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You've read the Iliad... You can analyze the conduct of a bunch of blustering, egotistical, impatient, glory-seeking young males...why Agamemnon taking his prize away from him pissed him off.
The thing is though, those kinds of behaviors are ubiquitous to young, aggressive, glory-seeking warriors in any context. Medieval knights and Japanese samurai conducted themselves the same way. Today with professional soldiers and other glory-seekers as well.
Humility is a sin. Awesomeness has to be recognized through conveyance of status symbols. Everyone is in pursuit of the coin of prestige. You have the real deals, Yojimbo, Achilles, Galahad - or Tiger Woods, if you will. They are textbook heroes; they mesh all the qualities that make a hero: bravado, honesty, guile, and of course pure skill.
Beneath that you have lesser mortals who have varying moral faults in pursuit of the apex of warrior status.
You have abject cowards like Paris. You have frothing bullies like Hector. You have good guys, who just aren't badass enough, like Patroclus. You have fools who just don't know their place, like the guy in the Seven Samurai who didn't grasp his "obvious" lack of skill and got sliced in half. They all pursue the coin of prestige. Some eventually obtain it, to some degree. Others, like Agamemnon, focus on the status symbol to the exclusion of what it means, and bring dishonor on themselves. There is always that interplay between the symbol and what it means, between the boast and backing it up. What you never see, is anyone in the Iliad simply folding. Nor in any such environment.
The game world is, or rather was, built on the same basic premise as the world of the Iliad, which is players interact with the world and with each other in pursuit of prestige. In doing so, those same recurring themes of heroic behavior manifest themselves. Talking about the smallness of Achilles the great warrior crying in his tent because he didn't get a piece of loot is one thing. Living it is something else entirely...
