In Homer’s “The Iliad,” the Trojan hero Hector and the Greek hero Achilles are destined for a showdown from the very beginning.
The poem marches with unwavering steps toward this inevitable conclusion like the marching ranks of Trojan and Greek soldiers on the blazing plain before Troy. The coming duel between the greatest warriors on each side remains ever-present throughout the seemingly endless struggle of the armies on the beaches before the city, caught between the “hallowed heights of Troy” and the “fish-filled seas,” suspended between human civilization and the wild unknown of the afterworld.
Through the story of these two warriors’s collision course, Homer presents us with two versions of masculinity. Both men have competitive, aggressive, even violent tendencies. Both men are terrors on the battlefield, for example. But they have very different motives, and so different types of masculinity. Often today, strong, or aggressive behavior from a man is automatically labeled as “toxic masculinity.” But that blanket moniker fails to make a distinction about the control and usage of such behavior that “The Iliad” dramatizes very well in its comparison of these two men….