thinking about heroes wishing to switch places……..
[…] when Odysseus meets the shade of Achilles, he addresses Achilles as “best of the Achaeans”. But the Odyssey then has Achilles saying that he would rather be alive and the lowliest of serfs than to be dead and the kingliest of shades. […] Achilles seems ready to trade places with Odysseus, whose safe homecoming will be marked by a painful transitional phase at the very lowest levels of the social order. The words of Achilles in the first nekuia are ironically conjuring up the glorious days of the Iliad when he had said:
“I have lost a safe return home [nostos], but I will have unfailing glory [kleos].” (IX 413)
The destiny of the Odyssey is that Odysseus shall have a nostos, ‘safe return home’. From the retrospective vantage point of the Odyssey, Achilles would trade his kleos for a nostos. It is as if he now would trade an Iliad for an Odyssey. By contrast, at a moment when Odysseus is sure that he will perish in the stormy sea, he wishes that he had died at Troy: “…and then the Achaeans would have carried on my kleos.” (v 308-311)
From Gregory Nagy’s The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the hero in ancient Greek poetry (1979)
