As a poet and sometime classicist, I cannot read the word wrath and not think of mênis. It is the very first word of the Iliad, and the aftermath of all Western literature travels in its blood-stained wake. Mênis is often translated as “wrath,” but it can also mean “rage” or “anger.” Richmond Lattimore’s translation begins, “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus”—“Wrath, sing, goddess,” is closer to the Greek word order, but maybe more difficult to parse. Mênis is those things, wrath and rage and anger, but it is also more than those things. Regular human beings in the Homeric world feel orgê (rage) or thumos (anger). To be angry in modern Greek (I live in Athens) is to be thumomenos/thumomene. But mênis is, properly, a cosmic wrath, divine wrath, a wrath beyond the scope of the human experience.

Part of the problem in the Iliad is that Achilles isn’t divine; the wrath is out of proportion to his heroic stature, even if he is, by birth, from his goddess mother, a kind of demigod. Everything that follows from that word—the death of Patroclus, the death of Hector, the sacking of cities, the rape and enslavement of women—is dragged behind its rattling wheels, like a battered long-haired corpse in the dust. Achilles’ destructive supernatural wrath stems from an insult to his ego, when his prize, the enslaved woman Briseis, is taken from him by the commander in chief of the Greeks, Agamemnon.

It isn’t so much the removal of this beloved prize (who, Homer tells us, leaves his side unwillingly) that sends Achilles into his cosmic wrath but the personal humiliation of Agamemnon’s affront. Fairly early on in the poem, in Book Nine, the leader of the Greeks sends an embassy with an offer to return Briseis in an effort to get Achilles back on his side. The embassy finds Achilles on the beach, strumming a royal lyre he has seized from his sacking of the city Thebe and singing to himself about the exploits of men (plausibly his own sacking of the city). The offer is generous. Not just Briseis: Agamemnon’s agents offer in addition to the contested girl seven tripods, six talents of gold, twenty cauldrons, twelve prize-winning racehorses, and seven beautiful female slaves from Lesbos who are clever at weaving, plus first dibs on any spoils from Troy when it is sacked and twenty of the prettiest young Trojan women. And, assuming the expedition gets home safely, Agamemnon also offers Achilles one of his own daughters for a bride, whose dowry will be seven cities, which will treat Achilles with tribute as though he were a god.

But Achilles will not hear of it. Not all of those gifts, and Briseis to boot, can make up for the initial insult. Achilles still boils and cannot be appeased.

In this same book Achilles explains the importance of honor. For him, the choice is not between life and death but between a short life of glory and a long, quiet life eked out in obscurity. His mother, the sea goddess Thetis, has explained that twin fates lie before him: if he stays and fights around the city of Troy, he loses his return home and a long life but gains glory. If he returns home, he gains a long life but loses fame. Either way, as a mortal, he is destined for death, but in this choose-your-own-adventure, he prefers the glory. Tripods, cattle, and women can be won in athletic contests or by cattle rustling or sacking cities or piracy—it isn’t the things that matter ultimately to Achilles, but reputation.

When he further explains how he feels dishonored and why he is angry, one word sticks out to me:
But my heart seethes with rancor whenever
I think what dishonor the son of Atreus did to me in front of the Greeks
As though I were some no-count migrant.

That final word, metanastes, or “migrant,” occurs in Homer only in Achilles’ phrase. So humiliating was Agamemnon’s insult that Achilles feels as if he has been treated like someone with no dignity or rights, a migrant. It is an uncanny moment of negative empathy. For a brief moment, Achilles can imagine what it is like not to be a hero or even a regular warrior, but to be instead an exile, someone who does not count, who has no share in honor, and whose humanity is not fully recognized. While Achilles’ focus is on himself and his outrageous treatment, his complaint opens a window onto a world not otherwise described in the Iliad. We are invited to consider the people displaced by war or famine or exile or politics or vendettas. Many such people move across the Aegean (and wider Mediterranean) to this very day.

One of the books of the Iliad that people tend to skip or skim over is Book Twenty-Three, the funeral games for Patroclus. It is arguably Achilles’ wrath that has gotten his friend killed in the first place. With Achilles sulking, on strike from the war, Patroclus decides to go into battle in his place and to wear his armor, thus dooming himself as a conspicuous target. Patroclus’s death leads to Achilles’ return to war in a killing spree of vengeance and murderous grief: he is likened in his whirlwind of slaughter to a raging wildfire. His supernatural rage is such that he battles the river god Xanthus and captures twelve young Trojans to sacrifice later. None of this satisfies the unquenchable rage of Achilles. Not even slaying Hector, the killer of Patroclus, satisfies his fury. Achilles proceeds to insult the corpse of the Trojan prince, piercing its heels through with a thong and dragging it around and around the city of Troy behind his chariot. And he is still angry. Egocentric wrath cannot be satisfied by feeding it. Like a fire, it only grows with fuel. In the end, the wrath of Achilles cannot be sated.

