At the outset of the poem, Homer invokes Calliope to help him sing of “Achilles’ rage, / Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks / Incalculable pain” (I.2-4). Now we see Achilles in action, and of course he is an incomparable warrior who slaughters men, puts an entire army to rout, and even fights a river. Clearly he is the greatest of the Greek heroes, yet in some ways he is apart from all the other Greeks. He does not fight for the same reasons. He does not have the same ambitions. In the end, how does the character of Achilles define the idea of the heroic, and in what ways is that different from how we might define it today?
Those who have not read Iliad might expect the battle between Achilles and Hector to be more of the plot’s focal point or climax, especially if they saw that ridiculous cheese-fest Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, in which Brad Pitt and Eric Bana fight for about three minutes straight. In the poem, Hector literally has no chance against Achilles, and to top it off, Athena intervenes at two different points to tilt the odds even more. It is profoundly anti-climactic, yet it is also essential to maintain the poem’s themes. Explain why.
In Book 23, Homer interrupts the main narrative to give us a kind of impromptu Olympics, with a chariot race, boxing, wrestling, sprinting, archery, and spear-throwing. What purpose does this serve? What does it tell us about Greek culture, or human psychology, or anything else you think relevant?
Those looking for the Trojan horse are usually shocked to find out that it doesn’t appear in the poem. This epic ends with Priam retrieving Hector’s body from Achilles, leading to Hector’s funeral. (To be fair, this is one scene that the above-mentioned cheese-fest did pretty well, but when you have Peter O’Toole playing Priam, you would have to be even more incompetent than Petersen to screw it up.) Why? Is this a satisfying conclusion? If so, in what way does this render the poem a dramatic unity, meaning a work that has thematic coherence? If not, how does it fail to do so?
War has traditionally been thought in western culture to be the activity of men, not women. Most of Iliad deals with the heroism and flaws of men. Yet the war Iliad describes supposedly begins because of a woman (and before that because of conflict between Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, leading to the judgment of Paris), and more importantly, women ultimately suffer more from war than men do. Men die, and their troubles — on earth, at least — cease. A wife’s or mother’s grief endures. Moreover, as Homer makes clear, the fate of the women of a conquered people is to be dealt with as loot and forced into sexual slavery, in effect being raped repeatedly by their captors who had killed their husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons. (Their male children too young to fight would also be killed.) Consider how Homer explores this theme in these books.