The theme of the Iliad is self-evident - the wrath of Achilles. Achilles is portrayed as a character with the freak of an attribute of intense self-obsession. The upshots and corollaries of such an anomaly of a personal trait are multifarious and variegated. In this case, it begets what's illustriously feted as 'The Iliad'. The seminal chapters of the Trojan War vicariously belong to Achilles despairing and ergo, exhaustively infuriating over Agamemnon's exacting demand. The Iliad is a tragedy, and the character of Achilles is shown to posses what in Greek tragedy is proverbial as the tragic-flaw or hamartia. This faculty of radical individualism in Achilles postpones what could've been a facile war and plays as the authentic and concrete turbulence yielding many trifling deaths, many insipid triumphs and many dolorous and denigrating defeats, leaving the odds and sods ravished and inert. Achilles can ideally be held accountable for such a calamitous turn of the Trojan War for his anger against the noetic and cognitive adjudication of the hoi-polloi sums up as base, bereft of the model raison d'être, and metes out as an erratic and erroneous verdict on the part of a man so vitally critical to an enterprise that subsumes not only the pride of the Achaians, but ostensibly the titular, inestimable lives that were at stake.

However, though we can rationalize that the theme of the Iliad is the insuperable, unremitting ire of Achilles, but we also need to heed the fact that 'Iliad' translates as the war of Troy, so the theme has to confer primacy to whatever the quaintest Homeric intent can be suspected. The theme of the Iliad does indeed, to all intents and purposes, touch palpably upon Troy through Hektor. Hektor can be considered as a total and absolute antithesis of the choleric Achilles: an unimpeachable true-blue, puissant Trojan, steadfast, intrepid, loyal, liberal, and nobly altruistic.

What consumes and aggrandizes the tragedy is the denouement of the Iliad where after the death of Patroklos at the hands of Hektor, Achilles implies with aplomb to wreak anarchy and reap retribution from Hektor. At the juncture, when he finally decimates Hektor, the tragic component of the Iliad is grossly iridescent and effulgent as Achilles, driven out of the flotsam and jetsam of his labored sense and temperate mentality, unlimbers vile desecration on the corpse of Hektor by dragging him circuitously around Patroklos's grave. This exudes the pith and quintessence of the tragic component.

Though the protagonist, Achilles is governed by a preponderant loathing for his impetuous, berserk and imprudent action, and thus is not exalted in the objective perspective of the rifling reader. Achilles is elicited as more of an abysmal, galling, egregious churl at the onset of the epic where he abjectly maroons his comrades abnegating the spirit and soul of camaraderie for a single woman, and then, goes to the villainous and iniquitous extent of exacerbating things for the Achaians with his new-fangled fey ideology of engaging Zeus against them. Hektor is portrayed as a classy warrior of nobility and virtue, and his part in the epic in itself is a Homeric encomium to let a divisive dichotomy be made manifest between the Achaian hero and the Trojan martyr.

What jars the critical eye most indelibly is that the perception of tragedy is discursive and evasive from the sterling theme of the Iliad. That is, though the theme integrally draws upon the indignation and indefatigable fury of Achilles, that does not actually beset the actual purposed or intentioned tragic involvement. The tragedy besieges Hektor and not Achilles… or rather it envelopes Hektor through Achilles. It is sufficiently pellucid that Achilles is the pigeonholed 'hero', but heroism, it seems, is not without its quirks.

On a gentler note, the thematic concern is prepossessed with a moral concern or so can liberated subjectivity delimit to obtain. There're fundamental hints of the disquiet, chaos, slaughter, carnage, and catastrophe of what and how wars can reduce men to mere pawns of a vast consecration of one's moral worth and how it relegates the necessarily hyperbolic, the perforce pregnancy of mortal existence. It is tangential, peripheral to polite messages of the ethical flavoring, to be savored abstractly as to how men perpetrate their own doom, their own domination by their unruly, dogmatic and despotic comportments, and the case of Achilles can be grasped as a tenebrous allegory apostrophized to conduct how resolution against compromise only further flummoxes and confounds the condition, and alleviation or mollification is distanced widely. The thematic concern, keeping in mind that we deal with an insurgent theoretical premise, can be stemmed downward to the base level that perhaps Homer would have instigated with, either was or could conceivably be, perhaps of an epiphanic and more liberalized ideal of 'man'.