Vaulting Ambition in Achilles and Macbeth

“I don’t like Achilles.” “I don’t like Macbeth.” Such words should not be uttered in the classroom. Of course, this is not because we are to find these men to be models, but rather because we need to ask the right questions. Instead of “how do I feel about this character?” we should ask, what is the author doing with this character, and what does this character tell us about who we are as human beings? Dante’s Inferno, same. A student can think: “I’m not going to Hell so I don’t care about the Inferno.” No, the Inferno teaches us about ourselves and our society. In other words, we shouldn’t read literature woodenly or from too safe a distance. It’s true, as Aristotle says, we enjoy dark art–tragic stories–because we aren’t actually in the presence of grotesque things like the Weird Sisters or the myriad of gruesome killings in the Iliad. However, that’s not to say we should read so that we don’t make applications to ourselves, even unpleasant ones. After all, literature is self-knowledge and shares with the Bible the ability to function as a mirror to our souls. I suggest we study these two heroes of literature to gain insight into our own propensities to evil ambition and to better grasp our society’s Inferno-like downward spiral. Both characters incarnate false ambition and help us to see manhood more clearly. Achilles and Macbeth illustrate the rewards and dangers of extreme ambition.

Achilles starts out bristling against the fool Agamemnon. In book one we see his leadership of the men as he calls for returning the priest’s daughter and, as soon as possible, repaying Agamemnon with three or four times as much for the loss of his prize. Achilles rightly takes this action against Agamemnon since he wins most of the battles and prizes for the men. Agamemnon will be repaid; there’s no reason for any crackle about this, and yet Agamemnon refuses this offer and instead takes a valuable prize away from Achilles, dishonoring the best man. Achilles’s first response is to kill Agamemnon, but Athene comes and speaks to him: 

Some day three times over such shining gifts shall be given you 

By reason of this outrage. Hold your hand then, and obey us (Iliad 1.213-14).  

Achilles is in the right. Athene herself calls Agamemnon’s action an outrage. And for this outrage Achilles chooses to sit out from the fighting and even to pray that Zeus punish his own side for dishonoring him. An extreme move! But his angry action fits with his pagan sense of his own excellence. Moreover, Achilles we learn has a destiny to live a short but glorious life. His “hope” is in kleos–the everlasting fame won by killing in battle, by winning the most prizes, by conducting the greatest, most glorious, aristeia of them all. His prizes, like his war bride, are essential for his afterlife in the songs of the bards. This is his gospel. And yet as he sits out and wishes and prays for his side to lose, he begins to think that his life has value beyond battle; he begins to wish to go home, marry, and live a long peaceful life without everlasting glory. This human desire makes him sympathetic as a character. Achilles says, sounding like Solomon, that “a man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much” (9.320), essentially asking, is my purpose only to die in battle? Why should I die young? Are possessions–prizes won in battle–worth my life? No, because “a man’s life cannot come back again.” (400, 408).

Shakespeare’s Macbeth strives to be great like Achilles. At first applauded and promoted, he lusts for the throne. So when the Weird Sisters appear and Banquo resists, Macbeth draws closer to the evil act itself. Though still “too full of the milk of human kindness,” we see him wrestling with himself in a moment of psychomachia:  

Is this a dagger which I see before me, 

The handle toward my hand? (2.1.44-45). 

This brilliant bit x-rays his psychological state: Macbeth knows murdering the king will destroy his life and cost him his soul, but like Adam he eats of the fruit his wife offers, preferring her love to God’s. By the middle of the play, Macbeth, now fully given over to evil, takes the lead in shedding blood, leaving Lady Macbeth behind. The paranoid king decides that the MacDuff family will be murdered, while the queen can only hear about it. Such a man ends justly isolated:  

My way of life 

If fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf, 

And that which should accompany old age, 

As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, 

I must not look to have… (5.3.26-30). 

Macbeth, the man who gains the world in exchange for his soul, the man who makes a bad bargain, becomes alienated from all his men, his wife, himself, and God. Near the end he calls on his servant Seyton (a homophone for Satan), cursing the witches whom he trusted, before losing his head (literally) to MacDuff’s avenging steel. MacDuff, not Macbeth, becomes the serpent-killing hero.

For Achilles’s finale, his aristeia, Homer creates the most fame-rewarding blood-soaked rampage ever recorded. In his pursuit of glory, he becomes less than human, spilling rivers of blood. While he once showed mercy, no longer: “Die on, all” he exclaims (21.128). When he fatally injures the pitiful Hector, the Trojan hero asks as he dies that Achilles not mutilate his body. A fair request. But Achilles will only trash talk in the extreme:  

I wish only that my spirit and fury would drive me 

To hack your meat away and eat it raw… (22.346-47). 

Achilles proceeds to drag the body of Hector behind his chariot, almost as if thinking this would reverse time and return Patroclus, his beloved friend. But raging against mortality won’t reverse death. Nor will the heroic code. Achilles knows this, saying that he doesn’t care about stupid war prizes anymore (19.147-48). He ends in obedience to the gods; he ends putting on funeral games with friends, and in grief for his own father, whom he notes will never have a returning son. He ends returning to the human things: he eats with King Priam and sleeps with Briseis. Achilles’ anger gone, his humanity and sanity returned, he will now die young but with a warrior’s glory.

If Achilles ends restored, Macbeth ends eternally destroyed. Achilles the pagan obviously falls short of the glory of God. Macbeth exists in a Christian coded world–we hear of Heaven and Hell, the “common enemy of man” and angels, blessing and prayer, murder (not killing), and guilt that won’t wash off, not honor and dishonor as in the Iliad. While Macbeth speaks of losing his “eternal jewel,” his friend Banquo stands against the evil Weird Sisters saying, “In the great hand of God I stand” (2.3.152). Had Macbeth trusted God this way he would have built upon his early victory and presumably gone on to be a faithful king. King Duncan says, “I have begun to plant thee and will labor to make thee full of growing.” What a blessed image. But Macbeth knows his own folly, his motive being only this: “[my] vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself” (1.7.27). He has “no other spur / to prick the sides of his intent” (26). The glory of God is not his motivation but only out-of-control ambition.

Achilles reaches the highest point of glory possible in his world, one that he cannot improve upon, limited as he is by his pagan world. As we’ve seen, his philosophizing at one point nearly leads him to bow out and live in obscurity, sensing the value of life as more important than glory through heroism. Macbeth, on the other hand, exemplifies reprobation, one who sells his soul for short-lived glory, in the face of the promise of eternal glory. Such lawlessness only throws acid on the glory he naturally had and inverts whatever glory he steals for himself into damnable shame. Again it is not about if we like a character but what he represents. And as young men use their strength to pursue ambitious goals, which our society desperately needs, these two larger-than-life literary figures commend themselves to us as representations of ambition in action with all of its glory and dangers.