Rage From The Iliad Quotes

Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, though it hurts us, and beat down by constraint the anger that rises inside us. Now I am making an end of my anger. It does not become me, unrelentingly to rage on

Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.

A man’s life breath cannot come back again–
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth.

Like a girl, a baby running after her mother, begging to be picked up, and she tugs on her skirts, holding her back as she tries to hurry off—all tears, fawning up at her, till she takes her in her arms… That’s how you look, Patroclus, streaming live tears.

You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat—coward!

And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you– it’s born with us the day that we are born.

…but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives.

Fear, O Achilles, the wrath of heaven; think on your own father and have compassion upon me, who am the more pitiable

His descent was like nightfall.

No one can hurry me down to Hades before my time, but if a man’s hour is come, be he brave or be he coward, there is no escape for him when he has once been born.

Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you – it’s born with us the day that we are born.

And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief, his sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil red with his own blood, he rots away himself-more birds than women flocking round his body!

Strife and Confusion joined the fight, along with cruel Death, who seized one wounded man while still alive and then another man without a wound, while pulling the feet of one more corpse out from the fight. The clothes Death wore around her shoulders were dyed red with human blood.

But listen to me first and swear an oath to use all your eloquence and strength to look after me and protect me.

Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

Why have you come to me here, dear heart, with all these instructions? I promise you I will do everything just as you ask. But come closer. Let us give in to grief, however briefly, in each other’s arms.

…like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.

There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.

Let him submit to me! Only the god of death is so relentless, Death submits to no one—so mortals hate him most of all the gods. Let him bow down to me! I am the greater king, I am the elder-born, I claim—the greater man.

The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

All things are in the hand of heaven, and Folly, eldest of Jove’s daughters, shuts men’s eyes to their destruction. She walks delicately, not on the solid earth, but hovers over the heads of men to make them stumble or to ensnare them.

No man or woman born, coward or brave, can shun his destiny.

I wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals, and gall, which makes a man grow angry for all his great mind, that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man’s heart and becomes a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping of honey.

It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair.

Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.