The Iliad (a song about Ilium, or Troy) along with its

companion epic theOdyssey form the foundation of

ancient Greek culture and address the extremes of
human experience through war and peace. Both epics
areprimary, or oral, epics that draw on an enormous
wealth of cultural stories in unified structures that we
attribute to the poet Homer, in eighth century B.C.E.
The epics are written in an unsentimental style:
the Iliad depicts the ambivalence of war in meticulously
accurate details. Both the nightmare of war and its
excitement find expression in the Iliad, just as
the Odyssey’s pages quest for a home, or a peace that
seems hard-won after the devastation of war.

“The Fury of Achilles,” Charles-Antoine Coypel (1737)

The subject of the Iliad is the rage of Achilles and the
consequences of that rage for both the Achaeans and the
Trojans. War effects not only the men who fight the
battles, but also the women and children whose lives are
then shaped by its outcome. War represents the worst
and, ironically, the best of humanity: ugly brutality and
terrible beauty. If you doubt this, look at the place
violence holds in our culture; films like The Matrix  even
show violence as poetic: a graceful dance of destruction
that thrills the audience like little else. We both pity
with Hector and sympathize with Achilles; neither side
of the war holds all of our sentiments. The final
outcome of the war, then, becomes truly tragic: only one
culture can continue while the other is destroyed or
enslaved.

The Iliad’s participants are the nobility of both cultures,

or the aristoi: “the best people.” They are the hereditary
holders of wealth and power, and their decisions effect
all of the culture. For example, Agamemnon’s decision
to infuriate Achilles at the outset of the Iliad has lasting
effects on the Greek warriors during the last weeks of
the Trojan War. Like most epics, of which the Iliad is
really the definitive example, the action begins in
medias res, a few weeks before the end of a ten-year
campaign, with all of the epic’s traditional
accouterments. The Iliad  poses questions, as will
the Odyssey, about the nature of political order and
what humans must do to maintain that vision and
structure. The initial contention in the Iliad is between
the Greek champion Achilles and the Greek commander
Agamemnon. Who has the stronger claim to right:
Agamemnon who has the hereditary position, or
Achilles, the one with merit? Ultimately does it matter?
When swords are drawn, reason becomes irrelevant.

“The Quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon,”

Giovanni Battista Gaulli
The Iliad is replete with the culture of men. Indeed, one
may argue that all wars since the beginning of time are
about men and what they want to control: state, wealth,
women. What will men do to maintain their view of
order and structure? What are the consequences of the
resulting pride, arrogance, destruction? In book one of
the Iliad, we discover that because of Agamemnon’s
refusal to relinquish Chryseis, Apollo has rained a
plague upon the Achaean forces. Because he is
eventually challenged by Achilles — who represents the
wishes of the rest of the men — Agamemnon decides to
claim Achilles’ prize (a girl named Briseis) to reassert
his authority and put Achilles in his place for his
challenge. Achilles shows cunning and restraint — 
qualities that are usually associated with Odysseus — in
his argument with Agamemnon, while the latter rages
and rails like a wounded child. Yet, when Agamemnon’s
men take Briseis, Achilles, also child-like, begins to pout
by his ships, cries to his mother, and refuses to play the
war game anymore. This final decision precipitates the
death of many Achaeans, including Achilles’ friend
Patroclus. Achilles’ resulting rage ends with the death of
Hector in book twenty-two, and Achilles’ own
apocryphal death under the bow of Paris before the
war’s end.

The brutality of Achilles and its consequences are most

evident in Book XXII of the Iliad. Achilles’ rage blinds
him to anything but the death of Hector, the Trojan
champion that killed Patroclus in book sixteen. Replete
with epic similes of the hunt, book twenty-two
illustrates Hector’s own reluctance to do what he sees as
his duty to face Achilles, yet thinks only of himself and
what his people might think if he doesn’t face the Greek
killing machine (cf. ll. 108-156). Hector’s resolve is soon
shaken as he sees Achilles closing, bloody rage the only
thing that Achilles sees. Hector flees, but is soon tricked
by Athena into stopping to face Achilles, perhaps a
commentary on Hector’s need for companionship and
Achilles’ desire for only personal vengeance and
renown. Hector is mercilessly murdered in front of
Troy’s walls, like a fawn at the jaws of a lion.

“Andromache Mourning Hector,” Jacques-Louis David

(1793)
The death of Hector, then, is given a final cultural
context from Hector’s widow Andromache. She now
sees the demise of Troy, but personally she sees no
future for their son Astyanax. The death of the father,
then, is a weighty metaphor for the Trojans: the order
that they secured will soon be rendered useless by the
barbarity of war; the father’s death leads to the
destruction of social order. This theme will be taken up
in the Odyssey  as well: what is the responsibility of the
son for maintaining order in the absence or death of the
father? As Andromache sees no future for Astyanax, life
does continue even after the carnage of war, yet a new
order is imposed on the losers — those who escape
death. This theme of continuity is also addressed by
Virgil in his Aeneid.
Is war, then, a necessary component of human life? Just
because it has been historically up until this point, are
we to be like Achilles who could not hear reason
through his bloody thoughts: “No truce / till one or the
other falls and gluts with blood” (XXII.313-14)? When
do we decide that war is better than order?