A Preamble of Sorts

I will not advocate for a political side in this matter, or in any other. The divisiveness within the United States represents a grave crisis that threatens to darken the great light of American liberty, which despite her imperfections, ushered in an unprecedented era of self-governance and natural rights for the betterment of mankind. That light has not yet gone out. But the persistent infighting between her people threatens a future in which the whole of humanity returns to the darkness of despotism; a future in which people willingly surrender the right to self-rule in exchange for the power to impose their preferred order through the language of violence. Some may argue that such a time has already come to pass, and in the hearts of many this may be true. Yet at present, our institutions still function, and our people remain free. This is not to say that I view the actions of ICE in Minnesota or the violent protests there as morally neutral, but rather to acknowledge that these events indicate that we lack a shared moral framework in the US that would allow for fruitful discourse in this regard.

As such, let us momentarily suspend our desire to see ourselves and our political affiliation as being legally or morally authoritative on this particular issue. Not because it is irrelevant, but because we cannot presently agree on what would constitute justice or legitimate governance on this matter. From this vantage point, we can employ the lessons of the Iliad to offer a substantive diagnosis of the situation in Minnesota, so that we can move towards a productive discussion of solutions that don’t revolve around the elimination of our political opponents. If you’re unfamiliar with the Iliad you can find some background information and a synopsis of the poem here.

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Power and Legitimacy in the Iliad and the United States

A prescient insight the Iliad provides us with respect to the situation in Minnesota revolves around how restraint should influence both the use of power, and the response to perceived injustice. The Greek forces in the Iliad are a confederation of Greek kingdoms who are honor bound to an oath to seek the return of Helen of Troy. As such, their strength comes from their unity, which is immediately fractured when Agamemnon dishonors Achilles (one of the other Greek kings) by forcing him to relinquish a woman who was given to him as a war prize. Agamemnon does this to compensate himself for the loss of his own war prize, a woman named Chryseis, to appease the god Apollo in the hopes of abating a plague.

Today we rightly find it morally reprehensible to treat humans as objects to be won, but in the Bronze Age this practice was embedded within the Greeks’ honor-based social economy. The awarding of prizes, human or otherwise, functioned as a system of incentives that sustained loyalty, duty, and cohesion within the alliance. Agamemnon stands foremost among the Greek kings because he commands the largest army, and within this cultural context, power often served as sufficient justification for action. Yet by seizing Achilles’ prize without restraint, Agamemnon undermines the very honor system that legitimizes his authority, collapsing the moral foundation of his leadership.

A similar dynamic can be observed in the controversy surrounding ICE’s activities in Minnesota and the violent protests that followed. Regardless of who is legally or morally correct, it is clear that many protesters, and likely a broader portion of the public, perceive these actions as illegitimate expressions of unrestrained power. The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have only intensified this perception. The widespread unwillingness to suspend judgment pending a full investigation only serves to compound the issue, further eroding confidence in our institutions and criminal justice process.

Anger Cannot Resolve Disorder

In a prior post, I discussed how Achilles’ anger signals that something has gone wrong. It is a response to Agamemnon’s actions and his growing perception of disorder in Agamemnon’s leadership of the Greeks. However, by withdrawing his forces from the war and praying to the gods to favor the Trojans, his unrestrained anger transforms a broken situation into a tragedy. In effect, he dooms many of his friends and compatriots to death, including his best friend Patroclus.

Similarly, anger over the perceived injustice of ICE activities in Minnesota has manifested in protests that have sometimes turned violent. As such, this anger has escalated a broken situation into a tragedy with the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents during these confrontations. This is not intended to justify their deaths, nor to assign sole blame to any one side, but rather to point out that anger, which has consumed much of the political discourse in the US for both sides on this issue (and many others), has no ability to resolve the underlying disorder it is responding to. Whether that disorder is a historical lack of enforcement of immigration law, or the perceived inhumane treatment of people residing in the US illegally, the larger problem is the perceived loss of legitimacy. The virtue of restraint (or temperance) is as important in how we respond to perceived disorder as it is in the exercise of power.

