The human and the divine interact through dreams, oracles, and inspiration in battle. And often the gods themselves put in a personal appearance to aid their favorites. Dreams and oracles reveal the will of the gods, but inspired fighting shows the gods' favor. Of course that favor is rather precarious, yet by means of it a hero wins the only thing in life worth winning — fame, glory in posterity. The Greeks looked back wistfully to the period of the Trojan War and earlier as an age of true greatness.
One might think that a race which values courage in battle to the degree the Greeks did would be blind to the squalor of war. But this legend shows nothing of the kind. Ruthless slaughter, meanness and trickery, the degradation of death — these are set forth without mitigation in a realistic light. Hector and Achilles are basically tragic figures, for they know the terrible doom that must fall on them, but they act out their destinies in battle with valor.
An outstanding incident in this tale comes as Hector faces Achilles. Achilles has nothing to lose, while Hector bears the weight of Troy on his shoulders. Seeing that Achilles is full of divine power, Hector weakens and runs even though he is a man of great courage. Athena has to trick him into making a stand, and Achilles slays him. Dying, Hector begs his killer to allow his parents to ransom his body, and the last thing he hears is Achilles' gloating refusal. But Achilles has set his own doom in motion. This episode prefigures the fall of Troy in a heart-rending way. The foremost hero of Troy has been slain by the foremost hero of Greece, who must shortly die in turn. Human choice and divine inevitability are interwoven here in tragic terms. But the entire legend of the Trojan War bears that same tragic stamp.
