like the brightest of stars

emilyenrose:

When I tell the story of Achilles, I tell it like this:

Once there was a wedding, goddess to mortal man. She wasn’t
very happy about it. Who knows what he thought. When orders come down from
Zeus, what idiot says no? But they were married, and there was a child, and that
child was almost something more than human.

I say almost because
he was still human in the way that mattered most: he was mortal, doomed.
Imagine being Thetis, his mother, pale and ocean-eyed, looking down at this
tiny scrap of life and knowing you would have to watch it die. I don’t think
any mother could stand it. She did what she could to protect him: bathed her
baby in the Styx, the river of death, and he had little to fear from ordinary
weapons after that. But a mortal is a mortal. Achilles was born to die.

There were two deaths woven for him by the Fates. Achilles could
have had a long and happy life, beloved and honoured, surrounded by kin, living
in peace and good fortune, dying at the last mourned by children and
grandchildren who would honour his memory as long as they lived; and when the
last of them was gone, Achilles’ memory would pass away from the world as well,
the final embers of a long-banked fire going dim.

That was one death.

The other was simpler: to die young and be remembered
forever. A brief bonfire blaze of life and then eternal glory.

How do you choose?

Maybe for you it would be easy. But remember Achilles was
young, he was proud, he was beautiful and swift and strong almost beyond what
is human, and he lived in a world of brief lives and brilliant deaths, a world
of hero-songs and clashing bronze. For him it was not easy.

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