Achilles’ Rage Exposes the Fragile Economy of Honor and Trust

The Iliad’s first surprise is not a literary footnote. It changes what the reader is being asked to watch. Despite the title’s association with Ilios, one of the names of Troy, the poem is not really “about the Trojan War” in the expected sense. The Trojan Horse does not appear. The war’s beginning is not narrated as the central action. The poem enters the conflict nine years in, assumes much of the legendary background as shared knowledge, and narrows attention to a single crisis inside the Greek camp.

That crisis is named in the poem’s first word. Reading from Robert Fagles’s translation, Russ Roberts emphasized the opening invocation:

For Ido Hevroni, the proem tells the audience exactly where to look. The background is Troy; the subject is Achilles’ rage. More specifically, the poem follows what happens while Achilles is angry, why that anger begins, what breaks it, and what it costs. The opening does not first emphasize Trojan deaths. It emphasizes the losses among Achilles’ own brothers in arms: the Achaeans, Argives, and Danaans — three names for the Greek force besieging Troy.

That is why the Iliad can be misread if approached merely as an ancient war story. Roberts said he had avoided the poem for years because he assumed it was “mostly killing,” the book before the Odyssey, and not especially interesting to him. Reading it seriously changed that impression. The violence is graphic, cinematic, and often anatomically specific — “where the arrow went in” and what happened next. But killing is not the whole of it. Much of the poem is about negotiation, frailty, ego, pride, and the psychology of human beings under pressure.

Hevroni’s case for reading the poem has two layers. The first is civilizational: he called the Iliad and the Odyssey “the genesis of the Western culture,” written centuries before philosophy and prior to many of the conceptual frameworks later readers bring to the West. In his view, much of what modern audiences know about heroes, action, myth, and Hollywood spectacle begins there.

The second reason is experiential. Reading the Iliad seriously, he argued, does not mean reading it professionally. Hevroni is trained in literature, but his specialty is Jewish literature, not Homeric scholarship. Still, sustained engagement with the poem reveals “so many truths and so many depths” that it can illuminate situations today.

That has been especially true in the classroom. At Shalem College, Hevroni teaches the Iliad in discussion rather than lecture. Students read the text, come to class, and test it together. Over years, serious students have repeatedly shown him something new in the poem. Over the last three years, the setting changed further: many students were returning from war.

The Israeli context in which Ido Hevroni has recently taught Homer gives the poem a different immediacy. Shalem students are typically around 25 years old. Many have already served in the army and remain part of the reserves. In Israel, Russ Roberts noted, “reserves” does not mean a distant backup force in the American sense. Reservists train regularly and, in wartime, are called back. Students did not return to administrative posts in back rooms; many served in battle.

After Hevroni began publishing about reading the Iliad with Israeli students returning from war, he heard from American veterans who described similar experiences. He also pointed to American veterans’ book clubs reading the poem. The scenes speak directly to people who have seen combat or lived close to it. Hevroni himself served in the reserves until age 40, though he said he did not participate in combat as his students have. He also located the subject personally: his son-in-law was in Lebanon and had recently lost a married friend.

But the Iliad is not only for combat veterans. War, Hevroni argued, is one of literature’s great laboratories for examining humanity. Citing Milan Kundera, he described literature as a space where human beings can be placed in situations that actual life does not permit us to stage experimentally. War concentrates questions ordinary life often diffuses: What happens to values under danger? How does a person act when everything he believes is broken? How does a man treat his wife and child when he must serve his country, regardless of the cause?

Roberts called war a crucible, a place where human beings are hammered and transformed. He placed the Iliad alongside later war literature — War and Peace, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and novels by Mark Helprin — as attempts to understand the human condition under extreme pressure. Reading Homer also forces a modern reader to confront the ancientness of violence. Violence is not a modern aberration. It appears early in Genesis in Cain and Abel and persists as a feature of the human condition.

Hevroni contrasted reading violent literature with consuming violent entertainment. People may avoid books about war, he said, while watching movies and series full of violence. But reading violence is different from watching it. Film gives less distance. The imagination and judgment, in his view, work less when watching than when reading. Reading a deep work that contains violence gives the reader an opportunity to train what he called “the muscles of morality.”

Modern popular culture’s dependence on “kissing and killing,” a phrase Roberts borrowed from a rabbi friend describing television, also makes Homer less remote. The Iliad has little kissing and a great deal of killing, Roberts said, but it also has much more than both. It is a predecessor to modern superhero stories. Achilles and Hector are not ordinary soldiers. They resemble figures whose capacities exceed the normal rules of combat. Roberts found himself thinking of the Avengers, where gods and quasi-gods enter battle.