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The Conditions for Resolution

So what, if anything, can we do with this? I’m not suggesting that the discourse over the enforcement of immigration law is irrelevant. However, in a world where we cannot fundamentally agree on its application, the debate is largely moot. Productive discourse, then, must focus on the deeper problem underlying this story: the shared perception across political lines that our laws and the institutions enforcing them are illegitimate or insufficient, compounded by our growing inability to exercise restraint—whether in the use of power or in response to perceived injustice. Like the Greeks, unity is our primary strength as a democracy, and the Iliad shows us, with sobering clarity, the price of losing it. So how do we restore the perception of legitimacy for our laws and institutions for both sides? And how do we cultivate the virtue of temperance broadly as a people?

Agamemnon’s primary mistake is that he uses power without restraint, which destroys the perception that his rule is legitimate. Achilles, similarly, does not exercise restraint in his response allowing his anger to create tragedy for himself and the entire Greek alliance. However, the perception of legitimacy isn’t exclusively about the use of power, especially in a democracy, but also about belief. Both the Greeks and the Trojans have a shared moral framework, which is why when Achilles rationalizes his withdrawal from the fighting in book 9, critiquing the entire honor-prize system itself, he becomes alien to his compatriots and cannot be reconciled to them. We have tragically lost a common moral framework in the West. A society that cannot agree on what justice looks like will never be able to agree on what authority is legitimate. Any way back to a semblance of political cohesion will require temperance and a recovery of shared values.

The only time order is restored in the Iliad is in the shared recognition of humanity, such as when the Trojans and Greeks agree to cease fighting to bury their dead, or when Achilles agrees to return the body of the Trojan king Priam’s son Hector, so he can be given a proper funeral. Unfortunately, these moments occur only after a profound amount of suffering. Maybe the real question is: what would enable us to acknowledge our shared humanity before our story becomes another tragedy?

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Towards Reconciliation

Perhaps a starting point lies in how we construct our narratives about political opponents. In the Iliad, Priam’s journey to Achilles succeeds because he does not arrive demanding Hector’s body as a matter of right, nor does he condemn Achilles for killing his son, though he would be justified in doing so. Instead, he appeals to Achilles’ memory of his own father, creating a moment wherein he recognizes their shared humanity, which transcends their enmity.

In our context, this might mean: Can those who support ICE enforcement genuinely engage with the fear experienced by immigrant communities facing separation from their families and the networks of care that have formed around them? Can those who oppose these enforcement actions acknowledge that many ICE agents see themselves as serving their country by upholding democratically enacted laws, and that many Americans feel that their longstanding concerns about border security have been ignored? This isn’t to proclaim that both sides are equally right, but rather recognizing that people on both sides are responding to real human concerns, and not simply acting from malice or stupidity.

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

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Synopsis of Books 6-9

In Books 6–9, the war presses forward under a faltering Greek alliance overshadowed by Achilles’ absence from the battlefield. Hector returns to Troy in Book 6, where his encounters with his mother Hecuba, his brother Paris, his wife Andromache, and his infant son reveal a city still ordered by family, duty, and reverence for the gods, even as Hector seems to acknowledge its imminent demise. Unlike Achilles, Hector chooses to fight on for the sake of what honor demands, even though he knows in his heart it will be to no effect.

The war briefly pauses in Book 7 with a duel between Hector and Ajax and a temporary truce between the Greeks and the Trojans to bury their dead, offering a fragile glimpse of the two sides recognizing their shared humanity before violence resumes. In Book 8, Zeus forbids the gods from interfering, tipping the balance decisively in Troy’s favor and driving the Greeks toward despair as they are pushed all the way back to their ships. By Book 9, Agamemnon attempts to mend the rupture by sending an embassy to offer Achilles an immense amount of wealth to restore him to the fight. However, Achilles rejects compensation, articulating a profound refusal of a system that has stripped honor of meaning and life of measure.

