#1: Compiled by Alex Zachary, edited by Ruben Harutunian
 

I. Background Myth and Tradition
The poem in context

Many of those fighting for the Achaians are erstwhile suitors of Helen.  While they are not fighting for her hand, per se, they are connected to the mission in some meaningful way.  At the suggestion of Odysseus, they once swore to honor the choice of Helen.  This does not apply to Achilleus, who is too young to have been a suitor of Helen (see History and dates) and has come to defend the honor of Agamemnon and Menelaos (and, presumably, to win honor of his own).

On a voyage to Sparta, Paris is entertained as a guest of Menelaos.  During his stay, Paris seizes Helen, the wife of his host.  Such a grievous violation of the guest/host relationship represents a violent breech of the Greek social code.  The ethical code, or heroic code, comprises several principles of duty and conduct.  Of particular interest here is the guest/host relationship.  The relationship demands hospitality (xenia) to visitors, travelers, etc., with the overriding assumption that we are all, at some point, both guests and hosts.

History and dates are not strict in the Iliad.  Homer’s audience is familiar with the heroic tradition, but the poet is afforded some leeway with reference to the relative ages of his warriors.  Homer may be said to have taken poetic license in the name of dramatic effect – so long as he avoids contradicting existing legend (see Lattimore, 21), he is free to construct the narrative as necessary.
For our purposes, there are three generations represented in the Achaian camp – it is useful to break them down as follows: the Nestors (eldest), the Agamemnons, and the Achilleuses.  Note that Achilleus’s age is somewhat inflated relative to his appearances in other myths (cf. the Apple of Discord).

Overlooking the battlements (Book 3, lines 161-242), Helen gives an account of several of the Achaian warriors.  Odysseus is said to have been to Troy before in an embassy (lines 204-224) and is remembered for his negotiating tact.  This lends, perhaps, a sense of background and history to the text, and is revealing of the values admired by the ancients (persuasion, diplomacy, etc.).

See also Lattimore’s notes on background legends (Introduction, 23).

Aphrodite reproaches Helen in Book 3, lines 414-417: "Wretched girl, do not tease me lest in anger I forsake you /…lest I encompass you in hard hate, caught between both sides, / Danaans and Trojans alike."  This moment crystallizes Helen’s crisis.  Herself a Greek, Helen has scorned the Achaians by fleeing Greece with Paris.  Now she finds herself a source of death and destruction to the Trojans and will ultimately – if entirely inadvertently – precipitate the fall of the city.  With this in mind, the loss of Aphrodite’s goodwill is a serious threat.  On a critical level, Helen belongs on neither side.  Her true allegiances are ambiguous at best and may be irrelevant besides (consider her despondent lament: "How I wish that on that day when my mother first bore me…" (6.345)).

Helen’s robe (Book 3, lines 125-129) presents several issues for us to address.
     The woman as weaver.  Weaving is prototypical work for the women of ancient Greece, slave women in particular.  Helen remains at home as mistress of palace, supervising the weaving, while her husband fights for honor (cf. Penelope and Odysseus).  The suggestion here seems to be Helen as Woman – beautiful, homebound, willing to "turn to love-making" (3.441) as necessary.
Perhaps more interesting is the object Helen weaves.  The robe is said to depict "the numerous struggles…endured for her sake."  While one reading of the passage suggests the poignancy of a woman’s illustrating the devastation she has caused, it is equally possible that this is an indication of Helen’s narcissism (of which more evidence will appear in Book 6).
     Weaving may also establish some status for Helen as an artist and recorder of history (cf. Homer).

Prophesy
The reading of prophesies allows mortals insight into what is fated for them.  Problems arise in the interpretation of prophesy, particularly when it portends ill.
     Book 1, lines 106-111.  Agamemnon refers to Kalchas’s bearing the unwanted news that the Achaian fleet would be detained at Aulis, attributable to the wrath of Artemis.  To appease her, Agamemnon is forced to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigeneia. Iphigeneia is brought to Aulis under the auspices of marriage to Achilleus but instead dies at her father’s hands.  Iphigeneia looms over the poem in a haunting perversion of the parent/child theme (see below). Homer makes no explicit mention of this story in the Iliad, but does allude to it.
     Book 2, lines 299-329.  Odysseus recalls the reading of a portent in which a snake eats eight fledging sparrows and their mother, the ninth.  "So for years as many as this shall we fight in this place / and in the tenth year we shall take the city of the wide ways."
     Worth noting is the stock put in prophesy by the Achaians. While Agamemnon reviles Kalchas, the reading of signs is ultimately honored.  .

