefield. In this case, it is evident how desperate Patroclus is due to his grief while he implores Achilles to forget Honor and take care of the problem at hand. Here, Homer expresses Patroclus’ distress through Achilles dialogue, “‘You’re like a little girl, pestering her mother / To pick her up, pulling at her hem,” comparing Patroclus to a little girl whining at her mother to describe how grief has affected him. While Patroclus begs of despair, grief also has different effects on other characters like Priam as he mourns for his son. Before Hector leaves to take on Achilles by himself, Priam begs him, “Show some pity for me / Before I go out of my mind with grief,” to not leave for the sake of Priam losing his most valuable son. Priam knows that Hector will not win the battle and mourns for Hector’s fate as well as his own sanity. Despite his efforts to keep Hector from leaving to his death, Priam loses him and at demise, desperately appeals, “Please let me go, alone, to the Greek ships. / I don’t care if you’re worried.” Here, Priam allows his emotions to take over, which is very understandable. Going to the Greek ships alone would be a rash and, frankly, a bad decision which is how his grief and pain causes him to become angry and want to seek revenge against the person who killed his son, Achilles. He also states that he does not care about the worries or opinions of others, which also conveys his mental state and how he is using his pain and anger to make decisions. Like Patroclus and Priam, lots of characters throughout the poem, lose loved ones and make decisions that may have been affected by their grief.

Through my own experiences, I have come to understand the Iliad better and in a deeper sense. Many people experience forms of grief during their lifetime because, in reality, I find it quite impossible to have a completely “happy” or a perfect life. There are bound to be ups and downs and gains and losses. In my personal experience, such strong emotions, such as grief, can cause me to make in-the-moment decisions. They can be positive and helpful but can also be impulsive and wind up in me skipping the steps to evaluate a situation before jumping into the decision of what I should do. With grief, there are the well-known five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then, acceptance. Knowing these, I have been able to analyze the theme throughout the book just a bit better. In Priam’s case, he already knows that Hector is not going to win in the battle against Achilles, meaning that he expects it to happen and therefore, isn’t exactly in denial when it occurs. However, Priam does seem to be very angry at Achilles when he sees his son fall to the ground which is, ofcourse, understandable. He uses this anger and emotion to make the decision of going to the enemy’s ships by himself. Though this may not end up holding true, I know this feeling and can relate to Priam here because there are definitely times where my emotions seem to be the one making the sudden decisions instead of myself. When people are angry, frustrated, or stressed, they may take that out on themselves and others or say things that they don’t mean. It’s just part of our human nature. If we’re pressured by a certain strong emotion or situation, we need a way to let it out and sometimes that happens in the wrong way, maybe by saying something hurtful at someone close that we didn’t mean. Grief, as we can see in the Iliad, led to the characters having pretty similar reactions. When knowing someone else’s death before it happened, many characters would beg as much as they could whether that be to the actual person or to the gods. And after death, many characters would be so captured in grieving and mourning through wailing and crying and other older physical methods. Though humans today may not pull our hair out when mourning, it doesn’t mean that grief affects us any less than it did back then. Though the Iliad is a fictionalized poem, Homer’s depiction and description of grief and the anguish of the characters is still accurate and fully relatable.