The Tragedy of Troy

The middle books of the Iliad sharply contrast the Greeks and the Trojans, as well as the heroes who represent them. While the Greek alliance has fractured under a loss of legitimacy within its leadership, Troy finds itself in a fundamentally different and more complicated position. The war is the direct result of Paris’s violation of the law of hospitality (Xenia - ξενία) when he carried off Helen along with wealth from Menelaus’s household during his host’s absence. Xenia is not simply a form of good manners, but rather a sacred obligation overseen by Zeus. For this reason, the Trojans recognize Paris’s wrongdoing, and the elder Antenor urges Helen be returned to the Greeks in book 7. Even the messenger sent to the Greeks admits that the Trojan people wish Paris would give her back.

“Son of Atreus, and you other great men of all the Achaeans, Priam and the rest of the haughty Trojans have bidden me give you, if this message be found to your pleasure and liking, the word of Paris, for whose sake this strife has arisen. All those possessions that Paris carried in his hollow ships to Troy, and I wish that he had perished before then, he is willing to give all back, and to add to these from his own goods. But the very wedded wife of glorious Menelaus he says that he will not give, though the Trojans would have him do it.” 1

Paris, however, is not the king of Troy; his father Priam holds that authority. Nor is Paris the heir to the throne; Hector is the heir apparent. Yet Priam never compels Paris to return Helen, and the Trojans do not question his leadership in this matter. Unlike the Greek situation at this stage of the war, Troy faces no crisis of political legitimacy.

What confronts us instead is a moral catastrophe that appears to be undoing an entire kingdom, though even this judgment is complicated. Aphrodite, a goddess, has given Helen to Paris as a reward for choosing her as the most beautiful among Hera and Athena. While this episode is not explicitly narrated in the Iliad, it was well known by the time the poem took shape. It helps explain the open hostility of Athena and Hera toward Troy, Helen’s pervasive self-loathing and diminished sense of agency, and Priam’s insistence in Book 3 that the gods themselves bear responsibility for the war. Troy’s tragedy, then, is not one of fractured authority, but of collective submission to an inherited moral catastrophe—a posture that stands in stark contrast to the unraveling ethos of the Greeks themselves.

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The Declining Greek Ethos

The Greeks, by contrast, who began the war with clear moral justification rooted in the violated honor of Menelaus, are increasingly behaving in ways that strain the limits of a shame-honor culture. While such conduct might be attributed to the corrosive effects of a ten-year war eroding the formality of honor, this explanation falters when set alongside the poem’s formal duels, wherein Greek and Trojan champions alike observe the rituals of honor and part on respectful terms.

The erosion of Greek moral coherence becomes unmistakable in Book 6, when a Trojan is thrown from his chariot and begs Menelaus for mercy, offering ransom from his family in exchange for his life. Menelaus is prepared to honor the request until Agamemnon intervenes, urging him to kill the man and spare no one, not even the pregnant women of Troy. Nestor, in turn, reinforces this posture by instructing the Greek forces to take no prisoners.

By the end of Book 7, this erosion extends beyond the battlefield. The Greeks burn their dead on a funeral pyre, then heap a burial mound over them and use it as the foundation for a defensive wall against the Trojans. The wall is not even dedicated to Poseidon, provoking his anger. In building their fortifications directly atop the remains of their fallen, the Greeks blur the boundary between what is owed to the dead and what is expedient for the living, subordinating remembrance and honor to military necessity in a way that is, at best, morally problematic.

