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authority, and honor. By taking back a prize of war, he has broken the rules that, had he been wise enough to perceive them, both afforded him his status and were all that kept Achilles’ terrible strength in check. “ ‘Zeus, exalted and mightiest, sky-dwelling in the dark mist,’ ” Agamemnon prays at the conclusion of his disastrous trial, offering accompanying sacrifice:
    â€œlet not the sun go down and disappear into darkness
until I have hurled headlong the castle of Priam
blazing, and lit the castle gates with the flames’ destruction; . . .”
He spoke, but none of this would the son of Kronos accomplish,
who accepted the victims, but piled up the unwished-for hardship.
    The king cannot know how wholly he is outranked, that it is Achilles’ prayers, not his, that are heard in heaven. The honor Achilles seeks now will be absolute, such as is demanded by the gods. “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles” are the words of the proem. Achilles will bring his king and the mortal comrades who did not follow him to their knees.
    To the epic’s deliberate, painstaking portrayal of Agamemnon’s ineptness are juxtaposed Achilles’ most pointedly damaging words:
    â€œI for my part did not come here for the sake of the Trojan
spearmen to fight against them, since to me they have done nothing.
. . . but for your sake,
o great shamelessness, we followed, to do you favour,
you with the dog’s eyes, to win your honour and Menelaos’
from the Trojans.”
    As any audience familiar with the story of the Trojan War would have known, this charge—that Achilles and the Achaeans are at Troy solely on behalf of Agamemnon and his brother—is wholly true. Thus, from the Iliad ’s first scenes, Homer has unambiguously established that the demoralized Achaean army fights under failed leadership for a questionable cause and wants to go home. It is, to say the least, a remarkable way to introduce a great war epic.

Terms of Engagement

    When Agamemnon has finished his sacrifice and prayers to Zeus, Nestor reminds him of his duty, urging him to muster the Achaeans for battle. As the heralds are duly summoned and the men marshaled with their proclamations and cries, Athene, the warrior goddess, sweeps through the great throng, holding her aegis, “ageless, immortal,” and urges them on:
    She kindled the strength in each man’s
heart to take the battle without respite and keep on fighting.
And now battle became sweeter to them than to go back
in their hollow ships to the beloved land of their fathers.
As obliterating fire lights up a vast forest
along the crests of a mountain, and the flare shows far off,
so as they marched, from the magnificent bronze the gleam went
dazzling all about through the upper air to the heaven.
These, as the multitudinous nations of birds winged,
of geese, and of cranes, and of swans long-throated
in the Asian meadow beside the Kaÿstrian waters
this way and that way make their flights in the pride of their
wings, then
settle in clashing swarms and the whole meadow echoes with them,
so of these the multitudinous tribes from the ships and
shelters poured to the plain of Skamandros, and the earth beneath
their
feet and under the feet of their horses thundered horribly.
They took position in the blossoming meadow of Skamandros,
thousands of them, as leaves and flowers appear in their season. 1
    The same great host which, provoked by Agamemnon’s trial, had risen as a man to flee to the ships intent on home is now intent on action. The change of heart was brought about in part by the rallying words of Odysseus and Nestor, but mostly by the sinister shadow of Athene’s great aegis. Like the goddess herself, the aegis is invisible to the men, its terror-inducing powers being transmitted to them in some mystical way. In statues and painted art, the aegis is depicted as a short mantle of goat-skin ( aígeios ) worn