Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

The shade of Achilles son of Peleus approaches with Patroclus, Antilochus, and Ajax. Odysseus tries to console him: no man was more blessed in life, and now he rules among the dead. Achilles rejects the comfort with the poem’s most famous underworld line—he would rather be a hireling bound to a landless man among the living than be lord of all the perished dead. Glory after death is ash beside breath. He then asks after his father Peleus and his son Neoptolemus. Odysseus knows nothing of Peleus but reports Neoptolemus’s excellence in the wooden horse and in counsel and fight before Troy—tall among the Argives, second only to Memnon somehow in beauty of deed as Odysseus frames it—and Achilles’ shade strides off through the asphodel meadow, rejoicing in the son’s report. The exchange reverses the living Achilles of the *Iliad*, who chose short glory over long obscurity: here the dead hero privileges life itself, yet still hungers for news of the child’s aretē. Separated from the nekyia summary, the speech is the heroic-cycle’s verdict on kleos from the far side of death.