Student # 29
Professor Joseph Foy
Human Event 171
31 March 2014
Throughout the Iliad readers are presented with various warriors: the Trojans Polydamas, Glaucus, Agenor; the Achaeans Patroclus, little Ajax, big Ajax. They and others like them model Homer’s virtues. The clearest demonstration of them comes from the Iliad’s protagonist and antagonist Achilles (the Achaean hero) and Hector (the Trojan hero). Both of these characters are immensely strong, intently determined, and at the top of their respective armies. Both these characters are more than just amazing warriors. Through their personal conflicts, they demonstrate the Homeric hero. The Homeric hero must balance supporting their community and their own self-interests. It is the struggle of the Homeric hero between their own self-interest and the interests of the community, their egoistic and altruistic desires, which makes them more than just ordinary civilians in Greek society.
The foundation of the Homeric heroes’ actions develops from the internal struggle amongst concern for themselves, their families, and their community. The hero’s egoistic desire compels him or her to pursue everlasting glory for them, launching a manifest of feats that people will remember in history for generations. The hero’s altruistic desire seats their personal safety, and the safety of their families, above everlasting fame. Iliad opens with Achilles and Hector fighting for someone else’s gain—Achilles for Agamemnon, Hector for Paris. Both start with similar motives but in contrasting directions. During the opening of Iliad, Achilles retracts his men from the action, due to being unsympathetically dishonored by Agamemnon taking Achilles bride Briseis. Achilles, despite the loss of his fel...
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...eir men and commanded by men, as partial divinities and as mortal humans. Both men must balance the opposite dynamics of separation from and assimilation with their respective troops. Neither the Achaean nor the Trojan masters this equilibrium; together both aspects of each hero brings him to the edges of humanity. Each warrior complements the other, since Achilles and Hector prod the other to everlasting glory and challenges his determination to achieve greatness. The concluding clash amid Achilles and Hector manifests his dwelling in the cosmic order: while they battle just outside the city, so they stand just before the entrance to eternal life everlasting. Though Achilles and Hector cannot escape their pending fates, they travel longer toward immortality in the present than any other man —facing humanity to the fullest extent, yet also glimpsing into the divine.
The most significant relationship in Homer's Iliad is the friendship between Achilles and Patroclus. Other male relationships play major roles in the epic and can be directly related to that of Achilles and Patroclus. The brotherhood of Agamemnon and Menelaos, and of Hector and Paris demonstrate their loyalty. They fight because of love for each other throughout the war. Achilles, however, is not driven to fight or even bother with the war until his friendship with Patroclus is broken. It is in this illustration, the poet shows the importance of friendship and brotherhood. Achilles only becomes the great warrior and leader he is fated to be in the act of friendship.
The Ancient Greeks admired their heroes and tried to learn from both their achievements and their mistakes. They believed that most great leaders and warriors followed a predictable behavior cycle, which often ended tragically. In Homer’s epic poem, The Iliad, Achilles is a great warrior who traces the stages of the behavior cycle twice, from arete to hubris to ate and then to nemesis. Achilles is a highly skilled warrior and a great leader who becomes a narcissist and an arrogant person, which leads to selfish and childish behavior resulting in the death of his best friend. Following Patroclus’ death, Achilles repeats the behavior cycle by regaining his courage and motivation, and goes back to battle against Hector. The pride he feels in killing Hector and his overpowering hatred for him, leads Achilles to another bad decision: disrespecting the body of his enemy. This foolish choice leads directly to Achilles death. Although The Iliad is mainly known as a story about the Trojan War, it is understood as a story about Achilles and his struggle to be a hero.
Achilles is a great warrior and the central character of The Iliad. His traits were highly lauded by the Ancient Greeks. Achilles most apparent heroic traits are his courage, glory, wealth, lineage, and his camaraderie. Achilles’ largest tragic flaw is his pride. His pride causes him to turn his back on his allies in the midst of war after Agamemnon has dishonored him. (Iliad Book I) After being begged to return and as things become grim, Achilles’ close friend Patroclus decides to go in his stead. Killed by Hector, the death of Patroclus causes a change in the stubborn Achilles. His indignation at being dishonored is gone; he has lost a friend because of this pride. “Despite my anguish I will beat it down, the fury mounting inside me, down by force. But now I’ll go and meet that murderer head-on, that Hector who destroyed the dearest life I know. For my own death, I’ll meet it freely.” (Iliad Book XVIII 133-8) Despite a prophecy that he will die if he avenges his friend, Achilles returns to the front enraged and ready for battle. His downfall of losing his closest friend due to his stubbornness has wrought a change in Achilles and he now returns to the battle to avenge and honor his friend’s death.