Hevroni accepted the connection but called the modern superhero version “the lesser version.” The need for myth, he argued, did not disappear after the Enlightenment. Drawing a line through Freud, Jung, and Rollo May, he said psychologists have spoken about a need — even a desperate need — for myth after the great myths were “buried.” Myth, in modern speech, often becomes synonymous with a lie. But that was not its original function. A myth can say something deep about the world that realistic fiction cannot say in the same way. If modern audiences are already dealing with myth through commercial cinema, Hevroni argued, Homer offers a more serious way to think about the same dimensions of life.

The Iliad’s divine machinery can be one of the strangest features for a reader trained by monotheistic assumptions. Russ Roberts compared the structure to a two-tiered children’s book in which a human family lives above the floorboards while a family of mice conducts its own parallel life beneath. In Homer, human beings fight, fail, negotiate, and grieve. At the same time, the gods on Olympus maneuver, quarrel, bargain, and pursue their own interests. Their conflicts spill into human affairs.

Ido Hevroni warned that readers should not enter this world expecting monotheism, whether believed or disbelieved. The poem gives, in his phrase, “polytheism in its best.” In his account, the gods are not creators of the world. They are not guardians of morality. Indeed, they often seem uninterested in morality altogether. Human beings, because they must live together, are more invested in moral order than the gods are.

Their presence, as Hevroni reads it, acknowledges that human beings are not self-enclosed masters of the world. Forces beyond individual control shape action, desire, conflict, courage, and ruin.

Hevroni used Aphrodite to show how this works. In the background to the Iliad lies the Judgment of Paris, a story the ancient audience would have known. In Hevroni’s account, the background begins with Thetis, a sea goddess desired by the Olympian gods. Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades are part of the world above and beneath human life: Zeus above all, Poseidon associated with the seas, and Hades with the realm beneath the earth and the dead. But a prophecy says the son of Thetis will be stronger than his father. That prophecy makes her marriage politically dangerous among the gods. Rather than allow her to marry a god and produce what Hevroni called a “super god,” she is married to a mortal, Peleus. Their son will be Achilles: extraordinary, but mortal.

At the wedding, Strife is not invited. As in the later fairy-tale pattern Hevroni compared to Sleeping Beauty, the excluded figure disrupts the celebration. Strife throws in a golden apple marked “to the fairest of them all.” Three goddesses contend for it: Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena. The gods do not want to judge among them, so the decision is handed to Paris, also called Alexandros, the young prince of Troy.

The choice is not merely a beauty contest. Each goddess represents a different power and offers Paris a different way to use power. Aphrodite, often called goddess of beauty, is for Hevroni more fundamentally the goddess of sex: the impulse that drives human beings and animals toward reproduction. Beauty serves that drive. Hera is the ruler, associated with marriage, politics, social order, and the laws that hold a society together. Athena is strategic intelligence, warcraft, and also weaving — the power to organize.

Paris chooses Aphrodite. She promises him Helen, the most beautiful woman on earth, who is already married to Menelaus of Sparta. Aphrodite does not care that Helen is married; marriage belongs to Hera’s domain. Sex, Hevroni said, “doesn’t know rules.” Paris visits Menelaus as a guest and, when Menelaus leaves home, takes Helen back to Troy. Menelaus calls on his brother Agamemnon and the other Greek kings, and the expedition to recover Helen begins.

None of this is the plot of the Iliad itself, but it is the world behind it. Roberts added the basic Trojan side: Priam is king of Troy, with many sons, the most prominent warriors being Hector and Paris. Hector is the great Trojan defender; Paris is the cause of much of the trouble and often the object of Hector’s contempt.

This divine background matters because the gods are not decorative. Their rivalries and attachments become part of the political economy of the war. They intervene constantly, not as moral arbiters but as interested powers.

The Iliad’s immediate human conflict begins with a distribution problem that is also a status problem. Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior, has taken Briseis as a war prize after killing her husband and brothers. Agamemnon, the Greek commander, has his own prize, Chryseis, but must return her. He then decides that because he is king and cannot be left without honor, he will take Briseis from Achilles.

Ido Hevroni said modern readers must confront the brutal role women play in this warrior culture. Women have power, and there is love and lust in the poem, but women are also treated as objects and trophies. When a city is sacked, the victors kill male combatants and take women as slaves, sometimes sex slaves. This is morally alien and uncomfortable to modern readers, but it sits at the heart of the quarrel that ignites the poem’s plot.

