"Good guys" committing perfidy (fake surrender) and it's treated as a clever heroic ploy instead of a war crime or something morally dubious

[u/AporiaParadox]

1. Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Anakin pretends to surrender to the enemy multiple times during the Clone Wars. And no, it's not used to indicate that Anakin is falling to the Dark Side, other characters like Obi-Wan do it too.
2. The Iliad. The Trojan Horse was a real dick move, a fake surrender compounded by a fake peace offering, followed by a massacre. I get that it was a different time, but still, most modern adaptations just treat it as a cool thing. One thing I'll give Nolan's The Odyssey credit for is that Odysseus recognizes that what his "clever plot" was wrong.

Perfidy is a serious war crime, because morality aside, in exchange for one victory, you're dooming all of your allies who might want to legitimately surrender in the future because now the enemy is just going to execute them, not to mention that now the enemy won't surrender to you and will just fight harder.

[u/AfterCommodus]

Depends heavily on the telling.  That said, when civilizations have harkened back to the war for their founding myths, they overwhelmingly have looked to Hector, Aeneas, and Troy, not Achilles, Agamemnon, and the Aecheans

[u/_whatever_wherever → u/AfterCommodus]

Different cultural values

The Greeks valued cleverness and tricks on the battlefield as much as they did marital prowess

While the Romans vauled a greater emphasis on martial might, so viewed the sorts of tactics Odyssius used as dishonourable

[u/facw00 → u/_whatever_wherever]

Yep Odysseus is a clever hero in Homer (though also arrogant to the point it gets his men killed and angers the gods), and dishonorable in Virgil.

[u/Chiron723 → u/facw00]

Reverse that. He angers the gods which ultimately get his men killed.

[u/Sustentio → u/_whatever_wherever]

Marital Prowess? How skilled you are in your marriage?

[u/Nebranower → u/_whatever_wherever]

I think the relative strength of your army makes a difference there, too. If your army is often fighting forces as strong or stronger than your own, you're going to value cleverness as a way to even the odds. If your army is the greatest army in the world, then of course you're going to treat getting clever as dishonorable and encourage straight up fights.

[u/Unfair_Pineapple8813 → u/AfterCommodus]

Well, Sparta and Smyrna worshipped Agamemnon. Though, I suspect it was more about him being strong and mighty in battle, than him being honorable or a just king.

[u/Strength-InThe-Loins → u/Unfair_Pineapple8813]

Please look up A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry's 7 part series on Sparta. Tl;dr fuck Sparta. It's one of the most evil societies to ever exist.

[u/anononobody → u/AfterCommodus]

I can see the Roman telling to be rooting for Trojans, but Im genuinely curious how the Greek telling of the Illiad wasn't meant for Greeks to be the good guys (or at least neutral)? Like, wouldn't the Mycenaeans or even Trojans just be "people" to Classical Greeks? The original comment sounds like "both sides bad" historical revisionism to me.

[u/_whatever_wherever → u/anononobody]

Because these stories are more often about imparting moral lessons relevant to the culture of the time and change and evolve with each telling

[u/anononobody → u/_whatever_wherever]

The moral lesson wouldn't be "the Greeks or Trojans are bad people" though, I would imagine it's more "Achilles's downfall was his pride" etc. So OP's original comment still doesn't make much sense to me.

[u/Gantolandon → u/anononobody]

Romans claimed to be the descendants of Trojans, so you can say they rooted for them a lot.

[u/pineapple_Jeff → u/AfterCommodus]

I mean that's not really a moral judgement, rather because the Trojans were defeated and essentially disappeared from history, leaving a convenient space for other cultures to claim their origins whereas the victorious Achaeans/Greeks still existed at the time and were known by those cultures, thus preventing the cultures from claiming to be their successors?

[u/Radigan0 → u/pineapple_Jeff]

They did not disappear from history, the city was rebuilt several times and was evidently still around in one form or another at least by the time of Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persian Empire.