Book 26
1
I was surprised at what you had to say the other day, Achilles, to Odysseus on the subject of death. What ignoble words! What little credit they reflected on both of your teachers, Chiron and Phoenix! I was listening, you know, when you said you would gladly “if but on earth above” be thrall to any man “whose lot is poverty, whose substance small”, rather than be king of all the dead. Cf. Odyssey, X I, 489-491. To speak thus might perhaps have been right for some mean cowardly Phrygian, who loves life regardless of honour, but for the son of Peleus, who surpassed all the heroes in his love of danger, to have such mean ideas for himself is utterly shameful, and opposed to the way you acted in life; for, though you could have had a long and obscure reign in the land of Phthia, you gladly preferred death with glory.
2
But in those days, son of Nestor, I still had no experience of this place, and, not knowing which existence was preferable, I preferred that miserable empty shadow of glory to life itself; but now I realise that glory is useless, however much men above hymn its praises, that among the dead all have but equal honour, and neither the beauty nor the strength we had remain with us, but we lie buried in the same darkness, all of us quite alike, and no better one than the other, and I am neither feared by the Trojan dead nor respected by the Greeks, but there is complete equality of speech and one dead man is like another, “be he mean or be he great”. Cf. Iliad, IX, 319. That’s why I’m distressed and annoyed at not being a thrall alive on earth.
