And so this aspect of the recitation absorbed all of our destinies, as did the choice of words and events and emotions. Replacing the age-old rivalry between Hector and Achilles, the actor at one point, perhaps in the discussion after his performance, posited the poem as a story of friendship between the two--in the drama itself at one point he departed into a fantasy of Achilles and Hector going out for a beer and a schmooze instead of a fatal confrontation. Hector wore Achilles' armor at the final confrontation--how many meanings or associations can this event inspire? Achilles' choice of eternal glory through a brief earthly existence was a form of suicide after all. Of course Hector made a fool out of himself, as if he could put on his alter ego's self with his armor and therefore vanquish the real owner for whom Hephaestus made it.
Hector had vanquished many, but not the half-God, who knew where the armor's Achilles' heal was, in this version of the poem, and stabbed there, just as the ultimate anti-Achilles, Paris, a master of the cowardly skill of archery, kills the hero by reaching his only mortal spot, the heal by which his mother had held him as she dipped him into the waters of immortality as an infant.
At the end, there is another list, of the tragedies that followed the events of the Iliad--its longer-range results: the ruse of the Trojan horse and the various nostoi, "returns home," including the Odyssey. The actor cannot go on--he retreats to the back of the stage to weep, going through the motions of washing his hands as the water flows over them, his tears.
(c)
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