Blasted Meddling gods // Ian Blair

    I don't think that the outcome of the Trojan War has surprised anyone so far. For one, the Achaeans outnumber the Trojans more than ten-to-one! Second, the Trojans have been pushed back to their city's shores, even up to their gates and inner walls by the time of book twenty-two. In such a desperate time for the city of Troy, it would make sense to try and either negotiate a surrender or challenge one of the Argives' champions to a duel with one of your best soldiers. Duels on the battlefield are not unheard-of, specifically in cultures that romanticized some form of honor or valor gained from dying in combat. Now do not misunderstand what I say, I am all for having Achilles and Hector dueling this conflict out between themselves so no more blood needs to be shed, but do the gods seriously have to involve themselves in everything?! Both Diomedes and Achilles have had kills taken out of their hands,  with Paris and Hector respectively, when they are whisked away by Apollo. In fact, Apollo saves Hector's life three different times; once while fighting Diomedes, second when fighting Ajax, and third when Hector initially engages Achilles in combat. Being bailed out by the gods should carry no honor, and it even strips the pair of princes of honor in my eyes. 

    Oh, and these are not the only occurrences of the gods intervening or meddling with the fights that are taking place. Scamander, the immortal who embodies the river that runs through the battlefield, ends up attacking Achilles and would have killed him with the help of his brother had Poseidon and Pallas Athena not intervened. Going back to earlier in the Iliad's text we can find examples of Ares joining the Trojan ranks and killing Argive men left and right, which he resumes when he engages Athena in combat (Homer 533). Zeus looked over the conflict for a significant amount of time, in which the Trojans were given glory and drove the Achaeans back to their ships, and none of these examples list how any of the times (roughly eleven) that Athena has interfered with the conflict. Athena's most notable interference was when she tricked Hector into believing that she was a dear brother of his, come to help his effort against Achilles. Hector's reaction when he realizes he was deceived gives us good insight into what could have been going through some of the other soldiers' minds as well: 

    "-yes and Hector knew the truth in his heart and the fighter cried aloud, 'My time has come! At last the gods have called me down to death. I thought he was at my side, the hero Deiphobus-he's safe inside the walls, Athena's tricked me blind. And now death, grim death is looming up beside me, no longer far away. No way to escape it now. This, this was their pleasure after all, sealed long ago-Zeus and the son of Zeus, the distant deadly Archer though often before now they rushed to my defense. So now I meet my doom. Well let me die-but not without struggle, not without glory, no, in some great clash of arms that even men to come will hear of down the years!'" (Homer 551). 

    After seeing the destruction and utter chaos that the gods caused on the battlefield, my personal opinion is that the gods should have stayed completely out of the war so that the fighters could settle the conflict in the best way for themselves. If the gods really were wise instead of rash-natured immortals, they would have recognized that the best approach was to have no approach at all; to simply stay on the sidelines. If the gods did want to intervene in the conflict, they should have acted as mediators between the nations, tens of thousands of lives could have been saved! In the end, the gods were fools to cause the war in the first place, but they were even greater fools to stay involved in what they would call "mortal affairs." Much like the movie War Games highlights in its storytelling, sometimes the best move is to not move at all.

P.S. I commented on Jamie's and Caroline's posts.