Achilles had no friends.

Achilles had no friends; he was the greatest warrior that history -- real or imagined -- has ever known. he killed not only Trojans, with whom he was at war, in the thousands -- but Greeks as well...the guys on his own team, the people of whom he was a leader. the Iliad is a poem about the 'wrath of Achilles;' it was unquenchable, unstoppable...inhuman. Achilles' anger and his sheer lust for glory made him an implacable force on the battlefield. he cut through men like a flaming sword, like a heavenly fire. he was a saint of blood, he was born to kill. by the end of the poem, he has no friends -- he offends his king, alienates his fellow warriors, and his only friend in the story, Patroclus, is slaughtered. he is a brooding, vengeful bastard.

in fact, Achilles is ensconced, encapsulated in the pruned, autumnal garden of his selfish desire -- he has chosen death and glory as the way of his life, and it has isolated him. Bernard Knox, who writes the introduction to the Fagles translation of the Iliad, asserts that it is Achilles' solopsism that grants him godlikeness; his singularity of purpose, his singularity of being, its arrogance, its refusal to join the rest of mankind in a common concession to humanity. Achilles is a man (granted, a demi-god); he is mortal, and lives among mortals, yet throughout the story he makes no connection, cannot join himself in any social bonds with mortal men. he aspires to greatness, to glory and even godhood in some sense, and leaves mankind behind him as something to be stepped over, cut through; until, Knox argues, Priam, king of Troy, comes to supplicate Achilles for the body of his son, Hector. here, Achilles ceases to be a god, ceases to be simply a force of personality, and becomes human........the eloquence and the love of Priam for his son has touched him. Achilles falls into this human reality: he too, has a father; he too, will wound him with his own impending death. he is able to feel something different than his bellicose single-mindedness; Priam anoints him with human compassion.

Achilles is doomed; he does not die at the end of the poem, but we know his life is sealed, bound to the death of Hector (whom he kills, knowing this full well). but he is pulled within the human realm before he dies, joins the race of mortal beings. he too will meet death, like the all the rest; he is as good as human. why not join them in life? according to Knox, the Iliad is the tragedy of Achilles; perhaps he learns too late, but it is never too little to learn how to become a part of this race.