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Notes -
His quick welcome wherever he turns is hilarious given that people either ignore his advice or take it and get doused with a literal bucket of shit.
I think you do a disservice to Achilles and the characterization of the Greeks. It is not all sunshine and rainbows - I seem to recall an incident where Agamemnon takes Achilles's war bride and Achilles says he's going to take his ball and go home, and then later Agamemnon begs him to rejoin the fight with a very generous comp package and Achilles refuses out of spite. But I haven't read the Iliad so I won't argue too much.
We certainly live in a prose recession.
But Achilles does not have to justify why he's a hero, he just is because he ticks all the boxes. Odysseus is different, he is unheroic by a lot of the tropes of the poems (and indeed by some of our own day) but Odysseus is a much more rounded character.
Achilles versus Agamemnon is not about "but I really love my sex-slave" or "is taking women captive and passing them around like party favours justified?", it's about arguing over The Champion's Portion. Achilles has been publicly disrespected by Agamemnon and his status challenged, and thus his honour is impugned unless Agamemnon makes reparation. Agamemnon is overlord of the combined Greek forces and can't be seen to be weak or to bow to blackmail. That's why all the negotiations between them carried on via third parties.
Achilles versus Agamemnon is of the same kind as Juss versus Gorice; Gorice is attempting to exercise overlordship which the Demonlanders refuse to recognise, and the plot kicks off from there. The fact that it has nothing to do with questions of morality or the right to rule or Evil Lord versus Good Guys is demonstrated at the end, where the victorious Demon lords lament that their mighty foes are dead and so there can be no more heroic battles, and their reward is to have everything reset so that Gorice is once again alive and the entire adventure will re-start. The effect of war and invasion on the common folk? the soldiers in their armies who will die and leave behind widows and orphans? Pffft, that is not the concern of the Supermen, the Heroes!
Gro, ironically, is the only one who thinks about the losing side in all these wars, and that is why he's constantly a turncoat and mistrusted even when personally liked. Nobody trusts him too far because they know he's just as likely to switch sides and be fighting them in the morning.
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