Russ Roberts read Agamemnon’s self-justifying speech about giving up Chryseis. Agamemnon says he prefers Chryseis even to his wife Clytemnestra, ranking her no lower “in build or breeding, in mind or works of hand,” but presents himself as willing to return her for the sake of the army. Then comes the demand: if he gives up his prize, another must be fetched for him immediately. Otherwise, he alone among the Argives will be without honor.

Achilles answers in economic terms. Where is such compensation supposed to come from? The treasure has already been distributed. There are no idle hoards lying around. To call back what has been parceled out among the troops would itself be a disgrace. Achilles proposes a deferred settlement: return the girl now, and if Zeus someday grants them Troy, the Achaeans will repay Agamemnon three or four times over.

The exchange is a negotiation with no available surplus. Agamemnon says, in effect, that he is willing to do what is best for all, but only if compensated now. Achilles replies that the available booty has already been allocated and that future compensation is the only feasible offer.

Hevroni interpreted Agamemnon’s move through hierarchy. The Iliad’s society is not a writing society, he said. Status must be visible. To explain this to modern readers, he used an office analogy: in a high-tech company, one can tell who leads by where the best parking spot is, which office is closest to the elevator, and who has the newest car. If the company head’s office has a leaking roof, he will not sit in the kitchen; he will displace the next person in line and take the best available office.

That does not make Agamemnon admirable, but it makes his action intelligible. He has lost his visible sign of honor. If he remains empty-handed, his rank is publicly diminished. So he raises the value of what he is giving up and presents his claim as justified. Achilles, however, experiences the act as betrayal. The commander has broken the rules by which Achilles has understood his life.

That mistake is “small” only in the sense that Briseis is one prize among many. In the moral economy of the camp, it is enormous. Achilles withdraws from battle and asks his mother Thetis to ask Zeus to help the Trojans, not because he wants Troy to win in some final sense, but so the Greeks will suffer enough to come begging for his return.

By the time Agamemnon tries to repair the breach, the Greeks are in serious danger. Hector and the Trojans have reversed the military balance. For the first time in nine years, Ido Hevroni noted, the Achaeans are sleeping behind a wall near their ships, while the Trojans camp outside. Agamemnon has promised victory, kept the army away from home for years, driven Achilles from the fighting, and now presides over a near-disaster.

His offer to Achilles is immense. Russ Roberts read the speech in which Agamemnon admits he was “mad” and “blind,” concedes Achilles is worth an army, and offers a “priceless ransom paid for friendship”: tripods, gold, cauldrons, stallions, seven women from Lesbos, Briseis returned with an oath that he has not slept with her, and more beyond that — land, sheep, cattle, even future rule and honor “like a god.” The offer seems designed to be impossible to refuse.

Achilles refuses it.

Roberts initially read this refusal as ego and pride, perhaps pettiness. Hevroni argued it is more. Achilles had wanted the Greeks to come to him in need, and that has happened. But by the time they come, he has changed. He has stepped outside the system that formed him.

Hevroni described Achilles as a person trained for one purpose: to be the best warrior and win the highest honor. That system depends on trust. A soldier must believe the structure: the cause, the chain of command, the rules of recognition, the leader who sends him into danger and brings him out. Agamemnon has broken that trust. Politics has overridden martial excellence, and Achilles is not a politician. He thought being the best warrior would be enough.

Once Achilles withdraws, he is able to look at the basic values of his society from the outside. He sees that there may be alternatives. Instead of killing and being killed for honor, one might live obscurely and peacefully. Hevroni sometimes tells students one could go to Australia, live in a caravan, have no honor and no great property, but live in peace. That thought is shocking inside a world fully invested in war.

Roberts connected this to testimony from students returning from Gaza. One student described coming out of combat, walking into Tel Aviv, and seeing people sitting with coffee and wine. The scene felt alien: “What the hell are they doing?” Eventually he processed it as the very reason he was fighting — so people could sit, drink coffee, talk, and connect. But the gap between the warrior’s life and the home front is almost unbearable to think about. When it is thought about, the soldier may ask: What am I doing? Why am I seeing and doing these things?

Hevroni said he hears similar dynamics from soldiers. In combat, they may endure weeks together without breaking. But once they leave for a weekend or vacation, some cannot return. While inside the war, the system holds. Outside, the question “for what?” becomes possible.

That, for Hevroni, makes Achilles understandable without making him admirable. Before the recent war, he said, many students hated Achilles more than any other character in the poem. Since the war began, they read him differently: as a soldier betrayed by his commander. Achilles’ trust in the whole structure collapses because Agamemnon’s ego violates the rules Achilles lived by.

Hevroni drew on Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam, written by a psychiatrist who worked with Vietnam veterans, as a model for reading the Iliad through the soldier’s experience. That approach treats Homeric figures not as remote classical types but as human beings in recognizable situations. Achilles is young, exceptional, and betrayed. He loses faith in the cause, and when soldiers lose trust in leadership — as Hevroni said happened in Vietnam among both soldiers and the American public — morale collapses.

