Literary Works That Shape Our World: A Critical Analysis - Sykalo Evgen 2023

Analysis of “The Iliad” by Homer

War, Gods, and Man Flu: Reading The Iliad in the Age of Oversharing

There’s a moment in The Iliad—somewhere between Achilles sulking in his tent and Hector getting very publicly dragged around the walls of Troy like someone’s broken IKEA dresser—when you start to wonder: why is everyone so dramatic?

Not dramatic in a contemporary, Tumblr-core, crying-in-a-bathroom way, but dramatic in the way only men who believe they’re part-divine and doomed can be. Like, yes, your honor was insulted. Yes, someone took your war prize. Yes, you have to burn the city to the ground now. We get it.

But that’s the thing: The Iliad isn’t just about war. It’s about the unbearable heaviness of being insulted.

And if that sounds flippant—good. Because Homer isn’t trying to be morally consistent. He’s not preaching. He’s chronicling a collapse. And it’s messy. Petty. Gorgeous. Sometimes unbearably slow. But somehow still more psychologically acute than half the memoirs clogging up the “grief & resilience” section at your local bookstore.

Let’s Talk: Why Did This War Even Start?

Okay, so, technically, The Iliad doesn’t show the beginning of the Trojan War. No golden apple. No beauty contest. No Helen standing on a balcony in Sparta like an ancient Greek Meghan Markle. Instead, we’re dropped into year ten, where everyone’s already crusty, sunburnt, and traumatized.

But the backstory is essential—and the ancient Greeks, bless them, were not minimalists.

Short version: Eris (goddess of discord, basically the original Twitter algorithm) throws a golden apple into a divine wedding because she wasn’t invited. Paris, a Trojan prince, is made to choose the hottest goddess. He picks Aphrodite, who bribes him with the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen. Problem: Helen is married. Bigger problem: her husband is a Greek king. Absolute, civilization-shattering problem: all the other Greek kings had previously sworn to defend Helen’s marriage, because men and their vows.

Boom: war.

Is that really why tens of thousands of people had to die? Over some divine pageant prize? Kind of. But also—because war is never just one thing. It’s lust and ego and the gods’ boredom and a broken masculinity nobody knows how to fix. Which brings us back to The Iliad.

Achilles: Human Red Flag

You know that guy who ghosts you for three months, then texts, “I was just really overwhelmed, sorry for disappearing”? That’s Achilles. But instead of ghosting, he rage-quits an entire war and lets people die out of spite.

Achilles is the first “main character energy” in Western literature. He’s also, arguably, the first emotionally unavailable man canonized as a hero. His whole arc hinges on a tantrum: Agamemnon, another Greek leader with the emotional range of a garden tool, takes Achilles’ concubine Briseis. Achilles, scandalized, withdraws from battle. Then his bestie/possible lover Patroclus dies. Then Achilles loses it, comes back, slaughters Hector, and refuses to return the body until he’s shamed into something resembling empathy by Hector’s grieving father.

Which is to say: growth? Maybe. But it's deeply reluctant. Achilles is all hot edges and cold interiority. He’s a man obsessed with legacy, honor, wrath—whatever it takes to avoid actually feeling grief until it physically tears him apart.

The ancient Greeks didn't invent toxic masculinity, but The Iliad might be its original user manual.

Gods, They’re Just Like Us (Petty, Insecure, Absurd)

If The Iliad were a group chat, the gods would be the chaos agents sending memes mid-argument. They’re divine, sure, but also easily offended, vengeful, and hilariously biased.

Hera roots for the Greeks. Aphrodite backs the Trojans. Zeus mostly just sighs, flips a coin, and lets fate do its thing. The gods don’t represent ideals; they are walking, leering contradictions. They interfere constantly—like bad parents at a middle school soccer game—but they’re also distant when it matters most. Death, grief, injustice? That’s mortal business. The gods meddle until it’s inconvenient, then retreat.

And isn’t that painfully modern? The institutions we think should intervene—governments, platforms, corporations, maybe even gods—often show up loud and early and then vanish the second things get serious.

Homer got it. Deities are attention-seekers.

Themes? Sure, But Let’s Not Pretend This Is a TED Talk

The themes of The Iliad have been analyzed to death: wrath, fate, mortality, glory, grief. But to read Homer like he’s giving a philosophical TED Talk is to miss the dirt and blood of it.

Glory in The Iliad isn’t abstract. It’s viscera. It’s the sparkle of sunlight on bronze armor right before someone’s throat is slit. It’s Achilles wailing over Patroclus’ corpse. It’s Hector kissing his son goodbye, knowing he won’t see him grow up. It's so much crying. Masculinity in Homeric epic is basically: fight, weep, die. Repeat.

And yet—somehow—it’s beautiful.

There's this gritty honesty to the way Homer stages grief. The wailing isn’t sanitized. The deaths aren’t noble. There’s no triumph, only cost. And that’s why the final image of the poem—Priam, the enemy king, begging Achilles for his son’s body—is more devastating than any battlefield victory. It’s the closest Homer gets to hope: a shared moment of human sorrow amid all the divine farce and muscular chaos.

Everyone’s a Critic, Even for a 3000-Year-Old Text

You’d think we’d be tired of The Iliad by now. But no. Everyone’s still writing about it, translating it, arguing over whether it’s too pro-war or too anti-war or too cis-het-male or actually a queer elegy or maybe secretly feminist? (Emily Wilson enters the chat.)

Interpretations shift with the culture. In the Victorian era, Achilles was noble and misunderstood. In the post-war 20th century, he was a proto-existentialist antihero. In 2025, he’s just another man refusing to go to therapy. We keep rereading The Iliad not because it changes—but because we do. And each time, the poem reflects that back at us. Like a polished shield. Or a really well-crafted subtweet.

So, What’s the Point?

Honestly? There isn’t one. Or, there are too many.

The Iliad is a paradox. It’s about the rage that drives us to kill and the grief that makes us human. It’s about gods who don't care and men who care too much. It’s a song of war that sometimes feels like a love poem. It’s brutal. Tedious in places. Weirdly funny. Horrifying. And it ends—not with triumph—but with quiet.

There’s no final lesson, no moral takeaway. Just the sense that all of this—wrath, war, love, loss—will happen again. Because it always does. Because we’re still the same species that invented a decade-long war over a woman and then sang about it for millennia.

I mean, who even talks like that anymore?

Homer does. Still. Somehow.