Growing up as a little kid one of my favorite things to make-believe was playing war. My cousin, brother, and I would go around and shoot each other with rubber band guns, pretending we are soldiers fighting the enemy. It felt fun, exciting, and overall just a common game to play. Now that I am older and have seen first-hand what real war can actually do to people, I understand how destructive war can be and more importantly how innocent I was, as a kid. At one point, our world was like a child too. Before the tragedy of World War One, the common conception of war was that it was just a fun game to play without serious consequences. The ancients Greeks would write great epic poems of glorious battles and even have a god that represented war, Ares. With the help of famous Greek authors like Homer and his brave hero, Achilles, from his epic poem Iliad, people for centuries consider war, this glorious event and were blind to the actuality of its true nature.
Most people would look at war with no intelligence of what it really is. The evidence is clear in our ancient literature. In Homer’s Epic poem, Iliad there is this famous and deadly warrior Achilles. It is easy to lose one’s self in the story, because of characters like Achilles and how Homer depicted him. Throughout the story, he is considered this fearless and heroic character. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, he is described as, “the bravest, handsomest, and greatest warrior of the army of Agamemnon in the Trojan War.” (www.britannica.com). Homer and other authors at the time had a way of embellishing the true ugliness of war and focused more on the gloriousness of it, with characters similar to Achilles. Rarely was the darker side of these heroes ever shown. In the same story Achilles also pillages 12 cities during the first 9 years of the war. Encyclopedia Britannica states, “During the first nine years of the war, Achilles ravaged the country around Troy and took 12 cities.” (www.britannica.com). At first, it is hard to look at Achilles as nothing but the brave hero, but once you actually think about that fact, you begin to realize just how gruesome Achilles actually was.
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The true meaning of war was heavily diluted in our ancient civilizations. It was more looked at as a sporting event where the winner would gain bragging rights, as suppose of this deadly conflict where people would lose their lives. This concept can be clearly represented in the works of our ancient authors. Homer’s epic poem Iliad, and how he portrayed his main character Achilles was one of the main reasons why people were blind to the monstrous nature of war.
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