now finished: The Iliad by Homer
I have finally read The Iliad.
Wait, no. I have finally! read The Iliad!
The epic thing, pages and pages and pages of hexameter, Books 1-24. Of which, I might add, I deem at least two unnecessary. We could easily do without the early on one that reads like the Old Testament, droning on and on about so-and-so and so-and-so and the son of so-and-so, just name after name after name. No one cares*, Homer. (Same to you, OT prophet scribes.) And, that Book 23, fever dream, opponent-dragging, don't-call-it-a-climax, don't-call-it-a-denouement chariot race is just....what? Who took over the directing of this episode? Tarantino? That Enter the Void guy**?
Anyway.
I liked reading The Iliad! Did I mention it's epic? So violent by the way, much like a Game of Thrones episode. The various bone-splitting, tendon-slicing, helmet-crushing, brain-spurting injuries and kills are gruesome and vividly rendered.
Here's what I didn't know: that there was so much Olympian gods chicanery involved in this. I really had spent four decades (or, three, I suppose) thinking it was more realistic than magical realism. Like, wheeeeeeee! gods just routinely step into our lives and do stuff. The whole (epic!) thing is honestly so similar to the impending biblical Christianity sensibility of war-fate-storytelling that I don't understand how anybody believes in any one monotheism god as opposed to all-those-pagan-gods. It's all part and parcel. Humans are so weird.
On that note, one time Zeus points out how terrible humans are. Zeus. Zeus! The jerkiest of jerks! He has this to say:
"For there is nothing more wretched than mankind / of all things that breathe and creep upon the earth. " -- Book 17
You are not kidding, son of Cronus.
Besides Achilles hanging around his ships lamenting how things are, and everybody but everybody considering women "prizes" to be won, taken, and stolen, the other main thing that happens throughout The Iliad are these wandering metaphors. "Then the Trojan warriors came," he'll say, "like a pack of wolves, who trot up the mountain, you know the kind I mean, with snouts toward the moon, like a lost wandering beast who knows its meal waits just around the bend, the kind of meal he can sink his teeth into, a wolf's tooth, the kind you wear around your neck; up the mountain they went like these wolves, as a clan of mystic seekers whose blood scent leads them on, like a man who has lost his only friend..."*** It goes on like that for a while, and then eventually the sentence ends and we can find out what the Trojans did.
Why did I read The Iliad now? (Besides the obvious why not, of course.) Well, lately I have been realizing that everyone seems to remember a whole lot more of the Greek mythology we read in junior high than I do. See, e.g., any given episode of Jeopardy! I was like WHY DO YOU ALL KNOW ALL THIS STUFF. Granted that it is definitely not because y'all have sat down and read The Iliad, I know that, but I am the Literary One, so I have to do the reading. I decided to invent an Ancient Greek Things class for myself and I have added some mythology and gods and classic epics books to my nearest stacks and I am filling in some knowledge gaps.
Also it's college football season, which is a great time to get hyped when "A dark cloud of Trojans now closes round..." (Book 16)
The Iliad!
p.s. Agamemnon reminds me a bit of tr$mptydumpty.
*yes I am aware it is of historical interest and some people care
**his name is Gaspar Noé. ugh.
***I made that up, but barely
