In Philip Roth's The Human Stain, Roth uses multiple conflicts and allusions within the story to explore human nature and the reasons why people choose paths to resolve conflicts . In the opening and closing scenes many conflicts are discovered and resolved. Conflicts include white versus black, right versus wrong, ideology versus ambition, and loyalty versus betrayal. Roth uses the Berkshire community and small Athena College in 1998 as a microcosm of the world in which he uses these conflicts, as well as classical and literary allusions to bring to light all the possible decisions of the past and outcomes of the future. In the opening scene the protagonist, Coleman Brutus Silk, is introduced through the eyes and words of the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman. Silk is a former professor of Greek and Latin and dean of the faculty at Athena College, located in the Berkshires of New England. During one of his lectures, Silk makes a classical allusion to the conflict between the mighty king Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles over the maiden Briseis in Homer's epic, the Iliad. Agamemnon steals Briseis, who is a war prize from Achilles, after returning his captured maiden, Chryseis, to her father. Achilles is enraged by Agamemnon's actions and vows never to assist the Greeks in their quests again. Silk is unknowingly describing, symbolically, the situation he will find himself in in a few months. Silk soon resigns from college after being labeled a racist, and his wife of more than forty years, Iris, dies during the debacle. Being a man over seventy-one years old, he should have honored his wife and lived the rest of his life in peace. Like an Agamemnon, however, he was lured by a younger woman. As Agamemnon says of Briseis, "Clytemnestra (Agamemnon's wife) is not as good as her, neither in face nor in figure," so Coleman Silk thinks of Faunia Farley, the thirty-four-year-old woman Coleman is beginning to have. a relationship with (Roth 4). In the process of taking on this new lover, however, Coleman has attracted a warrior not unlike Homer's mighty Achilles. Faunia's ex-husband, Les Farley, is a Vietnam veteran who suffered heavily from post-traumatic stress disorder. He turned into an almost mindless killer while in Vietnam "throwing so many hardy souls into the House of Death" (Homer 1 l.