Hector and Achilles

The contrast between Hector and Achilles forms a less obvious but revealing lens through which Homer interrogates the moral economy of a shame-honor culture. Hector is, for the most part, a static character who consistently does what honor demands. He is the quintessential hero of this culture. In Book 6, his wife Andromache meets him as he prepares to leave the city and return to the battlefield. She is distraught, knowing that Hector cannot defeat Achilles, who had earlier killed her father and seven brothers during the sack of Cilicia. Hector’s response reveals precisely how a hero in this culture is expected to think and act:

“All these things are in my mind also, lady; yet I would feel deep shame before the Trojans, and the Trojan women with trailing garments, if like a coward I were to shrink aside from the fighting; and the spirit will not let me, since I have learned to be valiant and to fight always among the foremost ranks of the Trojans, winning for my own self great glory, and for my father.” 2

In Book 9, Achilles’ refusal of Agamemnon’s embassy and offer of immense wealth if he returns to the battlefield confronts the audience with the inverse of Hector’s position, rendering him almost alien within a shame-honor culture. Achilles initially withdraws from the war in anger, wishing destruction upon the Greeks. Yet having sat with that anger, he has now rationalized his position with an unsettling critique of the entire honor-prize system itself. Agamemnon’s actions, he argues, have rendered the system incoherent: no gift can be trusted if it can simply be taken away again at Agamemnon’s convenience. Achilles then presses the logic further, closing with the dilemma revealed to him by his divine mother, Thetis—that if he remains at Troy, he will die young with everlasting glory, but if he returns home, he will live a long life having lost that glory.

“For not worth the value of my life are all the possessions they fable were won for Ilion, that strong–founded citadel, in the old days when there was peace, before the coming of the sons of the Achaians… but a man's life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth’s barrier.” 3

With this, he informs Odysseus and the rest of Agamemnon’s embassy that he intends to set sail at dawn the following morning, and that they should advise the rest of the Greeks to do the same. This renders the embassy speechless and brings his friend and surrogate father, Phoenix, to tears as he pleads with Achilles to reconsider. Yet Achilles remains unmoved. The true force of his refusal lies in the question it leaves hanging before all who hear it—what good are prizes and honor if they cannot be enjoyed or accompany a hero beyond the threshold of death, especially when that is the price so many heroes will pay in this war?

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Logs for the Fire

Hector and Achilles stand in fundamentally different circumstances, just as the Trojans and Greeks occupy fundamentally different positions within the war. Hector fights to defend his home with a powerful enemy at the gates, bound by his duty to city and family. Achilles, by contrast, fights under the obligations imposed by the oath sworn by Helen’s suitors, an inherited and personally binding commitment that draws him into a war not of his own making. The Greeks thus possess a clear moral justification for the conflict, yet their conduct grows increasingly morally incoherent as the war drags on. The Trojans, by contrast, are ensnared in a morally compromised situation made more inescapable by divine intervention, yet continue forward under an authority they do not contest.

What unites Hector and Achilles is that both are honor-bound in circumstances that will ultimately lead to their demise. Their distinct responses to that fate reveal something essential about duty and honor, not merely as personal virtues, but as forces that shape—and sometimes consume—the civilizations they serve. This tension remains legible in the modern world, where men and women are still asked to risk their lives for ideals inherited from institutions whose legitimacy may no longer be secure, or whose moral ethos may be questionable. When that legitimacy or moral ethos erodes, what sustains the willingness to fight for goods like freedom, rather than retreat into the private enjoyment of whatever time remains? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

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A Short Synopsis of Books I and II

The poem begins in the tenth year of the Trojan war, at which point the Greeks are tired and battle weary, having reached a brutal stalemate with Troy. Agamemnon publicly refuses a ransom from a priest of Apollo for the return of his daughter, which he has taken as a war prize. Apollo afflicts the Greeks with a plague as retribution, and Achilles calls an assembly of the Greek kings to ascertain the cause of Apollo’s anger with them. When it is revealed that the cause is Agamemnon’s refusal to return the priest’s daughter, Agamemnon is willing to return her, but not without taking away the war prize of another Greek king to compensate him for the loss. Achilles is angered by this, and the two have a falling out that results in Agamemnon taking from Achilles the woman who had been awarded to him as a war prize. Achilles responds by publicly refusing to acknowledge Agamemnon’s authority as legitimate, withdrawing himself and his forces from the war, and entreating the gods to favor the Trojans instead.