The Iliad does not require readers to approve Achilles. Hevroni emphasized that great art is not judgmental. It gives material for readers to judge. That is part of its moral training. Homer’s world is not split into light and darkness. The Greeks are not all good; the Trojans are not all bad. Achilles can be both wounded and destructive, understandable and morally troubling.

If Achilles is the figure of broken trust, Hector is the figure of loyalty. Ido Hevroni called him “probably the most tragic and beloved character of the book.” Homer, though on the side of the Greeks in Hevroni’s description, can still depict a magnificent character on the other side. Hector is not reduced to darkness.

Hector’s strength comes from loyalty: to the city, to his father Priam, to the laws and expectations of Troy. He does not believe in the cause of the war. He would return Helen. He thinks Paris has done wrong. Russ Roberts described Hector’s contempt for Paris: he blames him for causing the war, criticizes his courage and honor, and often treats him with disdain. Paris often accepts the criticism.

Yet Hector continues to fight. His father Priam, whom Hevroni described as old and weak, follows Paris. Hevroni compared the dynamic loosely to Jacob and Joseph: a beautiful younger son drawing the father’s allegiance and distorting his judgment. Paris is following something other than reason; Hevroni declined to name it directly, but the implication is Aphrodite’s domain rather than Athena’s. Hector sees the failure and remains bound to duty.

The scene with Andromache and their infant son Astyanax concentrates this tragedy. Hector has returned briefly from battle. Andromache urges him not to go back. She predicts he will be killed, and she is right. She also offers strategic counsel about where he might stand to protect himself better and command without exposing himself as much. Hevroni noted the striking fact that Hector does not dismiss her advice. Though such military counsel would not conventionally be “for a woman to say,” Hector accepts her intelligence. He begins by saying he identifies with her and understands her.

But he cannot stay. His reason is not simply the familiar language of comrades in arms. Roberts heard something more specific: Hector could not respect himself if he walked through Troy and met the eyes of the wives of men he had sent to their deaths while he took the easy way out. Hevroni agreed. Hector says he could not look into the eyes of the other women whose husbands, sons, and fathers he has sent to war. He was raised for this position. He is the commander in chief. His duty is to the city’s law, even if fulfilling that duty costs him his wife, his child, and his life.

The continuation of the scene reveals that Hector is not merely a public role. He is fully armored when he speaks with Andromache, especially wearing the helmet that covers part of his face. Then he turns to say goodbye to his son, and the child recoils in fear. Hevroni said students have described analogous moments returning from war: young nieces or nephews frightened by a relative who looks like a stranger after weeks away, changed by the face of war and the battle dress.

Hector removes the helmet. He smiles at the baby, and the baby smiles back. His speech changes; he becomes more hopeful. Homer, Hevroni said, captures a man torn from within. Hector knows what he must do, but he is not a robot and not a blind follower of law. He chooses duty because he believes it is right. He is a father, a husband, a lover of civilian life. He would not choose soldiering for itself. He was raised to protect the city, and when duty calls, he goes, knowing the price.

That is why Hector can be loved by readers even as his cause is compromised. He is loyal to a city whose leadership is weak, to a war he would not have started, and to obligations that will destroy him.

The Iliad’s difficulty is not only its age, names, violence, or gods. A first-time reader must learn that Greeks may be called Achaeans, Argives, or Danaans; that characters are often identified by fathers, as Achilles is the son of Peleus and Agamemnon and Menelaus are Atrides, sons of Atreus; and that the poem contains more than a thousand private names, though most do not need to be mastered. Russ Roberts’s practical advice was to keep reading. The confusion begins to resolve.

The deeper difficulty is moral. Ido Hevroni described great art as nonjudgmental in the sense that it gives readers the material for judgment rather than doing the judging for them. Agamemnon is grasping and politically rational. Achilles is betrayed and destructive. Hector is noble and bound to a bad cause. The gods are powerful and often petty, but not moral exemplars. Women are central and powerful in some respects, while also being treated in ways modern readers find abhorrent. War is both horrifying and revealing. Myth is neither literal reportage nor disposable fantasy, but a way of saying what ordinary realism may not reach.

For Roberts, the poem became unexpectedly relevant not because ancient warfare maps neatly onto modern life, but because Homer understands ego, pride, negotiation, rage, duty, fear, and the fragility of social trust. For Hevroni, teaching the poem to students returning from war deepened that relevance without exhausting it. War is the laboratory, but the experiment is human life.