“Italian Stallion” Meets “Breaker of Horses”: Achilles and Hector in Rocky IV (1985)

Homer’s Iliad and its narration of the conflict between the Greeks and Trojans, and Hector and Achilles, stands as the ur-text against which all subsequent tales of war, friendship, and revenge can be compared.1 Scholars of classical antiquity have long recognized later works as inheritance, imitation, and adaptation of Homer’s timeless epic. Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky IV (1985), on the other hand, has not been regarded as timeless.2 Critics have typically discussed it alongside other action films in the context of Reagan-era culture, politics, and ideology: a relatively uncomplicated pro-America microcosm of the Cold War.3 Certainly the film is meant to comment on America’s conflict with the Soviet Union and American ideology of the time, yet the film is hardly unproblematically pro-American or simplistic in its treatment of the political conflict. Reading Rocky IV as an inheritance of the myth of Achilles, Patroclus, and Hector sheds new light on how the film engages with issues of social and political identity, responsibility to community, friendship, and war.