Kleos

In Practice

It is not the same as simple fame in a modern sense; kleos in Homeric epic is specifically the kind of glory that survives a person's death, carried forward by song and story, and epic poetry itself is presented as the mechanism that keeps it alive. Achilles gives the concept its sharpest expression in the Iliad, when he tells the Greek envoys sent to win back his cooperation that his mother Thetis has told him he faces two possible fates: stay at Troy, die there, and win kleos aphthiton, imperishable glory that will never fade, or sail home to Phthia, live a long life, and lose that glory entirely. Achilles frames the two futures as mutually exclusive, a stark trade between length of life and permanence of memory, and the fact that he continues fighting at Troy after this speech is itself the poem's answer to which fate he ultimately accepts. Kleos is bound up with epic poetry's own self-understanding in a way few other Greek concepts are: the songs the poems describe bards singing within the story, and the Iliad and Odyssey themselves as poems, are exactly the vehicle through which kleos is supposed to travel forward in time. A hero's great deed only becomes kleos once it is sung about, which makes the poem not just a record of glory but the very thing glory depends on to exist beyond a single lifetime. The pursuit of kleos also explains behavior that can look reckless from outside the value system that produces it. A hero who could live safely by staying home, or by declining a dangerous fight, may choose the more dangerous path specifically because only the dangerous path offers a shot at kleos, and a long safe life offers none. This is part of why kleos is treated as a distinct value from mere survival or ordinary happiness in Homeric epic, worth weighing against them and, for a hero like Achilles, worth choosing over them outright. Pindar's victory odes extend the same concept well beyond the battlefield. Writing generations after Homer to celebrate athletic victors at Olympia and the other Panhellenic games, Pindar treats a mortal's achievement as similarly fleeting without a poet to commemorate it: the glory of a single day's victory, he says, is the highest thing that comes to any mortal, and it fades unless song fixes it in place. The mechanism is the same one Achilles relies on when he chooses death at Troy over a forgotten life, poetry as the thing that converts a mortal deed into something that outlasts the person who did it, only applied to a stadium instead of a battlefield.

Where This Appears

• Character Achilles
• Character Thetis
• Term Hubris
• Mythology Greek Mythology
• Mythology Roman Mythology

Referenced By

• Term Nostos

Sources