Who are the heroes and villains in The Iliad?

This strikes me as a very good question because from a
modern perspective the heroes and villains in Homer's Iliad are
sometimes difficult to identify. Also, the ancient definition of hero is different from
the modern definition, and therefore many characters in the Iliad
whom a modern person would never admire or want to emulate are, according to
the ancient definition of the word, still technically heroes. For example, modern
audiences don't seem to like Achilles very much since he cries to his mother and then
withdraws from the fighting, which results in his friend's death, but from a literary
perspective Achilles is still a hero.

Also, it is difficult
to identify heroes and villains in the Iliad because so much strife
exists within the various armies. To the modern reader of Iliad 1,
Agamemnon certainly looks like a villain because his treatment of Chryses brings great
hardship upon his own army.

From the Greek perspective, the
Trojans are the villains. The Trojan Paris abducted a married Greek woman, Helen, and
this action surely makes him look like a villain. Still, from the Greek perspective,
Hector is also a "villain" since he is one of the Trojans. Homer's depiction of Hector,
however, is so sensitively crafted that it is difficult for modern audiences to think of
Hector as a villain and from a modern perspective Hector may be the closest person to a
hero found in the poem.