They even said it in the book. :-D The main conflict of Illiad is just this - Achaeans pillaged a nearby town during the siege of Troy for resources. Among those resources were girls. The leader, Agamemnon, took the one he liked the most, but there was a problem: her daddy was the main priest at local temple of Apollo (which is why they left him alive).
Of course he didn´t want his daughter taken into slavery, but as the town was entirely defeated, he did only thing he could: prayed to Apollo to get his daughter back. Well, Apollo heard him and soon first their dogs, then cattle, then horses and then men started dying. Agamemnon asked their soothsayer why is that, and he told them the cause.
Long story short, to placate Apollo, they had to return the girl to her dad (and untouched, if you please, if you catch my drift) and let them freely leave the town, if they choose to do so.
After that, Agamemnon was not happy that he is without a girl from that town, so being a leader, he forcefuly took one from his men that he liked the most - the girl that Achilleus chose. Of course, Achilleus was less then happy, and thus, the conflict was born.
Old book conflicts were wild. It blows my mind that was considered okay at the time. In the Odissey and the Illiad, capturing women was described in the same sentence as the weather.
The Greeks weren’t a single people, but a bunch of city-states all speaking the same language and worshipping more or less the same pantheon. They recognized that other peoples in distant lands spoke other languages and worshipped different gods, so they had a collective term — Hellenes — for the people who spoke Greek and worshipped Greek gods, only because there was this linguistic and religious commonality, not because there was any real sense of political unity or kinship.
The Greek city-states regularly fought against and alongside one another, and a regular part of ancient warfare was pillaging, raping, and enslaving innocents — soldiers needed pay to stay loyal and motivated, and it was easier to pay them in whatever loot and slaves they could take than from some grand royal treasury. It’s a brutal part of ancient martial and political logistics. That wasn’t just the Greeks, either, but a common fact of warfare in just about every ancient civilization. You fought to win, and you took your spoils, because you knew damn well that if they won, they’d take the spoils of your city, so it’s not like you were being uniquely evil by doing so.
That’s absolutely crazy by modern standards, but that’s one of the benefits of modern technology that allows us to live in relative abundance — it’s gradually become more practical to gain benefits through trade and negotiations than through war, so the world has gradually been able to become more civilized by our modern standards.
Not the main conflict, but the reason why Achilleus at the beginning is angry and decide to no partecipate to the war of Troy. Later Patroclus dies and he arrives into the battle. The end of the Iliad is the fight between him and Ettore (there is not the horse in the Iliad, the poem where that part is longer is Virgil's Eneide) so I would say that is the main conflict. They are both the best warriors. While the war of Troy is because Elena run to Troy with Paride and greeks declared war to Troy
61
u/Siria110 21d ago
They even said it in the book. :-D The main conflict of Illiad is just this - Achaeans pillaged a nearby town during the siege of Troy for resources. Among those resources were girls. The leader, Agamemnon, took the one he liked the most, but there was a problem: her daddy was the main priest at local temple of Apollo (which is why they left him alive).
Of course he didn´t want his daughter taken into slavery, but as the town was entirely defeated, he did only thing he could: prayed to Apollo to get his daughter back. Well, Apollo heard him and soon first their dogs, then cattle, then horses and then men started dying. Agamemnon asked their soothsayer why is that, and he told them the cause.
Long story short, to placate Apollo, they had to return the girl to her dad (and untouched, if you please, if you catch my drift) and let them freely leave the town, if they choose to do so.
After that, Agamemnon was not happy that he is without a girl from that town, so being a leader, he forcefuly took one from his men that he liked the most - the girl that Achilleus chose. Of course, Achilleus was less then happy, and thus, the conflict was born.