Throughout history, vengeance, or revenge, has been altered by different cultures and even American culture. This is shown in many ancient Greek epics. Throughout these two epics, what is simply revenge and what is the action of revenge are very different from how revenge is viewed in today's society. Revenge is a major theme in the Iliad, with Achilles' revenge on Agamemnon and Hector, and in the Odyssey, with Poseidon's revenge on Odysseus and Odysseus' revenge on the suitors, and these epics define how revenge was viewed in the ancient Greek world. in the Iliad it is the main theme and pushes men to do things they normally wouldn't do. The main example of this is Achilles wanting revenge on Agamemnon. The first book of the Iliad explains that Achilles wants revenge because Agamemnon is forced to return Chryseis, his war bride, to his father, and decides to take the war bride away from him. According to “Some Thoughts about the Origins of 'Greek Ethics,'” by Nicholas D. Smith, “Agamemnon's unjust affront to Achilles leads to an extraordinarily deadly retaliation, the end result of which is that multitudes of these men's innocent allies are killed needlessly” (blacksmith 10). This is out of character for Achilles, who would normally be the first man to enter battle, leaving him out. “Rejecting even the most serious and impressive pleas that Agamemnon offers, and making more and more rationally indefensible decisions,” he shows how much his desire for revenge has turned him into a madman (smith 10). His only desire is to take revenge for his loss. It takes the death of Patroclus, his dear friend, to bring him back to the war, which he left. The death of Patroclus not only forces Achi......middle of paper......rse to murder Agamemnon. As Dilworth states in "The Fall of Troy and the Massacre of the Pretenders: The Last Symbolic Correspondence in the Odyssey"; The massacre of the suitors reverses and corrects Agamemnon's murder. As the story is recorded in the Odyssey, Aegisthus used twenty men to ambush and kill Agamemnon. From Ithaca the main claimant, Antinous, sent twenty men to ambush and kill Telemachus. He would have suffered the fate of Agamemnon. The same could be done by Ulysses, for whom the story of Agamemnon is a warning. The suitors instead die during a banquet, as a corrective to the killing of Agamemnon during a banquet. (Dilworth)This shows that Odysseus's revenge on the suitors not only fixes what Odysseus knows he has fixed, but also fixes what no one else has fixed, balances the revenge throughout the Odyssey.