In the beginning of the Iliad, Agamemnon is urged to return Chriseis to her family to quell Apollo's plagues on the Achaeans, but he refuses adamantly. Everyone else would be with a prize, and he would be left with none. He demands another soldier offers up someone or something of equal value to what he would lose, valuing his own material wealth over the lives of all his men:
"The prize, the beauteous prize, I will resign,
So dearly valued, and so justly mine.
But since for common good I yield the fair,
My private loss let grateful Greece repair;
Nor unrewarded let your prince complain,
That he alone has fought and bled in vain."
Agamemnon deludes himself, believing that reversing his wrongdoing is valid reason enough for his citizens to repay him. He cannot stand the idea of lacking when everyone else is not, even though that wouldn't be the case, since he is the King, and they the subjects.
"Insatiate king (Achilles thus replies),
Fond of the power, but fonder of the prize!
Would'st thou the Greeks their lawful prey should yield,
The due reward of many a well-fought field?"
Read Achilles' prompt as: you would take our labor unjustly from us with no recompense? You are King of Mycenae, but insatiable still for absolute control beyond reason. The soldier Pelides chimes in:
"What cause have I to war at thy decree?
The distant Trojans never injured me;...
Hither we sail'd, a voluntary throng,
To avenge a private, not a public wrong:
What else to Troy the assembled nations draws,But thine, ungrateful, and thy brother's cause?
Is this the pay our blood and toils deserve;
Disgraced and injured by the man we serve?
And darest thou threat to snatch my prize away,
Due to the deeds of many a dreadful day? "
Agamemnon exerts his power again, saying he will be repaid whether his subjects are willing to do so or not.
"Even in thy tent I'll seize the blooming prize,
Thy loved Briseis with the radiant eyes.
Hence shalt thou prove my might, and curse the hour
Thou stood'st a rival of imperial power;
And hence, to all our hosts it shall be known,
That kings are subject to the gods alone."
Achilles becomes so enraged by this, he unsheathes his sword, about to kill Agamemnon until Athena intervenes. But this doesn't stop Achilles from getting the final words in against the tyrannical king.
"When wert thou known in ambush'd fights to dare,
Or nobly face the horrid front of war?
'Tis ours, the chance of fighting fields to try;
Thine to look on, and bid the valiant die:
So much 'tis safer through the camp to go,
And rob a subject, than despoil a foe.
...
This sceptre, form'd by temper'd steel to prove
An ensign of the delegates of Jove,
From whom the power of laws and justice springs
(Tremendous oath! inviolate to kings);
By this I swear:—when bleeding Greece again
Shall call Achilles, she shall call in vain.
When, flush'd with slaughter, Hector comes to spread
The purpled shore with mountains of the dead,
Then shall thou mourn the affront thy madness gave,
Forced to deplore when impotent to save:
Then rage in bitterness of soul to know
This act has made the bravest Greek thy foe."
He throws the scepter to the ground and sits. He has refused to fight for the Greeks due to the unjust actions of their leader.
Early readers of Iliad may find the scene in this beginning book to be trivial or hard to comprehend for a modern era. It is referred to as a "fight" or "quarrel" between solely Agamemnon and Achilles, and trivializes down to "bickering over Briseis", saying that Achilles is only angry that his own prize could be taken away from him by Agamemnon. This is an extremely reductionist take. Simply rereading over these excerpts I have provided will deconstruct that idea.
The possibility of Agamemnon taking Briseis, Achilles' prize, is not the only thing Achilles has to be wrathful about. There is a plague descended upon the Greeks by the insolence of their own ruler. The Greeks fight for the personal problems of their ruling class, not because Troy started conflict by invading Greek land. Achilles is not the only one upset with Agamemnon, many others are as well such as Pelides.
The first words of The Iliad's original Greek are "Achilles' wrath." It is the center point of the entire story. Wouldn't it be counterintuitive for that wrath to be petty? The word that translates into wrath is a Greek word for anger that was
only ever used to describe the retributive wrath of the gods upon
mortals for wrongdoings. Fundamentally, he is not just upset about something being taken from him, like a spoiled child. He holds a righteous, retributive anger not selfishly, but selflessly against the Trojan war and its orchestrators.