Homer's two central heroes, Odysseus and Achilles, are in many ways differing manifestations of the same themes. While Achilles' character is almost utterly consistent in his rage, pride, and near divinity, Odysseus' character is difficult to pin down to a single moral; though perhaps more human than Achilles, he remains more difficult to understand. Nevertheless, both heroes are defined not by their appearances, nor by the impressions they leave upon the minds of those around them, nor even so much by the words they speak, but almost entirely by their actions. Action is what drives the plot of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, and action is what holds the characters together. In this respect, the theme of humanity is revealed in both Odysseus and Achilles: man is a combination of his will, his actions, and his relationship to the divine. This blend allows Homer to divulge all that is human in his characters, and all that is a vehicle for the idyllic aspects of ancient Greek society. Accordingly, the apparent inconsistencies in the characterization of Odysseus can be accounted for by his spiritual distance from the god-like Achilles; Achilles is more coherent because he is the son of a god. This is not to say that Achilles is not at times petty or unimaginative, but that his standards of action are merely more continuous through time. Nevertheless, both of Homer's heroes embody important and admirable facets of ancient Greek culture, though they fracture in the ways they are represented.
In this, Homer presents us with a culture where the pursuit of military glory directly conflicts with devotion to one’s family, and in pursuing the former, Hector must abandon his family. But family members are not the only losses the soldiers must endure: They also experience great anguish when they lose their fellow warriors on the battlefield. When Achilles learns of Patroclus’s death, for example, he is stricken with grief, yelling at the gods as he claws at the ground and tears at his hair. Achilles’ intense feelings of grief soon give way to rage, and Homer describes how the hero loses “the will to live, to take [his] stand in the world of men” until he can vanquish Hector (18.105–106). Achilles goes on to slaughter Hector in one of the poem’s most violent passages. Patroclus’s death upsets Achilles’ concept of the world order. Now he fights not for glory or out of envy, but because he simply cannot live until he kills his Hector. Grief and rage have become inextricably linked for Achilles, and war is no longer a noble or glorious endeavor but simply the symptom of loss. The tension between the glory of
Throughout the Iliad, heroic characters make decisions based on a specific set of principles, which are referred to as the “code of honor.” The heroic code that Homer presents to readers is easy to recognize because the heroic code is the cause for many of the events that take place, but many of the characters have different perceptions of how highly the code should be regarded. Hector, the greatest of the Trojan warriors, begins the poem as a model for a hero. His dedication and firm belief in the code of honor is described many times throughout the course of the Iliad. As a reward for heroic traits in battle, prizes were sometimes awarded to victors of war. In Book 1 Achilles receives Chryseis as a prize and a symbol of honor. Heroism had its rewards and its setbacks which ultimately was the backbone of the Illiad in the case of Achilles prize. Hector, arguably the greatest Trojan warrior or even the bravest of the Homeric heroes is very fierce and fights for what he believes is his destiny. In book VI Hector expresses his bravery when Andromache pleads with Hector not to fight when Hector says, “But I would die of shame to face the men of Troy and the Trojan woman trailing their long robes if I would shrink from battle now, a coward. Nor does the sprit urge me on that way. I’ve learned it all too well. To stand up bravely, always to fight in the front ranks of Trojan soldiers, winning my father great glory, glory for myself” (VI, 387).
...shows that Achilles the character with which the reader most often identifies, it has exhibited his independence from the heroic code and that he is able of making decision that have no basis in superiority. He is about to choose his own destiny and live his own philosophy and one who follows this is truly a hero by anyone’s standards. A conservative comparison of the actions and thoughts of the two characters provides the reader with a perhaps unexpected insight. It seems that Hector is indeed possessive of a human side that makes him scare from dying in war. He uses both his human gratitude and the warrior value that he learned since childhoods apply, so that there is the least friction between the two and results are indeed attractive and excellent. So they may be flawed, but these characteristic make them both classic literacy heroes of the epic poem The Iliad.
