Nietzsche's Dichotomy

Homer's Iliad is an epic poem, which describes the siege of Troy and the events that happened during the Trojan war, focusing mainly of the battles and military campaigns. However, the poem lacks a philosophical element due to which a reader constantly questions the reasons of characters' behavior. Especially controversial and unpredictable turn out to be the Achilles' actions, as he does not only act in contrary to the readers' expectations but also challenges other characters' idea of him and their commonly held beliefs. One way to interpret Achilles' actions is to look at them through the lens of a more recent work, namely, Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This philosophical novel is significant in analyzing the Homerian character
The interest to the Greek culture and philosophy was what united the two friends. At that period Nietzsche wrote his first major work, the Birth of Tragedy, where he breaks down the Greek tragedy into two bounded elements - Dionysian and Apollonian. Nietzsche claims that the dual nature of the Greek theater is a result of the same dichotomy in a human life and the ideal combination of the two origins is incarnated in the Greek Tragedy. Here Nietzsche argues that Homer in his poems perfectly embodies the Apollonian origin of tragedy, which is a reflection of logic and reason: "how inexpressibly sublime Homer is, therefore, who as a single individual relates to that Apollonian folk culture as the single dream-artist to the dream-capacity of the people and of nature itself" (Nietzsche 29). The Birth of Tragedy is not the only Nietzsche's tribute to the Ancient Greek culture and Homer in particular. In his lecture Homer and Classical Philology Nietzsche elaborates on the "Homer question" concerned with the realness of the author of the Odyssey and the Iliad. The extent to which Homerian heritage dominated Nietzsche's thought is expressed by Bishop: "Treating Homer for Nietzsche is a way of getting at the constitutional troubles of a discipline, which in turn stand at the end of a long history in the transmission and recovery of classical antiquity"
Nietzsche calls the main character after an Iranian prophet Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), founder of Zoroastrianism. The figure of actual Zarathustra emerged in the second millennium B.C. in Western Iran and is depicted as the first fighter with the evil spirit and initiator of the reorder of the world. In the same way Nietzsche's Zarathustra is a reformer and prophet, whose lessons are described in the novel. The Nietzsche's character's resemblance with the Homerian characters starts on the level of its non-fictional version. Skjærvø in his work finds the similarity between the Iliad and the numerous extracts from the ancient Iranian Zarathustra stories and concludes that both texts follow the Indo-European Epic Narrative tradition (180). More precisely the author demonstrates the connection between Zarathustra and the character of Diomedes in the Iliad. In a broader context he compares the war of Troy with the great battle in which Zarathustra plays a key role: "Zarathustra does appear at the point when the fate of the world is to be decided by a great battle, a battle that closes the old Iranian epic, like the great battle of the Mahabharata"(Skjærvø,