1. What role thus war play in the Illiad?

It is presented as a good or
bad thing? What are the worthwhile causes of fighting a war?

War is the main stage in Homer's The Iliad, an epic poem that details the last
years of the Trojan War. The war was started by a fight between the gods. As
a result Paris, a Trojan prince, stole Helen of Troy from the Achaean king
Menelaus. Homer introduces us to many warriors on both the Trojan and
Achaean sides. The quotes from the Illiad demonstrate how war was viewed. 

For me it mostly presented a good thing by the following reasons:

Being a Warrior Is a Way of Life

When Hector is speaking to Aias, an Achaean warrior, he speaks about being

a warrior as if he was a skilled craftsman. He says, ''…do not be testing me as
if I were some ineffectual boy…who knows nothing of the works of warfare…I
know well myself how to fight and kill men in battle; / I know how to turn to
the right, how to turn to the left the ox-hide/ tanned into a shield which is my
protection in battle…'' 

From this confrontation, we can presume that being a soldier was treated like
a skilled profession, reserved for only the best. Hector argues that being a
warrior requires great attention to detail and execution of training. Being a
man dedicated to protect his country and his people is a way of life. It isn't
some folly to be taken lightly. 

In War, Everyone Is Equal

Many of us forget when thinking about war that on both sides there are men
with families, with lives that exist beyond the scope of battle. In Homer's The
Iliad, the warriors are constantly reminded by their leaders that the men they
are fighting are their equals, and never to be thought of as lesser. 

For example, when one battle is over in the poem, both the Trojans and the
Achaeans gather their dead, and the scene is quite emotional. The Trojans
wanted to cry, but Homer writes that, 

This is an excellent quote because it shows how the Trojans and the
Achaeans are equal, even though they are fighting on opposite sides. They
honor their dead the same way, and afterwards, they both go home with a
sense of emptiness and ''with their hearts in sorrow'' from the loss of their
people. These men are men regardless of who they are fighting for, and
Homer doesn't let us forget that.
 The Causes Of War

There is always at least one main conflict in ever great piece of literature.
In The Iliad, there are actually a few. Let's take a look at them now. 

1. Achilles

The main conflict in The Iliad is caused from the hubris, or excessive pride,
of the main character, Achilles. Achilles is the Greek equivalent to Michael
Jordan. Achilles was an amazing man and often regarded as one of the
mightiest warriors in Greek mythology. Achilles, on the side of the Greeks,
has made the advance upon Troy successfully during The Iliad. Unfortunately,
Achilles leaves the battle and refuses to fight. This happens because
Agamemnon demands that he have Achilles's war prize, the lovely maiden
Briseis. This wounds the pride of the great Achilles. As a result, Achilles
refuses to partake in the war, and the absence of his strength causes the
Greeks to suffer greatly in their battle against the Trojans. Barely managing
to fight the Trojans back, the Greek army continues to face casualties. The
casualties do not sway Achilles at first, but when his best friend Patroclus is
killed, the mighty warrior grows angry with rage. Achilles once again joins the
battle to protect his honor - ensuring victory for the Greeks. 

2. Paris and Helen of Troy

While Achilles's battle with Agamemnon is the main conflict in the epic, The
Iliad is probably most known for the conflicts caused by Helen of Troy. Known
as the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy is often stated as
the immediate cause of the Trojan War. Known as the face that 'launched a
thousand ships,' Helen was Paris's prize from Aphrodite after Paris declared
the goddess to be the most beautiful. Taken from her husband Menelaus to
Troy by the young Paris, Helen's capture irritated her greatly. Unable to afford
the great insult of having the most beautiful woman in the world taken from
him, Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon raised a Greek army to retrieve
the maiden from Troy.

2. In the situation of hector in Illiad, which would you choose-

responsibility to people or responsibility to one's ability?
I will choose responsibility to people like in the Book VI of Homer’s Iliad
where there shows the contention in the heart of Hector, Ilium’s champion,
but also a husband and new father: he is torn between his responsibilities as
a hero to his people and as a head of the household. Like so many soldiers
going off to battle today, Hector is a new father who must risk his life to
maintain his people’s way of life. Hector knows that Troy is doomed, but he
must do his duty as champion and prince, even though it means the
enslavement of his wife and child. In Hector’s plight, we see what is perhaps
the utmost position of humanity in war: to lose does not mean just the death
of the hero, but his death precipitates the death of the society that he
protects.

At least one characteristic of the hero in the Iliad is his resolve to meet fate
bravely. Hector communicates this belief to Andromache, before returning to
the battlefield:

Andromache,
dear one, why so desperate? Why so much grief for me?
No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate.
And fate? No man alive has ever escaped it,
neither brave man nor coward, I tell you—
it’s born with us the day we are born.

