ABSTRACT
The first word of European literature is ‘wrath’ – Achilles’s μῆνις – in The Iliad, which is the source of so much chaos and suffering (‘The wrath, sing, O goddess…’). Literature’s investment in the emotions is foundational. Imaginative writing itself could be defined as ‘preoccupation with feeling’ (writers’, readers’, characters’). As Nietzsche expresses it, ‘[T]he poets … are enamoured of the passions as such’. 1 The Fall of Troy, the deaths of the supreme warriors Hector and Patroclus, along with those of so many others, are at least partly caused by Achilles’s rage towards Agamemnon. Would Patroclus have been killed had Achilles fought with the Greeks from the outset, rather than sulked in his tent, furious at Agamemnon for stealing his slave girl? The Iliad’s subject is nothing other than pathos: ‘and with them, all unwilling, went the woman. But Achilles burst into tears and drew apart from his comrades, and sat down on the shore of the gray sea, looking out over the wine-dark deep’. 2
