Gods In The Iliad Research Paper

The Gods Role in The Iliad The gods in The Iliad are very greedy, self-centered, vain, malicious, and two-faced. Homer does a very good job of showing us this throughout the entire epic poem, and he does it in such a way so that anyone who reads this can understand. All of the gods that get involved in this war have their own self-serving motives behind all of their interference. Right in the very beginning of the epic poem, one of Apollo's priests prays to him to send a plague onto the Achaeans because they will not give him back his daughter. Apollo decides to go ahead and do what the priest asks because the priest is loyal and if he does do this then the priest will sacrifice many things in Apollo's name. The Achaeans gave the daughter
So she, of course, helps the Trojans out. She ends up getting a small injury during a battle and flees to Mount Olympus and convinces her husband, Ares, with her "charms" to go fight for her. He does do and ends up getting wounded and flees to Mount Olympus as well. Ares then says to Zeus, "We everlasting gods…Ah what chilling blows / we suffer- thanks to our own conflicting wills- / whenever we show these mortal men some kindness" (V. ll. 1008-1010). Ares shows here that he knows the gods have their motives in this war by saying they have their own conflicting wills. He also gets injured by an Achaean that he himself was trying to kill. He says he was showing kindness to the humans when all he did was go down there and kill people, this shows how self-centered and malicious Ares really
She is helping the Achaeans because Hera asked her to so this will make Hera look more favorably toward her. She really does not do much actual fighting in the battles but she inspires people and gets them to fight like in book two with Odysseus. She is also the biggest deceiver and backstabber out of all the gods in this epic. She is always disguising herself to start fights as in book four when she gets an archer to shoot an arrow at Menelaus, but she, "…deflected it down the belt / where the gold buckles clasp and breastplate overlap" (IV. ll. 152-153). She only did this to get the fighting started again. She is finally able to trick Hector into fighting Achilles and brings about his death. Hector finally realizes, "…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" (XXII. ll. 351-353). He knows he has been tricked by Athena and it is as if he expected it to happen. Athena is only doing all of this for her own gain in the eyes of Hera because she is the queen of the