Significance of War in The Iliad or Personal / family life vs War

One can make a strong argument that The Iliad seems to celebrate war. Characters emerge as worthy or despicable based on their degree of competence and bravery in battle. Paris, for example, doesn’t like to fight, and correspondingly receives the scorn of both his family and his lover. Achilles, on the other hand, wins eternal glory by explicitly rejecting the option of a long, comfortable, uneventful life at home. The text itself seems to support this means of judging character and extends it even to the gods. The epic holds up warlike deities such as Athena for the reader’s admiration while it makes fun of gods who run from aggression, using the timidity of Aphrodite and Artemis to create a scene of comic relief. To fight is to prove one’s honor and integrity, while to avoid warfare is to demonstrate laziness, ignoble fear, or misaligned priorities. 

 Andromache pleads with Hector not to risk orphaning his son, but Hector knows that fighting among the front ranks represents the only means of “winning my father great glory.” Achilles debates returning home to live in ease with his aging father, but he remains at Troy to win glory by killing Hector and avenging Patroclus. The characters prize so highly the martial values of honor, noble bravery, and glory that they willingly sacrifice the chance to live a long life with those they love. Eventually, the war changes the destiny of every character in The Iliad. 

 To be sure, The Iliad doesn’t ignore the realities of war. Men die gruesome deaths; women become slaves and concubines, a plague breaks out in the Achaean camp and decimates the army. Homer never implies that the fight constitutes a waste of time or human life. Rather, he portrays each side as having a justifiable reason to fight and depicts warfare as a respectable and even glorious manner of settling the dispute. However, in Book 7 he also shows the essential similarity between the Achaians and the Trojans, even though they are on opposing sides of a long war. “……in silence/ they piled the bodies upon the pyre, with their hearts in sorrow,/ and burned them upon the fire, and went back to sacred Ilion./ In the same way on the other side the strong-greaved Achaians/ piled their own slain upon the pyre, with their hearts in sorrow,/and burned them upon the fire, and went-back to their hollow vessels.”