Fate

How does fate operate as an active force?  To what extent is it merely a set of circumstances?  In the poem, human behavior works within a framework of things acknowledged as fated (beyond an inevitable death, which applies to humanity outside the poem as well).
     The stamp of the gods on the activities of mortals is clear throughout the poem.  As the Olympians manipulate circumstance and intervene according to their prejudices, consequence is seemingly reversed or delayed (for instance, the rescue of Paris at 3.375).  So the gods are employed to explain the inexplicable.
     Yet Fate is immutable (for the most part, anyway) – though the gods may influence the course of events, the outcome is preordained.  Each man has his own destiny, no matter the path that leads him there.

Human Choice

There are two registers in the poem: the personal and the communal.
     Each of the poem’s warriors chooses a course of action and endures the consequences of that choice.
     The line that separates free will and fate, however, is very difficult to negotiate within the poem.  For the sake of illustration, we look here to Achilleus and the supposed options he sets out for himself in Book 9, lines 411-416:

(1) "Stay here and fight…my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting"; (2) "Return home to the beloved land of my fathers…my glory is gone, but there will be a long life / left for me."

Here Achilleus sets forth his options and infers their likely consequences. Whether Achilleus understands this to be an actual choice is impossible to discern.  In Book 1, he acknowledges that he is destined to die a young man: "My mother, you bore me to be a man with a short life" (352).  The poet is not clear on the extent to which Achilleus’s choices affect the length of his life.
     What we can say with certainty is that each man is fated to die, and of this fact the warriors seem acutely aware.  For the mortals, there is everything at stake in war.  Honor won in battle can be some means to immortality for a fallen hero (kleos: battle glory and epic glory).  Whatever the case, the inevitability of death does serve to bind the community of warriors (and of all humanity) together.

Three movements of Book 6

Diomedes and Glaukos meet on the battlefield (119-236).  Responding to Diomedes’s request for identification and lineage, Glaukos reveals that he comes from stock equal in prestige to Diomedes’s.  Diomedes declares that their forefathers had been guest-friends, and so should they consider themselves.  The two exchange armor and seek honor in battles with other men.  The episode is revealing of the authority in parentage within Greek culture.  What is implicit in the Iliad’s standard use of patronymics and paternal epithets is made explicit here.  Even the war cause is subordinated to broader cultural ideals that link men to history and to one another.  The passage also underlines how easy the change is from philos (beloved, dear) to ekthros (hated, hostile), and the power of xenia.

Hektor at the house of Priam (242-368).  Hektor encounters his mother, Hekabe, who urges him to remain at home so she may care for him.  Hektor refuses and instructs her to go to the temple of Athene and make sacrifices on behalf of the Trojans.  The primary bond between mother and son is evident; so, too, is the shift in the relationship when the son has grown into a man.  Hektor now cares for himself and for countless others.  He must direct his mother to the proper course of action.  Hektor meets briefly with Paris and Helen who remain in their chamber conducting the private work of narcissism (he fondling his armor and she supervising the weaving of her place in history).  Hektor urges his brother back to the battlefield and rejects Helen’s advances.  His duty leads him to his own house to find his wife and son.

Hektor, Andromache, and Astyanax (369-529).  Hektor finds his wife in a distracted state, his son in the arms of the nursemaid.  Hektor explains to his distraught wife the choice he makes between public and private responsibility.  He is duty-bound to fight the invaders for the sake of his community.  Andromache’s salvation will come in that public or communal realm as well: "Some day…a man will say of you: / ‘This is the wife of Hektor, who was ever the bravest fighter / of the Trojans’" (459-461).  He does concede, however, his misery at the notion that Andromache will be taken captive and made a slave to the Achaians.  "But may I be dead," he says, "before I / hear you crying and know by this that they drag you captive" (464-465). With this thought, he holds out his arms to his infant son who recoils at the sight of an armored warrior.  The public code – that is, the glory of Hektor, the admirable uniform of war – is meaningless here; the connection between father and infant son exists exclusively in the private realm.  Hektor holds his son to the gods and prays that Astyanax will be thought by future men to be better than his father (476-481).  In the ancient world, as in the contemporary one, this is the most mortal men can hope for their sons.

Community obligation v. individual desire (see Background Myth, Fate and Will, Parents and Children)
nomos v. physis: custom, law v. nature
Parents and children (see above)
Gender (see Helen, 2a)
eleos and dike: pity and justice (see Menelaos/Adrestos episode, 6.37)
Remembering and forgetting:  Identity, knowledge, ethics (see Thamyris, who sings without memory (2.597); Achilleus’s transformation, post Book 17; and, of course, the proem).
Private virtue v. public ethical code (see #1 above)