Achilles Last Stand

Basically, Achilles last stand is about Plant's vacation in Greece and Morocco after his accident. He wrote the song in and after this trip.

Robert Plant was already going through a pretty rough go of it by the time presence was recorded. The Rock and Roll lifestyle had already taken its toll and his naive attitude toward life that you could see in happy-go-lucky songs like "thank you" and "the ocean" was just gone. From this point on, you only see darker, more contemplative songs. Even Hot Dog is really cynical.

Essentially, Achilles Last Stand is a direct allusion to the Iliad, in which the central point is that Achilles was deprived of his concubine and abandoned the Trojan war for a time. At length he returned to fight, but died shortly after.

At the time of Plant's accident, like I said, he was very jaded. The references to the Iliad is certainly meant to show a parallel between Achilles' boycott of the Trojan War and Plant's leave.

You can see in the beginning he is sort of doubtful about the whole thing.He's more saying, we can't say no, rather than he wants to go. But eventually he becomes very warm to the idea. In the Iliad, Achilles at first only leaves because he's angry at Agamemnon who took away his sex slave, but eventually decides he's fighting his fate (he knew that he was going to have a short life of war or a long life of peace via prophecy).

You can see this transfer in the lyrics to the song. Eventually he realizes he wants to escape: "Oh, to sail away" and "the shackles of commitment fell". Plant knew by this point that the rock n roll lifestyle will have its consequences, and indeed, you can see that he was unable to be there for his young son when he died and also lost Page to heroin for a long time as well as Bonham permanently. Essentially, Plant, by the middle of the song, has decided, or at least is considering, that he wants out of the rock n roll lifestyle, and that he just wants to live peacefully, in the sort of happy lifestyle he found in his vacation.

But he can't escape forever. After the idyll establishes itself ("Days went by when you and i, bathed in eternal summers glow"), he feels himself being called back: "Oh, Albion remains, sleeping now to rise again". He is beginning to have the realization that he cannot escape forever, and that he has to return. For the song up until this point, he's just living large on his vacation and having a good, peaceful time, that's very clean as opposed to the drug-fueled rock n roll lifestyle that he's been living.

In the iliad, too, Achilles finds fate calling him. He loses his friend to the war and has to return. In that story, fate forces Achilles' hand: He is jolted to action. But Plant has a more subtle approach. He finds the rock and roll lifestyle calling him back, forcing him to return.

He becomes desperate by the end of the song: "What place to rest the search". He cannot find peace, because he is going against fate. And then, we reach the climax of the song: "The mighty arms of atlas, hold the heavens from the earth". He is seeing the bigger picture. The Atlas mountains probably instilled a sense of smallness in him, that he cannot fight fate and that he has to return some time or another. At length, he tells us that "I know the way, know the way, [etc]". The fury of the song reaches its capacity, and at last ends. And indeed, Achilles leaves his retreat and fights in Troy, and dies swiftly afer.

The rage and pure power of the song is meant to be Plant's equivalent of Achilles' rage. He is fighting fate, the very force that pushes down upon us all, that which we cannot fight. He is cutting down the Iliad to a 10 minute song that shows an attempt to defy destiny, in order to escape a fatal lifestyle, but in the end he loses the battle and the fury ends.

Credit to a [deleted] reddit comment