The Male Ethic
The primary characters in the Homeric poems are aristocrats, who are expected to live
up to a demanding code of values. The men are mainly warriors, like the incomparable
Achilles1 of the
Iliad. This poem tells part of the
famous story of the attack by a Greek army on the city of
Troy2, a stronghold
located in northwestern Anatolia. Although it is commonly assumed that the Trojans were
a different people from the Greeks, the poems themselves provide no definitive answer to
the question of their ethnic identity. In the
Iliad's representation of
the Trojan War, which the Greeks believed occurred about four hundred years before
Homer's time, Achilles is, in the language of the poem, “
the best of the
Greeks3” because he is a “
doer of deeds and
speaker of words4” without equal. Achilles' overriding concern in word and action is
with the glory and recognition for all time that he can win with his
“excellence” (the best available translation for Greek
arete
5, a word with a range
of meanings). Like all aristocrats, Achilles feared the disgrace that he would feel
before others if he were seen to fail to live up to the code of excellence. Under the
aristocratic code, failure and wrongdoing produced public shame.
