Why is agamemnon mad at achilles

Achilles slew Mynes and the brothers of Briseis children of Briseus , then received her as his war prize. Even though she was a war prize, Achilles and Briseis fell in love with each other, and Achilles may have gone to Troy intending to spend much time in his tent with her, as was portrayed in the movie. But was it just a myth? What did Helen look like? Actually, historians are pretty much unanimous: the Trojan Horse was just a myth, but Troy was certainly a real place.

Her legs were the best; her mouth the cutest. There was a beauty-mark between her eyebrows. The reason why Helen is so beautiful is because she is the daughter of Zeus himself and she is therefore partly divine. Furthermore, no warrior comes close to being his equal as a fighter.

Achilles has a strong sense of social order that in the beginning, manifests itself in his concern for the disorder in the Achaian camp; a deadly plague is destroying the soldiers, and Achilles wants to know the reason why. His king, Agamemnon, will not act, so Achilles decides to act: He calls for an assembly of the entire army.

In doing this, Achilles upsets the order of protocol; only Agamemnon can decide to call an assembly, but Achilles does so to try to return order to the Achaian camp. He succeeds, partially. He finds out why the plague is killing hundreds of Achaian soldiers, but in the process, he creates disorder when it is revealed that Agamemnon is responsible for the deadly plague. Thus, Achilles' attempt to return order to the Achaian camp does little, ultimately, to establish order.

Apollo lifts the plague, but after Achilles withdraws himself and his troops from the Achaian army, disorder still remains among the Achaians.

Agamemnon, of course, is as guilty of creating the ensuing disorder as Achilles is, but Achilles seems petulant and argumentative.

He is undermining the little harmony that does exist. In his argument that Agamemnon receives all the best war prizes and does nothing to earn them, Achilles forgets the valuable prizes that he has received.

His rage even causes him to almost attempt to kill Agamemnon, but the goddess Athena saves him from this deed. It should be noted that Achilles does not leave the Achaian army without sufficient reason: Agamemnon demanded to have the maiden Briseis, Achilles' war prize, and Achilles saw this act as a parallel to Paris' kidnapping of Helen — he sees himself in the same position as Menelaos. Consequently, the quarrel between himself and Agamemnon is as righteous to him as is the war against the Trojans.

Because of this dishonor, anger seizes Achilles and he strides toward Agamemnon to kill him. Hera sends the goddess Athena to stop him. Only Achilles can see Athena , who tells him not to kill the king. To Achilles this is an outrageous affront to his honor and status as the most valiant fighter among the Greeks.

He accuses Agamemnon of a trans-gression of the heroic code. Instead of recognizing Achilles as his peer homoion he has "dishonored" him. The one-on-one combat ends with Achilles killing Hector. Still pulsing with anger and needing to satisfy his revenge and grief for having lost Patroclus, Achilles allows Achaean soldiers to stab and mutilate Hector's corpse.

Then Achilles ties the body to his chariot and drags it behind. We can see this in the Iliad where Achilles is depicted as a tragic hero whose overwhelming stubbornness and pride ultimately bring about his own downfall.

It can be argued that Achilles's fatal flaw is that of hubris, excessive pride and overconfidence. The Illiad Achilles's anger may be considered both a vice and a virtue. His anger allowed him to seek vengeance without conscience. However at the same time it is possible to see Achilles as a man pushed beyond madness, so stricken with shock and grief he does not have the capability to sympathize. He did so by luring him outside the walls of Troy and slaying him when he came out.

This act helped secure a Greek victory. What caused the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles? Achilles called for the Greek army leaders to meet to convince Agamemnon to let Chryseis go. He relates to her the tale of his quarrel with Agamemnon, and she promises to take the matter up with Zeus—who owes her a favor—as soon as he returns from a thirteen-day period of feasting with the Aethiopians.

Meanwhile, the Achaean commander Odysseus is navigating the ship that Chryseis has boarded. When he lands, he returns the maiden and makes sacrifices to Apollo. Chryses, overjoyed to see his daughter, prays to the god to lift the plague from the Achaean camp. Apollo acknowledges his prayer, and Odysseus returns to his comrades.

But the end of the plague on the Achaeans only marks the beginning of worse suffering. Ever since his quarrel with Agamemnon, Achilles has refused to participate in battle, and, after twelve days, Thetis makes her appeal to Zeus, as promised. Zeus is reluctant to help the Trojans, for his wife, Hera , favors the Greeks, but he finally agrees.

Hera becomes livid when she discovers that Zeus is helping the Trojans, but her son Hephaestus persuades her not to plunge the gods into conflict over the mortals. Like other ancient epic poems, The Iliad presents its subject clearly from the outset.

Although the Trojan War as a whole figures prominently in the work, this larger conflict ultimately provides the text with background rather than subject matter. By the time Achilles and Agamemnon enter their quarrel, the Trojan War has been going on for nearly ten years.

Instead, it scrutinizes the origins and the end of this wrath, thus narrowing the scope of the poem from a larger conflict between warring peoples to a smaller one between warring individuals. But while the poem focuses most centrally on the rage of a mortal, it also concerns itself greatly with the motivations and actions of the gods.