Book two exposes what happens when the Greek unity is fractured, while the gods further exacerbate a deteriorating situation. Zeus seeks to deceive Agamemnon by sending a dream in which he tells him that his victory over Troy is imminent. Agamemnon then decides to test the resolve of the remaining Greek forces by suggesting that he has given up on the conflict and that they should return home. The men are eager to leave, and begin immediately returning to their ships. However, their leaders are ultimately able to marshal them for combat again, and they make sacrifices to the gods in preparation for battle.

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Power, Honor, and Anger in Context

What unfolds in book I of The Iliad is a tightly linked chain of events that cause anger in Apollo, Agamemnon, and Achilles setting the tragedy in motion. This is probably the primary point of confusion for a modern reader, including myself when I had first read this in high school. Having grown up in a Western culture that still retained the vestiges of a guilt culture’s moral framework, it’s hard not to see these characters as morally ambiguous at best, or morally bad at worst. They don’t fit neatly into the dichotomous moral economy of good and evil we use to portray modern fictional characters. However, all of these characters are morally coherent in their own time and framework.

The difference between a shame–honor culture and a guilt culture is complex and much debated, and I will address it more fully in a separate post. For our purposes here, however, I’ll offer a simple working distinction. In a shame–honor culture, moral judgment is primarily external. A person’s standing is determined by how they are publicly perceived, recognized, or exposed. To be revealed as weak, dishonorable, or contemptible before others is itself a moral failure. By contrast, a guilt culture locates moral judgment internally. What matters most is not how one appears, but whether one has done what is right or wrong, even if no one else knows. In such a framework, a person may retain public respect while still bearing moral guilt, whereas in a shame–honor culture, public exposure is often the decisive moral verdict. At the time of Homer, Greece was more or less a shame-honor culture.

With this framework we can see that Agamemnon’s mistake is not refusing the ransom or declining to return Chryses’ daughter, but publicly dishonoring Apollo’s priest. He treats Chryses as a lesser man whose appeal can be dismissed because he lacks power, failing to recognize that Chryses speaks as an emissary of divine authority. Apollo, who is more powerful than Agamemnon, responds to this violation by afflicting the Greeks with a plague, restoring right order through a demonstration of that power. The irony is that this response compels Achilles—a lesser king than Agamemnon—to call an assembly that exposes Agamemnon’s failure, forcing Agamemnon to confront a mirror image of his own offense wherein his authority is publicly challenged by those beneath him.

Achilles’ actions are morally intelligible within this framework because they expose a genuine failure of leadership on Agamemnon’s part, which rightly calls his legitimacy into question before the other Greek kings. Achilles’ speech suggests that this offense is not isolated, but emblematic of a broader pattern of abuse and misrule observed over the course of the war. Yet Agamemnon, unable to absorb public loss of honor, responds not by restoring legitimacy, but by asserting his power to publicly dishonor Achilles instead. In this light, Achilles’ anger is not itself the moral failure, but rather the signal of one. The failure lies in the breakdown and abuse of rightful authority that gives rise to the anger, even as that anger contributes to the larger tragedy that follows.

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Hierarchy Divorced from Legitimacy Breeds Chaos

Book II reveals what happens once hierarchy is severed from legitimacy. At the request of Achilles’ mother Thetis, Zeus sends Agamemnon a deceptive dream promising imminent victory. This act exposes a tension over divine authority among the gods, that mirrors a growing leadership crisis among the Greeks. Zeus’s decision is met with resistance from Hera, requiring further intervention from Athena to contain the fallout. Authority remains intact, but harmony does not. Order is no longer naturally present, and must be actively managed.

