Close Reading of the Odyssey: Kleos through the Eyes of a Warrior Homer uses the Odyssey as a means to rediscover the Grecian concept of kleos and apply a deeper, more conceptualized meaning to it as an ethical and moral standard for mortals to obtain their own means of immortality through storytelling and death. Achilles , for example, gained the immortality he strove for within the Iliad when he encountered a timeless death in battle at Troy. However, it is in the Odyssey that the concept of kleos is criticized by Achilles, who contradicts this value and scrutinizes the importance of glory and honor, allowing a possibility for change within the Homeric mindset of how kleos is viewed. Although the value of kleos does seem to change and is susceptible to differing approaches, the ideal and basic foundations remain prominent and most important even within the Odyssean warrior’s approach. At Odysseus’s lamenting of his godly life and honorable death, Achilles, the seemingly embodiment of kleos, objects to his own prominence. He instead begs for an uneventful life on earth, and would rather be “slaving away” (11.512) as “a hired hand” (11.511), choosing to throw all of his glory that he strove to gain during the Trojan War just to be alive and back on the earth. Through this passage, it becomes evident that Achilles, through his death, has begun to value kleos less and less, subjugating this Grecian warrior ideology to a change, transforming it from an accepted cultural value, into a more complex and somewhat problematic principle. Achilles’s attitude of his death is simply what average mortals view it as – death, put simply, is death. His outlook of this immortality prominently contradicts that of the heroic ideals of death with
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