But the poem, as we know, does not end with wrath. It ends, on a very human scale, with the funeral of Hector, which is made possible by Achilles’ acknowledgment of the humanity of others, most famously in the ransom scene where the elderly Priam, king of Troy, comes under cover of darkness to the Greek camp to ransom the body of his son so that it can be properly mourned and burned on a funeral pyre. But there are some indications even earlier that Achilles can see past the wall of wrath that has made him something more than mortal and less than human.

The ghost of Patroclus comes to Achilles in a dream and tells him he needs a proper funeral. To us, and no doubt even to classical Greeks, the funeral Achilles devises seems horrific, even barbaric: the blood sacrifice on the funeral pyre includes four horses, nine dogs who were especially friendly to Patroclus, and the dozen Trojan youths Achilles seized during his rampage. But in a moment where Achilles fully acknowledges that he will die on the plains of Troy, far from home, he shears off his own long hair to burn on the pyre, a lock of hair he had originally dedicated to a spring in his homeland, to be shorn in thanksgiving on his homecoming.

The funeral games in Book Twenty-Three sometimes feel like an interlude, the relief of some light entertainment, though they contain a great chariot race that is the predecessor of Hollywood scenes from Ben-Hur to the Star Wars franchise. The games also show something starting to shift in the implacable heart of Achilles. He gives them in honor of another; he does not participate. Here, his glory is in the giving of prizes (oxen and women and horses and mules and gold cups) and not in the receiving of them. Most surprising is a lump of iron ore which he gives as a prize for the discus or shot put (in this case, the lump of iron ore is itself the object to be thrown). This valuable and anachronistic material—we are, after all, in the Bronze Age—has its own “object biography.” We know where Achilles acquired it and when: in the same raid on Thebe where he slew King Eëtion, the father of Andromache and thus father-in-law of Hector, and seized the lyre on which is he strumming in Book Nine, and in the same set of raids around the Bay of Edremit where he captured Briseis. He is giving up one of his hard-won prizes (or at least a five-year loan of it). But what really intrigues me is that as he describes it and its worth, we suddenly get a picture of a world after war and wrath, a world of bucolic peace, of growing prosperity rather than burning it down. We would expect that iron to be invaluable as a material for making weapons and arms. Instead, Achilles says it will be useful on a farm.

Here is Caroline Alexander’s translation:

Rise up, you who would try for this prize.
Even if the winner’s fields are very far away,
he will have the use of this for the turning of five years;
and not for any lack of iron will his shepherd
or his ploughman have to venture to the city, for this will supply them.

In that moment, as Achilles starts to turn from his inner anger at insulted personal dignity in the past to an outer gaze at the peace and prosperity of others and into the future, Achilles turns swords into plowshares.

The anachronism of iron is rarely so literal—it is more often metaphorical; in fact, Achilles says Priam has a “heart of iron” when the old man dares to come into his tent to ask for the body of his son back. This might strike the modern reader as strange since it is Achilles who appears at this moment “iron-hearted” (one thinks of Auden’s “iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles / who would not live long” in “The Shield of Achilles”). We might think, instead, of Priam as staunch-hearted—brave to come, an old man with no defenses, right into the camp of his deadly foe. Or perhaps it is a case of Achilles projecting his own iron-heartedness onto another.

Achilles might well have simply struck the old man down, decapitating the Trojan leadership in the process. But he does not necessarily play by the rules of Bronze Age warfare. For instance, it is made clear by Achilles himself that he might have disposed of Hector’s body on the pyre of Patroclus or set him up a separate funeral pyre. We learn in Book Six from Andromache (Hector’s wife) that when Achilles sacked the city of Thebe and killed her father, Achilles honored the king by placing him on a pyre in his armor rather than despoiling his corpse. Instead, Achilles chooses to dishonor and desecrate the corpse of Hector, dragging it around behind his chariot rather than allowing it to be burned. Only the pity of the gods has kept the corpse whole and uncorrupted.

Priam circumvents the wrath of Achilles by appealing not to Achilles’s sense of honor, his insatiable ego, but to his place as a son of an aged father, his human interconnection (in Emily Wilson’s translation):

Please, Achilles, show
reverence towards the gods and pity me
in memory of your own poor old father.
I am more pitiable than him. I have
endured what no man yet on earth has done—
I pressed my mouth into the hand of him
who killed my son.

Wilson, who picks up a rhyme on “done” / “son” here—Homer does not rhyme, of course—ingeniously alludes to Michael Longley’s great sonnet on this scene, “Ceasefire,” which closes: “I get down on my knees and do what must be done / And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.” And indeed, both weep together, Priam for his son, Achilles for his father—whom he will not be able to care for in his old age, doomed as he is to not live long. The poem ends on a ceasefire, so that the besieged Trojans can leave the city to collect enough wood for a funeral pyre. Wrath ceases, and war pauses, and human rhythms of eating, drinking, sleeping, and mourning close the story.

Achilles makes a cameo appearance in the Odyssey, this time as a ghostly shade, in the episode where Odysseus consults departed spirits. Odysseus addresses Achilles as treated like a god in life, and a king in death, where he lords it over his fellow shades. Achilles puts him straight (in Barry Powell’s translation):

Don’t sing praise to me about death, my fine Odysseus!
If I could live on the earth, I would be happy to serve as a hired
hand to some other, even to some man without a plot of land,
one who has little to live on, than to be king among all the dead!

