Themes:
Anger Betrayal Fate and Chance Honor Pride Hospitality Love Patriotism Revenge Ritual
The First Word of the Iliad: Anger
The first line of the Iliad affords two instances of what you can do without any knowledge of Greek whatever.
IL.1.1 mênin aeide thea [1Pêlêïadeô Achilêos 1]
IL.1.1 SING, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
Here you can take advantage of the feature that links Greek nouns and adjectives to the words used in the translation. If you follow the link from "anger," a table pops up on the right that shows all Greek words that are translated by "anger":
'anger'
LSJ achos [noun] (66)
LSJ eris [noun] (69)
LSJ kotos [noun] (7)
LSJ menos [noun] (206)
LSJ mênis [noun] (20)
LSJ mênithmos [noun] (3)
LSJ nemesêtos [adjective] (8)
LSJ thumos [noun] (853)
LSJ cholos [noun] (68)
LSJ cholôtos [adjective] (4)
Without knowing Greek, you can nevertheless match the noun "mênis" with the form "mênin" in the opening line of the poem. Following the link from "mênin" will therefore take you to all lines in which the poet uses the same word he uses to describe the anger of Achilles. If you look at the translation of those lines in the Iliad, you notice that the anger is the anger of a god (8x) or of Achilles (4x). And the restriction of "mênis" to a divine agent is also observed in the Odyssey and in the Homeric Hymns. So without knowing any Greek you can nonetheless directly observe an important feature of the Iliad: the word chosen to describe the anger of Achilles is put in the most prominent possible position. It is the first word of the poem, and it is a word used only of gods and Achilles. There is something superhuman about the anger of Achilles.
There is more you can do with the word list from which you picked "mênis." Since they are all Greek words that Lattimore at one time or another translates as "anger," they are probably a reasonably good guide to the semantic field of "anger," and there are quite a few of them. With a little guessing and drawing on your tacit knowledge of Greek vocabulary that comes with a knowledge of English, you can make some stabs at the other words. Thus "mênithmos" looks like a cousin of "mênis," and you discover indeed that it is a word used three times in Iliad 16 to describe the anger of Achilles. "Cholos" and "cholôtos" may have something to do with "choleric." "Eris" points to "eristic" and therefore "quarrel," and "nemesêtos" looks like "nemesis" and points to revenge.
Two of the words, "menos" and "thumos," are extremely common. You may guess that they probably don't always mean "anger," and if you follow the links from them, you see immediately that this is the case. "Thumos" appears to be mostly translated by such words as "heart," "spirit," "mind," "life," and you gather from this that it is a very general word for emotions and seems to straddle thought and feeling. If you follow "menos" you see that it is translated alternately as "strength," "rage," "fury," from which you can infer that it means something like "fighting strength and spirit."
If you follow the word "cholos," you see from the translation of the lines that it is quite consistently translated as "anger." You note that it is used to describe the anger of a variety of persons, both mortal and immortal. You also note that its 68 occurrences make it a lot more common than "mênis" and a lot less common than "menos" or "thumos." So you conclude that "cholos" is probably the most specific generic word for anger. This is confirmed by looking at the equally common word "eris," which, as you can see easily from the translations, is much more likely to refer to a state of discord than to the emotions attached to it.
The thirty minutes spent of tracing the opening word of the Iliad and its cousins have taught you some important things about Homer's psychological vocabulary. The common words "menos" and "thumos" respectively straddle action and emotion or thought and emotion in ways that are strange to us. And the "mênis" of Achilles is not a garden variety kind of anger, but something that reaches beyond the human.