The Iliad

Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Books 1-4

Books 5-8

Books 9-12

Books 13-16

Books 17-20

Books 21-24

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Character Analysis

Achilles

The root of Achilles’s name in Greek is akhos (άχος), meaning sorrow or pain; his name roughly means “man of many sorrows.” This correlates with his representation in the Iliad. From the first word of poem, it is evident that Achilles is suffering. After his disastrous argument with Agamemnon, he withdraws from battle, appearing infrequently but significantly until the final books. Achilles has been portrayed as inflexible because he refuses the embassy and holds tightly to both grief and rage throughout the poem. Yet the Achilles readers/listeners encounter in Book 1 is markedly different from the one they are left with in Book 24.

Achilles begins the poem preoccupied with how he is honored and furious when he feels disrespected. The implication is that he has fought efficiently and exceptionally, above all other Achaeans, and is a source of terror for the Trojans, but Achilles is not fighting for a personal cause. He is at Troy because it will lead him to fame, in ways he may not know or understand at the beginning of the poem, by way of the Iliad. The source of his fame becomes, ironically, the story of his unquenchable rage and grief; it is the fame of going too far and being humbled, having to accept that he is not a god. He has limits, and the process of accepting them becomes the source of his fame.

Hector

In contrast to Achilles, Hector is fighting, from the outset, for a very personal cause: the survival of his city and his family. He would return Helen to the Achaeans, along with her treasure, but his brother Paris, who is portrayed as far more inclined to party than fight, refuses to give up his prize from Aphrodite. Thus, Hector is forced to lead the defense of Troy, the responsibility falling on him because he is the best Trojan warrior. Winning does not offer the opportunity to plunder treasures but the prize of living, and like other heroes in the Iliad, Hector values his life, his wife and son, his home and people.

The poem portrays Hector as beloved by the gods, in particular Zeus, who wants to save him but is restrained from doing so by Athena. Zeus pities Hector for his fate and, as compensation, allows him to feel the joy of victory, if only momentarily. The problem is that Hector misreads these moments of success, interpreting them as harbingers of ultimate victory. When Hector realizes he has been fooled, partly from his own folly in ignoring Polydamas’s measured advice, he goes down fighting. His personal cause lost, he fights to be remembered as a brave fighter who faced his fate head-on. In this sense his narrative arc is an inversion of Achilles’s.

Helen

Though Helen occupies relatively little space in the narrative, she is a central figure who perhaps most starkly exemplifies mortal powerlessness in the face of divine forces. Her first appearance in the narrative is in Book 3, weaving a web of the Trojan War, at which she is the center but over which she has no say. Even the longing she feels for her former home and husband is instilled in her by Iris. Helen’s own feelings and desires are never truly individuated. After Aphrodite saves Paris from Menelaus, she fetches Helen, insisting that Helen go to his bed. Helen lashes out, expressing her feelings of helplessness and powerlessness, her frustration and grief at being passed from one man to another, according to Aphrodite’s whims and schemes. The goddess of love responds with threats of violence and worse, prompting Helen to comply instead of taking out her resentment at Paris.

Helen’s presence in Troy has brought the city to the edge of ruin within the Iliad; in the events that follow the poem, it will cause the fall of the city, the death of its men and enslavement of its women. Yet when she appears on the walls to watch the duel between Menelaus and Paris, the Trojan elders remark on her beauty, saying it is “no wonder the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered / years of agony all for her, for such a woman,” describing her beauty as “terrible” (133). Hesiod’s Works and Days can again suggest a way of reading their perception of beauty as both terrible and desirable. According to the myth of Pandora in Hesiod, Zeus instructed the gods to create Pandora, the first woman, as both a gift and curse to men. Pandora is conceptualized as an affliction, a punishment for men because Prometheus outsmarted Zeus on their behalf, but she is pleasurable pain, a paradoxical fusion that pervades the ancient Greek imagination.