The same pattern is repeated among the Greeks where the actions of the gods are exacerbating this growing disorder. Aware that his leadership no longer commands genuine allegiance, Agamemnon attempts to test, and ultimately manipulate, the Greek forces through deception. The result is near collapse, as the men rush for the ships eager to abandon the war, and order is restored only through public coercion and shame when Odysseus publicly beats Thersites to silence his dissent. The Greek coalition still exists, but it no longer coheres.

*In this context, “authority” refers to power that is recognized as legitimate, while “hierarchy” refers to power enforced by rank or position, even when legitimacy is in doubt.

Logs for the Fire

What we are left with by the end of Book II of The Iliad is a frayed Greek alliance, in which order is preserved through force in the absence of legitimacy. The Greeks of Homer’s day were by no means democratic, but that does not mean they were indifferent to legitimacy within their hierarchies of authority. When legitimacy falters, power does not disappear, but its application becomes more dangerous.

As modern readers, we should ask ourselves what kind of world emerges when power becomes the primary means of sustaining the order we have come to expect. When you consider the institutions and social structures that govern your towns, cities, states, and nations, do you sense their legitimacy to be secure, or waning? And if it is waning, what are the long-term costs of maintaining order without it?

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Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey stand alongside the biblical corpus as the beginning of Western civilization’s consciousness, making them an excellent place to begin reflecting on its present condition. This is the aim of the Ark Project: to revisit the texts and ideas that formed Western civilization to spur discussion about how we could forge a better future. The Iliad became the basis for later commentaries on the dangers of unrestrained power in the works of Herodotus and Thucydides, the ethical critique of anger from the Stoics to Aquinas, and the insight that legitimate leadership requires justice, restraint, and reverence for higher order.

Contents

• What Kind of Story the Iliad Is (and Isn’t)

• The Iliad, in Brief: Honor, Wrath, and Tragedy

• A Cultural Memory of a Collapsed Civilization

• What the Iliad Reveals About the West Today

• Recommended Reading and Works Consulted

What Kind of Story the Iliad Is (and Isn’t)

The Iliad is a poem that tells the listener how the heroic age ended for the Greeks, akin to the great flood in Genesis and the antediluvian period that preceded it. Most of the major heroes are doomed and Greek listeners at the time of Homer knew it, which is part of the emotional atmosphere of the story as a tragedy. The emotional weight of the Iliad isn’t built through suspense, but the inevitability of a destiny already known to the audience. This presumption of cultural knowledge, which we now lack, is a primary reason why modern readers will struggle to understand the poem.

Equally important to understanding the Iliad is the moral landscape of Homer’s time. Though later Greeks such as Sophocles and Aeschylus would reinterpret these stories through a deeper moral lens and the still later Judeo-Christian lens would reveal how the nature of sin sealed the fate of many, the Greeks of the time did not see it this way. Their culture was not one of guilt, nor did they subscribe to a moral understanding of human behavior like their Jewish counterparts in the promised land.1 Rather, the Greeks of Homer’s time saw this story as a revelation of an awesome, but ultimately unsustainable heroic age. The Greek gods are not moral authorities, and the human characters are not moral exemplars. The story certainly reveals a moral landscape, but one that only later-developed moral frameworks could properly interpret.

Greek culture at this time was an honor culture, and the story highlights what honor demands. The gods are active in the world, and are responsible for the events that unfold, including those which the story treats as causal to the tragedy. They are just as petty as humans, with vendettas, grudges, and quarrels, which dramatically impact the lives of mere mortals who are powerless against them. In fact, the author of the story seems to externalize non-rational experience as the result of divine influence.2 In essence, the Iliad is descriptive rather than prescriptive.

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The Iliad, in Brief: Honor, Wrath, and Tragedy

The heart of this story is laid bare immediately as the opening lines take us to the tenth year of the Trojan War. The Achaeans are a confederation of kingdoms drawn into war with Troy (a city on the coast of modern day Turkey) to avenge the honor of Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, whose wife Helen was abducted (or seduced) by the disgraced Trojan prince Paris. The Greek kings had previously sworn an oath for the right to court Helen in her youth: they would defend the chosen husband, should their marriage be violated, as a means of avoiding war amongst themselves. Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus ultimately wins Helen’s hand in marriage. Thus, when Paris later carries Helen off to Troy while Menalaus is away, the conditions of the oath are triggered, and the Achaeans unite under the leadership of Agamemnon.

