Who are the Good Guys?

Stories based wholly or partly on legends almost invariably share some basic characteristics. For instance, there is generally a primary hero (the protagonist) and a primary villain (the antagonist). We expect that the hero is “good” and that the villain is “evil.” Each story defines these traits differently, but it is nearly always obvious which character is good and which character is bad. Furthermore, one can safely assume that the protagonist’s allies are “good,” and that the antagonist’s allies are “evil.” In Homer’s Iliad, however, such a clear delineation between the good guys and the bad guys is nowhere to be found.

Before opening the book, I knew that the Iliad was a story about Achilles and the Trojan War. I assumed, therefore that Achilles and the rest of the Achaians were the good guys, and that the Trojans were the bad guys. This assumption presented me with problems right from the start. In line 25 of Book 1, we see that Agamemnon is evil, even though he is on the same side as Achilles. We have this humble priest, bearing “gifts beyond count” (l. 13) and bowing in supplication of all the Achaians. All he wants is his daughter, but Agamemnon denies his request (and the will of the Achaians) and goes on to forbid Chryses from ever returning. “Never let me find you again, old sir, near our hollow / ships, neither lingering now nor coming again hereafter, / for fear your staff and the god’s ribbons help you no longer,” (ll. 26-28).

Agamemnon’s “evilness,” though, can fit within the basic assumption of hero versus villain, because Agamemnon ends up being a possible enemy of Achilles. The tension between the two men develops into a full-blown quarrel by the time Achilles dashes against the ground the “sceptre / studded with golden nails,” (ll. 245-6). However, I started wondering about even Achilles when he asks his mother to see if Zeus “might be willing to help the Trojans, / and pin the Achaians back against the ships and the water, / dying [so that] Agamemnon may recognize / his madness, that he did no honour to the best of the Achaians,” (ll. 408-12). Does Homer expect us to sympathize with Achilles? He just asked that his own men be defeated. How are we supposed to see him as the good guy after he condemns to death some of his own friends?

As I read Book 5, I noticed that Homer seemed to be trying to tell the audience that war is hell. No death (of a chieftain) is anonymous, whether the victim is Achaian or Trojan. Homer describes each death as the horrible event that it is. In the beginning of the next book, Menelaos is about to spare the life of a Trojan, when his brother, Agamemnon, comes along and tells him that no Trojan should go free, not even “the young man child that the mother carries / still in her body,” (ll. 58-9). At this point, I fully realized that the Iliad is not just a story about Achilles. In addition to telling about one man, Homer is telling about human beings and war. In real life, wars are not fought between good guys and bad guys, but between groups of people, each as morally diverse as the others.

After realizing that there are virtuous men and evil men on both sides in the Iliad, I found it much easier to understand what was going on. Reading again about Achilles in Book 9, I had a new conception of what kind of person he is. He may have been a little rash in asking for the defeat of the Achaians, but he himself refuses to fight because he wants to go home. “If I return home to the beloved land of my fathers, / the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life / left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly,” (ll. 414-6). In understanding why each character acts the way that he does, I began to understand that, unlike the stock characters in most epics, the Iliad is filled with human characters.