Throughout the text, major characters seem to be at constant battle with their different emotions. This inner conflict is mirrored by the everyday conflicts between the gods. Just as Zeus and Hera are constantly at odds with one another, so are the different sides of Achilles: his cultural responsibility, pride, honor, and revenge. No one is completely at peace with his or her conflicting emotions in The Iliad – and therefore, neither are the gods, who represent these emotions. Hector is a prime example of a human who finds himself torn between two forces: his love for his growing family, and his duty as a prince of Troy. He admits to Andromache that he worries about his own mortality, but emphasizes that “I would die of shame to face the men of Troy…if I would shrink from battle now, a coward.” (Homer 6: 523, 525). Hector’s deeply ingrained sense of honor and loyalty to home is clearly established in the beginning of the text. Therefore, when Zeus later grants Hector “power to kill and kill till you cut your way to the benched ships” (Homer 11: 241-242), it is not too much of a stretch to attribute Hector’s dodged perseverance to his upbringing and rigid sense of duty, rather than to the
Although Achilles and Hector are both leaders of men, Hector leads with a mature sense that gives his men reason to respect him. In turn, Hector respects his men which gives fulfillment to both parties. Hector is not a man to sit around and mull over strategies and ideas - Hector is a man of action. His men are inspired to fight because they see their captain fighting as well. Hector fights for belief and respect while Achilles fights out of rage and rashness. Achilles is not respected by his men, rather he is feared. Nobody wants to receive the blunt of the attack when Achilles randomly flies into a rage, therefore his men are terrified of him and allow him to do as he pleases.
The Iliad may be seen as an account of the circumstances that irrevocably alter the life of one man: Achilles, one of the greatest warriors. Throughout the course of the poem Achilles goes through many ordeals that change his character immensely. Starting with his quarrel with Agamemnon and withdrawal from battle, to the death of Patroklos, and with the slaying of Hektor. Achilles emotions and actions decide the fate of many warriors on both sides. Achilles struggles with anger, honor, pride, loyalty and love make the poem more that just a gruesome war story.
In 700 B.C, Homer, a blind Greek poet, composed The Iliad. This work has become one of the most significant works in Western literature. The Iliad is an epic poem. It is a long narrative poem in verse form which tells the story of a hero. Achilles is the epic hero in The Iliad. Achilles is the best warrior of the Achaeans and Hector was the top warrior for the Trojans. Although Achilles and Hector seem very similar, they actually have a lot of differences between the two of them, which makes each of them unique. The similarities are prominent between Achilles and Hector, but they were different in the way the way they lived, why they fought, and by their mentality.
According the Iliad by Homer, Hector and Achilles are the main characters that have many different, but also they have some similarity.They both have the different in personalities and life. Also, they have the different about leadership and relationship with their family. Both are the two strong warriors and heroes. Achilles is in Greek side, Hector is in the Trojans side , and they both want to win the battle . Both characteristics believed that their fate is to die on the battle as the warrior, but approach war differently. However, they all have the advantage and disadvantage. Also, They have the different reasons to fight the battle that hector fight for his homeland and his family's honor and Achilles fight for Helen , also because he is the best warrior that he want people to respected him.
In Homer’s The Iliad he tells of the battles and events during the time of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles. This was just a small portion of the Trojan War that had lasted ten years. The Iliad shares the ideas of the glory of war, military values over family life, and the impermanence of human life and its creation. One thing that Homer does is characterize the two different warriors Achilles and Hector. These two great warriors both show different kinds of traits that shape the character they become throughout the The Iliad. Achilles is the main hero in The Iliad, but Homer subliminally tries to persuade the reader that Hector is the true hero in this story.
In the poem, Iliad, Achilles and Hector both show relative heroism in their own different ways. Achilles may have been the more popular hero, but Hector had great heroism as well. Each of these characters possess their own different strengths and weaknesses. These two characters both have pride as being one of their main weaknesses. Hector seems as if he would suit best in the modern world, but there are a few different reasons as to why the ancients may have chose Achilles. Hector and Achilles both lost a lot by letting their pride get in the way of their heroism. Both of these characters were their country’s best warrior. Achilles and Hector have very different personalities, and very different ways of approaching situations.
In Homer’s epic, the Iliad, the legendary, has no two characters that are so similar yet so different as Greek warrior, Achilles, and the Prince of Troy, Hector. Achilles is the strongest fighter in the Greek side, and Hector is the strongest Trojan. They are both put into the mold of a hero that their respective societies have put them into; however; it is evident that they are both extremely complex characters with different roles within their society and with their families, and with the gods.