What ensues in book I is an incredible irony, considering the reason the Greeks are at war with the Trojans in the first place. Agamemnon has taken Chryseis, the daughter of a priest of Apollo named Chryses, as a war prize. When Chryses offers Agamemnon a rich ransom for her return, Agamemnon refuses. In response to this affront, Chryses prays to Apollo for justice. Apollo answers his prayer by causing a great plague to afflict the Greeks. As the plague threatens to turn the tide of the war, Achilles calls an assembly of the Greek kings and recommends withdrawing from the conflict if they cannot appease the gods to end the plague. When it is revealed by a seer that Agamemnon’s refusal to return Chryseis is the cause, Achilles advises returning the girl, which results in a heated dispute between the two kings wherein Achilles questions Agamemnon’s conduct and honor while openly insulting him.

The wise, and very old Greek king Nestor attempts to counsel the two against their quarrel, as it is bad for the whole of the Greek alliance, but is unsuccessful. Agamemnon, though willing to return Chryseis, will not suffer the loss of honor without stripping Achilles of his own war prize, a woman named Briseis. This deeply wounds Achilles’ pride, and drives him in anger to withdraw his men from the conflict, while entreating his divine mother Thetis to appeal to Zeus to bring about great misfortune for the Greeks in their war with Troy.

Achilles’ wish is ultimately granted and the Greeks are unable to gain advantage against Troy. Eventually, it is revealed that Achilles is fated to die if he returns to the battlefield, but will have glory that lives well beyond his days on earth. Alternatively, he could have a long life of insignificance by abandoning the war permanently and returning home. However, it is the loss of his dear friend Patroclus in battle that ultimately moves Achilles to return to the war. He eventually defeats the heir-apparent to the throne of Troy, prince Hector, and desecrates his body.

The story ends with Hector’s father, King Priam entering Achilles’ camp to beg him to return his son’s body so he can be given a proper burial. Achilles is brought to further grief, thinking on how his own father will fare after he learns of his (Achilles) death, and agrees to return Hector’s body. Thus the story begins and ends with a parent asking for the return of their child. Achilles at last avoids the mistake that has brought the Greeks to ruin in the first place by recognizing their shared humanity rather than denying Hector (and Priam) the dignity of a proper funeral, and treating honor as absolute in conduct, though Achilles is still doomed to die.

A Cultural Memory of a Collapsed Civilization

In reality, this story is something of a cultural memory for the Greeks. This war, if indeed historical, is one that likely transpired towards the end of the Bronze Age.3 The Bronze Age concluded with a civilizational collapse for Greeks. There are many theories as to why this occurred, which include a prolonged drought, a serious plague, external pressures such as war or predation from piracy, and/or internal strife.4 Regardless of cause, there was a dramatic reduction in Greek trade and a dwindling supply of tin, which made forging bronze items such as weapons and armor a rare commodity. Economies likely collapsed as well, and many once great Greek palaces from this time period appear to have been burned from within, suggesting potential social upheaval or civil conflict. By some estimates, the population throughout the Greek mainland may have fallen by as much as fifty percent.5

Indeed, Greeks of Homer’s time would’ve looked back at the once great Greek palaces of the bronze age, which still stood unoccupied in their time, as a testament to a mythical age long since passed; one where they could barely conceive of how these structures were even made. For example, the famed “Cyclopean Walls” were so named because Greeks after the Bronze Age collapse believed they were built by cyclopes due to their large and seemingly perfect nature. Thus the Iliad can be understood as a literary post-collapse consciousness of a grander Greek past, which seeks to explain their present circumstances. Here the modern Western reader can find commonality with the Greeks from the time of Homer through a shared sense of cultural amnesia, if not post-abundance decline.