It is an astonishing rebuke to everything Achilles stood for in the Iliad. But Achilles does not leave the interview unhappy—he asks Odysseus after his old father and son. Odysseus can give no news of the aged parent, but his report of Achilles’ son’s greatness leaves the fallen hero proud and content. The baleful Achilles in life becomes something more humble in death. While he avows he would avenge his father if the old man’s grey hairs were being insulted, given an hour of life, it is more in righteous anger than self-absorbed wrath.

Another epic poem in the Western canon begins with divine rage, this time aimed at a refugee. Just four lines into the Aeneid, Virgil describes how the hero Aeneas (a Trojan prince made a refugee after the Greek destruction of Troy) suffers because of the unrelenting/unforgetful wrath (ira) of cruel Juno, queen of the gods. The grudge of wrath is an act of memory as violence, of refusing to forgive and forget, of nursing injury. Aeneas is fully a victim here and is driven from his homeland. (The word in Latin, profugus, roughly the same word as the Italian profugo today, continues to make headlines for similar reasons.) He is not the wielder of wrath but the recipient of it. His epithet is consistently “pious”—he respects his crippled father, whom he carries on his shoulders; he cares for his young son and reveres the gods—the good immigrant who tries to do everything the right way.

For the last decade or so, I have worked with many such immigrants in Greece, mostly through a poetry workshop I run with refugee and migrant women. They come from all over, and some have even traveled the same old seaways of the Aegean that legendary Trojans did to Europe. Some are scarcely literate; others have advanced degrees in literature, are professional chefs, or have taught secondary school. The term migrant or refugee has a way of flattening the complexity of their situation. It reduces these people to what they need instead of what they can offer, of giving them no share of human worth. While mostly what I see from them is resilience and even hope, I get glimpses too of frustration, anger, sorrow, despair, for wasted potential, for the endless waiting to be able to move on with their lives while time itself passes.

As a student reading the Aeneid, I was shocked that Aeneas somehow manages to “lose” his first wife in the confusion of the fall of Troy. This struck me as ludicrous at the time, and more than a little careless. But having now heard many stories of fleeing war-torn areas firsthand, I realize that this is one of the realistic touches of the poem: as people flee, as confusion reigns, as people make for various transports and dinghies, nothing is easier than to lose contact with a person, temporarily or forever. In the major flows of migration to Greece in 2015 and 2016, in the wake of the Syrian Civil War and other conflicts, how common it was on volunteer Facebook pages to see missing-person posts: a wife, a husband, a child, a brother, a sister, lost in a panicked crowd, in the chaos of a checkpoint, in the churning water of a sinking ship.

Virgil died before putting the finishing touches on the Aeneid. It is possible the ending we have is not the ending he would have left it with, yet it is a powerful one. In a battle, as Aeneas struggles to make a new life in Italy and to plant the foundations of what will become Rome, he fights the noble Etruscan warrior Turnus, a character who in many ways resembles the noble Trojan warrior Hector. Having defeated him, and with the young man at his mercy, Aeneas fleetingly considers sparing him. Turnus, as Hector does to Achilles, appeals to Aeneas as the son of an aged father. Readers of Homer (as all of Virgil’s original readers were) will expect pious Aeneas to have something like Achilles’ mighty change of heart.

And Aeneas’s spirit does begin to bend. But suddenly, seeing that Turnus wears the belt of the slain youth Pallas, Aeneas is kindled into rage (“rous’d anew to wrath” as Dryden has it) and plunges his sword into Turnus, whose life force flees protesting to the underworld.

It is a troubling and shocking end that raises more questions than it answers, including how Virgil wanted this poem to reflect on the new empire (and the new emperor, Augustus) rising out of the civil-war wreckage of the Roman republic. The ambiguous poem seems at this moment to choose the endless wars of empire over an obscure peace, unforgetting wrath over placid amnesty.

Aeneas seems, in what to me is a rather damning action, to embody instead the aphorism in Auden’s ever-relevant poem “September 1, 1939”:

Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Wrath is one of those engines by which evil is done—wrath is, I would argue, more than hate, the opposite of love. If one can define by opposites, is not wrath precisely the opposite of Paul’s famous definition of love in his first epistle to the Corinthians?

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

Is not this the perfect inverse and opposite of Achilles and his all-consuming mênis? All of these—the impatience, the unkindness, the envy, the boastfulness and pride, the dishonoring of others, the self-seeking, the being easily provoked, and above all the being unforgetful of slights and keeping score, are descriptive of the wrath that proves such a destructive force in the Iliad and that darkens and foreshadows the vision of the Aeneid. Hatred, one might say, has at least a focus on the other, however twisted; but wrath’s deadly focus is on the self, a kind of weaponized self-pity. The destruction to others is a devastating side effect of its blinkered bloody-mindedness, and it is a focus that only the amnesty of forgetfulness and self-forgetfulness, empathy, forgiveness, and love can diffuse and defuse.

This essay is part of a special issue on the Seven Deadly Sins. Subscribe here for 20% off a yearlong subscription.