honor in battle?

I want to link this to talking about honor in class and one of the presentations (I don't remember whose it was, but it was the one where they called a cease fire to collect the dead).

I was watching the presentation and I saw a picture of both sides just collecting their dead. I also remember the presenters saying how both sides would occasionally take a day off the fighting to just collect their dead. My question is, when one side is out their collecting their dead, why doesn't the other side ambush them and just kill them all? That would save a lot more lives for the ambushing side. The answer I suppose, would be because that's against this code of honor that they're supposed to live by.

So my question is this: why? Why was honor so important? Obviously honor was considered more valuable than human life since because (say) the trojans never ambushed the acheans during one of these body collections, a lot more trojans died at the hands of some of those same acheans who were picking up corpses. Now it probably wouldn't be achilles or ajax or hector picking up those bodies, but still, it would have helped win the war. So the second question is this: should honor be held so highly? Or should it be nothing more than something to prevent absolute barbarity in war? OR should it not be considered at all? Should war be completely based on survival?

I think the whole idea of "honor in war" is ironic at best, hypocritical at worst. What's honorable about killing people? The fact that their should be such a code of conduct in war to de-horrify it, to make it more "game-like" is repulsive. People die in war, lives are destroyed by war, and for someone to say "this is how you're supposed to make war" guidelines or rules, if you will, seems absurd. After all, what good is honor to the dead? Dead is dead, regardless of how one died.

close calls

It's strange how this war keeps going back and forth. One second, the greeks are all about to die or flee, and the next the trojans are begging Paris to give back Helen. I think the whole war is nothing more than an ego trip. The greeks have no real need for Troy to fall, they're waging a war because Menelaus's woman left him. And the Trojans are fighting because Paris is too selfish to give her up to save the lives of his soldiers, and he's too scared to even fight for most of the war. It's his fault the war occured and his fault it's being prolonged, and he doesn't even fight until Hector and Helen order him to. If there were ever nations waging war for the sake of war, it'd be the Acheans and the Trojans.

Iliad ch 1-5

I think the story so far is entertaining in a sense. I look at the gods and how they have petty arguments, and then go kill mortals and have mortals wounding them, etc. I think it's funny reading about it, and had the story been intended to be pure fiction, with gods created solely for the purpose of the story it would have been more enjoyable. But knowing that people actually prayed to and believed in gods that were as prone to petty squabbles as the mortals they're supposed to be ruling over seems to be a little pathetic. Pathetic is a little harsh, but I can't think of a less extreme word that still works. All in all, I think the gods are quite childish and I have a hard time thinking of them as "gods" per se as opposed to just ordinary people who are good at fighting.

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