What the Iliad Reveals About the West Today

The Iliad is important to the Ark Project because it confronts us with a civilization approaching its own demise. Homer does not offer a vision of renewal, reform, or escape. He preserves a memory of what human life looks like when power outruns restraint, when honor becomes absolute, and when reconciliation is possible only through shared suffering. The poem is not intended to be instructive, but it can still be diagnostic. Modern Western readers should perceive a world defined by a morally ambiguous landscape; one that looks increasingly similar to our own. The question for the Ark Project, which will guide our analysis of the text in a subsequent post is: what does the Iliad teach us about the causes of civilizational decay, and what, if anything, could alter that course?

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Recommended Reading and Works Consulted

To aid me in this inquiry, I have consulted the following works, which I recommend to readers who wish to deepen their understanding alongside me as we explore the Iliad together.

The Greeks and the Irrational
Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951.

A foundational study of Greek moral and religious experience in the age of Homer, originally developed from lectures delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1940s. Dodds’ analysis is especially valuable for understanding Homeric psychology and the externalization of non-rational experience through divine agency.

The Greeks: A Global History
Beaton, Roderick. The Greeks: A Global History. New York: Basic Books, 2021.

A wide-ranging and accessible history of Greek civilization from its earliest periods to the present day. Beaton combines strong scholarship with a clear narrative, making this an excellent orienting work for readers new to Greek history.

The Iliad
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.

One of the most technically faithful English translations still readable for modern audiences. Lattimore preserves line numbering, making it especially useful for close reading and cross-reference.

The Iliad & The Odyssey
Homer. The Iliad & The Odyssey. Translated by Samuel Butler. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 1999.

A prose translation that prioritizes narrative clarity over poetic form. While less precise than modern verse translations, Butler’s English retains a certain dignity and clarity that some readers may find more accessible.

To anyone who reads the news, even if only occasionally, it would be hard to come away with the idea that Western civilization is striding towards a bright future. Though the news shamelessly peddles in negative information with all the tenacity of a used car salesman, at a certain level, the sentiment and major events of the past few years leaves me with an inescapable feeling that most of the Western world is barreling towards darker times, to say the least. If by chance you feel the same, consider the Ark Project a place of discussion with the aim of preserving the very best of what Western civilization has brought forth. Put differently, the Ark Project is an ongoing thought experiment that seeks to discern clever ways we children of the West may carry the fire we were blessed to receive into the future; that there may yet be a generation willing and able to receive and carry it onward.

Here I will ruminate on the classic works that served as the foundation of Western civilization and the United States. My goal is to facilitate a dialogue where we can reopen the discourses that shaped the West in the light of the events which followed, and the present circumstances we now find ourselves in. The old debates of how societies should be governed, how markets and capital should be managed, and the best way to order society to serve the betterment of mankind are all up for discussion. I will also consider ways we can create little “arks” within Western society for the sake of building a better future. But in order for these posts to be interesting, they should be a discussion, which is why I’m hoping for a lively comments section for each post. Likewise, I’m also hoping for guests who share a passion for these subjects to author posts here alongside me. Given the vast sea of substacks, this may be a tall order, but as a devoted Christian I’ll pray for God’s favor in this endeavor.

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In fact, I should lay my cards down on the table face up so that you don’t feel deceived. Though a name like The Ark Project would seem to strongly suggest that this is a blog featuring Judeo-Christian themes, you should know that I am a devout Catholic. I chose the name quite obviously on the basis of the flood story from Genesis, because the Western world seems to be racing towards a similarly destructive fate, and I hope to put my skills to their best use in finding ways of preserving the good amidst a growing sea of bad. Books are my treasure because I value knowledge and wisdom, and I have loved discussion and debate on politics, philosophy, history, and religion for as long as I have lived. But more than that, I love writing, and sharing knowledge with others, which I hope to do often here.

As such I hope you will join me in this endeavor, and I wish you well!