of the last six years of the war. Thus, he was writing his history always with the overview in sight - which will be this paper's assumption - while never actually getting to the "payoff."
These assumptions established, it would do well when making the comparison of Athens-to-Achilles to review the role each character plays in the respective accounts.
Achilles makes his influence felt first in terms of chronological appearance. The Trojan War was fought sometime in the late Bronze Age according to archeological piecings-together of the shards of non-Homeric hard data (Knox 23-24). Achilles is involved in a war that is, at best, absurd: the engagement of two armies for the sole purpose of helping one man (the Spartan king, Menelaus) regain his wife (Helen) from a man she prefers more (the Trojan prince, Paris). "Honor" may have been the original motivator for the invasion of the Anatolian Greek city of Troy by an Achaean alliance of Peloponnesian Greeks, but by the time The Iliad begins - ten years into the siege - logic has long been supplanted by something worse (Iliad 1: 1-3):
Rage - Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls
Homer framed his poetic chronicle of the Trojan War around the rage of Achilles: "its ca
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