Robert Fagles, translator par excellence of the Iliad and Odyssey, is dead. I have fond memories of reading both nearly a decade ago during my year in Amsterdam, the Iliad while traveling in the Peloponnese, punctuated by visits to the evocative ruins of Troy and Mycenae, cities of the Homeric epics. In commemoration, here are the closing words from Fagles’ introduction to the Iliad.

The Iliad remains a terrifying poem. Achilles, just before his death, is redeemed as a human being, but there is no consolation for the death of Hector. We are left with a sense of waste, which is not adequately balanced even by the greatness of the heroic figures and the action; the scale descends towards loss. The Iliad remains not only the greatest epic poem in literature but also the most tragic.

Homer’s Achilles is clearly the model for the tragic hero of the Sophoclean stage; his stubborn, passionate devotion to an ideal image of self is the same force that drives Antigone, Oedipus, Ajax and Philoctetes to the fulfillment of their destinies. Homer’s Achilles is also, for archaic Greek society, the essence of the aristocratic ideal, the paragon of male beauty, courage and patrician manners—””the splendor running in the blood,” says Pindar … And this, too, strikes a tragic note, for Pindar sang his praise of aristocratic values in the century which saw them go down to extinction, replaced by the new spirit of Athenian democracy. But it seems at first surprising that one of the most famous citizens of that democracy, a man whose life and thought would seem to place him at the extreme opposite pole from the Homeric hero, who was so far removed from Achilles’ blind instinctive reactions that he could declare the unexamined life unlivable, that Socrates, on trial for his life, should invoke the name of Achilles. Explaining to his judge why he feels no shame or regret for a course of action that has brought him face-to-face with a death sentence, and rejecting all thought of a compromise that might save his life (and which his fellow citizens would have been glad to offer), he cites as his example Achilles, the Achilles, who, told by his mother that his own death would come soon after Hector’s, replied: “Then let me die at once—€”rather than “sit by the ships … / a useless, dead weight on the good green earth”.

And yet, on consideration, it is not so surprising. Like Achilles, he was defying the community, hewing to a solitary line, in loyalty to a private ideal of conduct, of honor. In the last analysis, the bloodstained warrior and the gentle philosopher live and die by the same heroic, and tragic, pattern.