Hurray for hora

What's the connection between a monologue on time and death from a contemporary science-fiction movie, The Blade Runner, and an exhortation to Achilles in Homer's epic, Iliad?

It's "hora."

The connection is brilliantly and seamlessly made by Gregory Nagy, Professor of Classical Greek Literature at Harvard University.

Nagy has been teaching a popular class titled "Concepts of the Hero in Classical Greek Civilization" at Harvard since 1978, and now the course, renamed simply, "The Ancient Greek Hero," is available online, as one of Harvard's first massive open online courses (or, moocs).

The decision to teach the heroic ideals of Achilles through a Blade Runner-like modern story was made when Nagy's course went online.

The rain-drenched death soliloquy of Roy Batty is as disparate as it gets from anything redolent of Achilles.

The soliloquy goes thus:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe, [...] attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

Here is Nagy's interpretation:

The tears in rain are a way of comparing the microcosm of the self and the macrocosm of the rain that is enveloping the whole scene, [...] ‘Time to die’—and, for me, a good point of comparison is the word hôrâ, which means the right time, the right place, the seasonal time, the beautiful time. Where everything comes together.

The Professor then links with Homer's Iliad: 

The scene from the Iliad in which Achilles is told of his forked destiny: “You have two choices, Achilles. Either you stay at Troy and fight, and then die young, and then get a glory that is imperishable. Or you go home. And then you don’t die young. You live to a ripe old age, presumably, and you could even be happy. But you’re not going to get the glory. And this glory—I use the word ‘glory’ to translate kleos—is not just glory. It’s the glory that comes from being featured in the medium of Homeric poetry.