Like Oedipus’ anagnoresis, Hector’s position is much the same: while we

cannot avoid our fate, we can decide how we’ll meet it. Our actions are our
responsibility, even though, as Achilles muses in Book IX, death will claim us
all: “The same honor waits / for the coward and the brave. They both go
down to Death.” In fact, while Hector and Achilles both seem to be
considering death — under the extreme circumstances of war, what else would
one think about? — They both approach it differently.

Hector is a family man, but he is a champion first. Even though his status as
the son of Priam and Hecuba is a factor, his pride affects his position, and
stokes his responsibility to his people: “I would die of shame to face the men
of Troy / and the Trojan women trailing their long robes / if I would shrink
from battle now, a coward.” Hector is concerned about his place — and his
perceived place — as champion; he must not let his people down. He even
admonishes his brother Paris for not doing his duty, for languishing in his
room instead of fighting. Yet, in this resolve — a resolve that will be put to the
test in Book XXII — Hector’s responsibility will also win him glory and renown.

Achilles, on the other hand, questions the validity of this position. Since
breaking with Agamemnon and the rest of the Achaeans, Achilles has
obviously had some time to think about life. In Book IX, Agamemnon’s forces
have been beaten back nearly to the ships and an embassy of heroes is sent
to Achilles to attempt to win him back to the battle, while Achilles sulks by his
ships. After being surrounded by death, Achilles considers whether or not he
should accept his responsibility as a hero. After all, he has two choices:

If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy,

my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.
If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,
my pride, my glory dies . . .
true, but the life that’s left me will be long,
the stroke of death will not come on me quickly.

Achilles has decided to choose the latter course; he is determined to set sail
the next morning, having lost faith in the leadership and subsequently lost
faith is his hero’s pride and glory. The champion of the Greeks even advises
the others to flee, since defeat seems nigh. It’s only after Patroclus’ death
that Achilles is reminded of his duties to king and country, though he is
motivated by that rage begun by Agamemnon and stoked to its full fury by
Hector, and does his duty, establishing his fame, but cutting his life short.

Hector does his duty for his people, but Andromache’s lament for Hector and
their son in Book XXII shows how duty to country is not always compatible to
duty to one’s family. Yet, the death of the family is a microcosm of the reality
of the Trojans: their culture, as it is now, is doomed. Hector’s death means
the inevitable defeat of Troy.

3. Think about the effects anger has on events. What positive and
negative effects result from anger? Why do characters are angry? Is
their anger justified or not? Explain

warrior hero such as Ajax, Hector or Achilles must be willing to fight in hand-
to-hand combat day after day. He must be able, physically and
psychologically, to plunge a sword into the body of another human being, and
to risk having a sword plunged into his own. He must be brutal and ready to
risk brutality. At the same time, he must be gentle to his friends and allies,
and able to join with them in group activities both military and peaceful.

Plato was well aware of the problem these opposing demands create, both in
the soul of the warrior and in the society he inhabits: ‘Where,’ he asks, ‘are
we to find a character that is both gentle and big-tempered [megalothumon]
at the same time? After all, a gentle nature is the opposite of an angry one.’
When, in the opening line of the Iliad, Homer asks the goddess to sing ‘the
anger of Peleus’ son Achilles’, a large part of what he is asking her to do is to
explore this opposition, its sources and effects.

Anger or rage (mênis, thumos, orgê) is an emotion, a mixture of belief and

desire. It is not a somatic feeling, as nausea and giddiness are, though it is
usually accompanied by such feelings – trembling and blushing, for example,
and the sense of seeing red. It is, in Aristotle’s definition, ‘a desire,
accompanied by pain, to take apparent revenge for apparent insult’.

Anger is triggered by insult, then, and so is connected to worth (aretê) and to

honour (timê). A person is insulted when the treatment he receives is worse
than the treatment his worth entitles him to receive. He is honoured when he
is given treatment proportional to his worth, and his worth is above or well-
above average. When we speak of honour, therefore, we are in a way
speaking of worth, since honour measures worth. Honour and insult are thus
close to being polar opposites, and an insult is a harm to worth or honour.

Honour, like insult, comes from others. It is their recognition of our worth. It
is the intrusion of the social into the psychological, the public into the private.
After all, others honour us for what they find of worth in us. ‘To pursue
[honour],’ wrote Baruch Spinoza in Treatise on the Emendation of the
Intellect (1677), ‘we must direct our lives according to other men’s powers of
understanding, fleeing what they commonly flee and seeking what they
commonly seek.’ So what we come to think of as worthwhile in ourselves is
bound to have as a large component what others think to be worthwhile in
us.

4. How do ypu feel about achilles and hector after hector is killed?
How do you feel about what the achaeance do to hectors body?

