Two Heroes: Achilles' Undying Fame and the Lakota Who Touched and Lived

What if a warrior’s bravest act were not killing his enemy? What if real valor meant closing the distance to an armed foe, laying a hand on him, and coming home unhurt?

For the Lakota of the North American Great Plains, that was exactly it. Their highest honor lay not in taking a life but in touching one and living.

In the same centuries, at the far end of the Aegean, another kind of hero was choosing the opposite: a short life, death itself the price, in exchange for glory without end.

The hero a civilization tells stories about reveals where that civilization has placed its meaning. This essay looks at two of them side by side — the world of Homer’s Iliad and the story of the Lakota warrior.

Courage That Touches and Returns

In Lakota tradition, the greatest mark of courage was not killing the enemy. A warrior would ride up to an armed opponent, touch him, and get away without a scratch.

This system of honor held a fine gradation inside it. Stealing an enemy’s horse, seizing his weapon, slipping into his camp and slipping back out — each was its own badge of daring. Every such contact was recorded with an eagle feather or a mark worked into a garment; a man’s past deeds could be read off the honors sewn onto his clothing. A feather earned by returning wounded was even painted red, so the manner of the deed showed as plainly as the deed itself.

The rush of drawing close to an enemy, of touching him, counted for more than killing him or dying in a fight with him. The whole system rewarded courage, not death. The goal was not to destroy the enemy but to pass through fear and return alive.

Courage here is not the power to destroy but the willingness to put oneself at risk. What matters is the contact, not the outcome. To a mind schooled in the modern logic of winning by wiping out, this reads almost like an inverted equation.

Seeking Immortality in the Written Word

In the ninth book of the Iliad, Achilles is offered two roads: a long but ordinary life, or a short one crowned with undying fame.

He chooses the second, and so he dies. The Greek name for the glory he chooses is kleos — the sound of a man’s name still echoing after he himself is gone.

This is precisely what makes a hero a hero in the Homeric tradition: Achilles chooses to lengthen not his life but the life of his name. In Homer’s Iliad, he becomes worthy of glory without end.

The strange part is this: Achilles’ mother, the sea-goddess Thetis, actually tried to make him immortal and failed. What grants him immortality, then, is not the gods but the lines of the poet Homer.

In the Odyssey, when Odysseus descends to the land of the dead, he meets the shade of Achilles. And there, that great hero says something startling — that he would rather be a hired laborer working the soil for some poor, landless farmer than rule as king over all the dead.

So the man who chose to die for his fame comes to regret that choice on the far side of death. In this way Homer casts a thin shadow over his own heroic ideal — is kleos, is glory, really worth everything?

This is the central question of the Western hero’s story. Is it worth dying for the sake of greatness?

The idea had sunk so deep into the Greek world that it shaped everything. Olympic contests, poetry competitions, philosophical disputes — all fed from the same drive: be seen, win, be remembered. The competitive city-state, the polis, had turned the individual’s urge to stand out into a social expectation. For a Greek, the worst catastrophe was not death but vanishing without a trace; to have one’s name go unspoken was as good as never having lived at all.

Still, it helps to remember that this equation was never universal. In the same centuries, in China, Zhuangzi counseled the reverse: “sitting in forgetfulness,” zuowang, was a virtue, because the more a person let go of name, of rank, even of self, the closer he drew to his own essence and to the Tao. Where the Greek gave his life to be remembered, the Taoist sage embraced being forgotten as a form of release.

Setting the two traditions side by side stirs a question in me: is a person who agrees to die in order to be remembered truly free? Achilles does not fear death — yes — but he is terrified of being forgotten. The Lakota warrior refuses that second fear from the outset, because in his worldview the land already remembers you. On social media, millions of people chase a kind of modern kleos, competing to be seen, liked, remembered. Achilles’ wish that his name be spoken forever now echoes in follower counts and dreams of going viral.

Here is where the difference has its root. The Greek hero tries to win immortality alone; the Lakota hero seeks an adrenaline rush that gives him experience and pride.