With the death of Patroclus, any compassion Achilles once had is now gone,
destroyed by grief and rage. His attacks against the Trojans are unnecessarily
brutal and pitiless; the carnage angers Xanthus, whose waters become filled
with dead bodies. His denial of Lycaon's pleas for mercy is one of the Iliad's
most frightening passages. Achilles' words are cold, inhuman. As many other
Trojans before him have hoped, Lycaon hopes that his family's wealth will be
able to save him, but Achilles is past the point when life can be spared. In the
Fagles translation, Lycaon speaks of Patroclus as "your strong, gentle friend,"
with emphasis added to "gentle," as if Lycaon is trying to remind Achilles of
the compassion that distinguished Patroclus among men. Rather than honor
his friend's memory by remembering his compassion, Achilles allows any
shred of gentleness in him to die with Patroclus. Achilles treats these human
lives more lightly than the gods do, and he is as mortal as the men he kills.
We are reminded of his mortality when he nearly dies an undignified death at
the hands of Xanthus, the river god. Suddenly, he is vulnerable again, but
once freed by Hephaestus' fire, Achilles returns to the slaughter. 

The battles between the gods are comic in tone, with the exception of the
clash between Xanthus and Hephaestus. Athena punches Aphrodite in the
breasts; Hera smacks Artemis around with her own bow. Homer presents
these battles lightly because the gods have nothing at stake when they fight.
Only men can have dignity in battle because men can die. The wounds of the
gods heal quickly, and nothing can kill them. With nothing to lose, their
clashes can never be noble. There can be no sacrifice or martyrdom or true
courage; their invulnerability disqualifies them from a claim to human dignity. 

With the death of their champion approaching, we see the Trojans behaving
nobly. Priam watches the battle with concern, ordering that the gates remain
open until everyone is inside, even though he risks that Achilles might the
city. Agenor, though terrified of Achilles, stands and fights a battle he cannot
seriously think he has a real chance of winning. His courage, along with
Apollo's deception, buys the city of Troy a little more time.

5. Discuss how the Greek able to enter the city of troy and made city
fall into ashes.

According to the Iliad, when the tide of the Trojan War had turned against

the Greeks and the Trojans were threatening their ships, Patroclus convinced
Achilles to let him lead the Myrmidons into combat. Achilles consented; giving
Patroclus the armor Achilles had received from his father, in order for
Patroclus to impersonate Achilles. Achilles then told Patroclus to return after
beating the Trojans back from their ships. Patroclus defied Achilles' order and
pursued the Trojans back to the gates of Troy.[8] Patroclus killed many
Trojans and Trojan allies, including a son of Zeus, Sarpedon. While fighting,
Patroclus' wits were removed by Apollo, after which Patroclus was hit with the
spear of Euphorbos. Hector then killed Patroclus by stabbing him in the
stomach with a spear.

The body of Patroclus is lifted by Menelaus and Meriones while Odysseus and

others look on (Etruscan relief, 2nd century BC)

Achilles retrieved his body, which had been stripped of armor by Hector and
protected on the battlefield by Menelaus and Ajax. Achilles did not allow the
burial of Patroclus' body until the ghost of Patroclus appeared and demanded
his burial in order to pass into Hades. Patroclus was then cremated on a
funeral pyre, which was covered in the hair of his sorrowful companions. As
the cutting of hair was a sign of grief while also acting as a sign of the
separation of the living and the dead, this points to how well-liked Patroclus
had been. The ashes of Achilles were said to have been buried in a golden
urn along with those of Patroclus by the Hellespont.

1. What role thus war play in the Illiad? It is presented as a good

or bad thing? What are the worthwhile causes of fighting a war?

The Iliad is based on an epic conflict, the Trojan War, so Of course war plays
a major part in the poem. Homer presents war as a testing ground for
heroes: a place where brave soldiers can write their name in the annals of
history by performing heroic deeds on the field of battle.

2. In the situation of hector in Illiad, which would you choose-

responsibility to people or responsibility to one's ability?

I would make the choice that Hector makes responsibility to other people.
This is one of the many personal qualities that makes Hector such a
sympathetic character and which distinguishes him from Achilles. Whereas
Achilles is interested only in personal glory, Hector actually cares about the
welfare of his people.

3. Think about the effects anger has on events. What positive and
negative effects result from anger? Why do characters are angry? Is
their anger justified or not? Explain

Your anger affects those around you it causes a negative feeling on those
around you. At the very least, your anger can cause people to feel put off,
upset, intimidated, afraid, or a handful of other unpleasant emotions. Youre
also running the risk of pushing loved ones out of your life for good.
4. How do ypu feel about achilles and hector after hector is killed?

How do you feel about what the achaeance do to hectors body?

The one on one combat ends with Achilles killing Hector. Still pulsing with
anger and needing to satisfy his revenge and grief for having lost Patroclus,
Achaean soldiers to stab and mutilate Hectors corpse. Then Achilles ties the
body to his chariot and drags it behind.

5. Discuss how the Greek able to enter the city of troy and made city
fall into ashes.

The greek enter the city of troy because of the Trojan horse. Soldiers were
able to take the city of troy after a fruitless ten year siege by hiding in a giant
horse supposedly left as an offering to the goddess Athena. they pretended to
sail away. The Trojans believed the huge wooden horse was a peace offering
to their gods and thus a symbol of their victory after a long siege.