Title The Iliad Series --- Author Homer Cover Art --- Publisher Collector's Library - 2004 First Printing --- Category Mythology Warnings Graphic battles Main Characters Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Paris Main Elements Gods

The Iliad is one of the finest of all the great works that have been handed down to use from Classical Antiquity. Paris, a Trojan prince, having won Helen as his prize for judging a beauty contest between the goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, abducted her from her Greek husband Menelaus and transported her to Troy. The Greeks, enraged by this audacity and devastated by the loss of the most beautiful woman in the world, set sail to Troy and began the long siege of the city. The Iliad narrates the events ten years into the war, describing the anger of Achilles which results in the death of Patroclus and Achilles' mourning of him and avenging his murder. It has had a far-reaching impact on Western literature and culture, inspiring writers, artists and classical composers across the ages. Even though it was written more than two thousand years ago, The Iliad remains both powerful and enthralling.

I wanted to do a gods/angels/demons reading theme for the year, and to start it off I wanted to go back to some of the source materials. I was surprised to find how many reactions I had to reading The Iliad, and while yes, after a while the repetition and the battle after battle after battle does start to drag a bit, it was hardly a total bore which is what I was kind of expecting. I took some notes as I was reading, perhaps I'll just go through those.

First, I would actually recommend watching the movie first, or at least reading up on the background. We are dropped right in the middle of the story with the Greeks already besieging Troy for the past 10 years and you are pretty much expected to know who everyone is. Fortunately I knew enough going in. It doesn't start in the middle of a battle though, it starts with Agamemnon (the leader of the the Greeks) bickering with Achilles (his best warrior) over the fact that Agamemnon has to return a girl he took as a prize since Apollo is cursing the Greeks with a plague in revenge. But he's the big cheese! How could he possibly give his booty when the other lesser men around him get to keep theirs...so he decides that if he has to give up his girl, he'll take Achilles' girl instead. Achilles takes this as such a big insult, he won't fight for three quarters of the book even as his fellow Greeks get slaughtered. Basically the first chapter makes it very clear that both Agamemnon and Achilles are both petty jerks. I mean, the poor girl, but no one cares what she thinks, after all she's just an object to be owned...

So yeah, I mean girls don't play a big role. There is Helen, who is the prize everyone is fighting for, but that's all she is. The women don't do anything but bemoan their fate and beat their breast if their husbands are killed and worry about being taken as a spoil of war. At one point the Greeks are having competitions and for wrestling, first prize was a cooking pot worth 12 oxen, and a woman who was skilled at weaving was the second prize, valued at 4 oxen. Nice, worth less than the pot she will cook with. Thus keep this in mind going into it, this is historical, as well as testosterone heavy. And I've always found that kind of odd about the Greeks, given that Athena is a war god (and also kind of an engineer) women were pretty well helpless in ancient Greek society. Now, I'm reading the Legends of the Ring which is Norse/Germanic mythology and when a woman's husband is killed she's happy to grab a sword and lop off a few heads of her own, women could kick ass there. Amazing contrast between the two (plus unrelated I found that it was believed the Asagard and Troy is the same place, how weird!)

Now back to the Paris/Helen thing, Helen clearly doesn't care for Paris at all, he's her captor. I'd always heard this big love story between them but she just wants to go home to her real husband and seems to think Paris is a bit of a wuss. And I don't understand why Priam, and his fifty other sons, don't force Paris to give her back. Tthey try to reason with him, but he refuses and so they defend him with their lives (and the dude is a total coward, letting everyone die for him while he runs and hides in Helen's bedroom). Nobody had to die if his father just put his foot down and said, "Son, I don't care that you think she's pretty, she's not yours and we aren't going to throw away the lives our of best warriors so you can canoodle with her", but nope. Priam is willing to lose his city for a bratty son who doesn't want to give up his toys, toys which aren't even his mind you, Paris is a thief, stealing from his host when he was a guest.

And sense a lot of things don't make. The gods for example. I didn't expect the gods to be physical characters in the books. Not only do they influence the fight, they get down there and walk amongst the warriors sometimes fighting by their sides. But they never seem to be able to decide whose side they are on, within minutes they will go from protecting a Trojan, to allowing the Greeks to route them. I decided in the end, what Homer was really describing is the randomness of a real battle, which would require the gods to be incapable of picking a side and sticking to it. Oh and you know that Deus Ex Machina term? It's literal here where a god jumps in and saves someone or other who would otherwise die and end the story early.

Another scene that made no sense...the Greeks have been sitting on that beach sieging Troy for the past 10 years right? So Priam brings Helen up to the wall of the city and then starts pointing people out asking who they are...you've been fighting for 10 years and you still can recognize the major players outside your gates? I mean dude, did you hide in your basement for a decade and only now peeped over your wall to see who was there?

Now, the original was an epic poem, my translation was prose. I was kind of glad about that since poetry is so tricky to translate you either lose the beauty of the language (at which point it makes it boring to read as poetry) or you lose the meaning the words were intended to convey. But, it is still originally a poem, and it is still ancient, so the translator went with using thees and thous, the language is verbose, everyone having a title (Achilles is fleet of foot, a few others were of the great war cry), everyone keeps saying how wonderful they are, or how wonderful someone else is, they will stop in the middle of a battle to shout at each other to describe their exploits and how one is better than the other, and things will get repeated...a lot. Like Zeus will tell Iris to give Agamemnon a certain dream and he describes it, then Iris goes and verbatim repeats it to Agamemnon, then Agamemnon will wake up and tell his advisors word-for-word about the dream, then they'll gather everyone around and repeat it all over again...and Homer wasn't being paid by the word!

The battles are also very graphic. Now I guess this would be exciting stuff for the ancient Greek male reader, but as a modern woman, I was equally grossed out and occasionally outright laughing. I mean people frequently got a spear in their nipple (not chest, but nipple, he was very specific about that). Another guy got a rock to the forehead, smashed in his face so badly his eyes popped out and landed at his feet (sorry, that just sounds like a cartoon). Another guy gets an arrow through is buttock that comes out through his bladder (Ewww! but *giggle* he has an arrow in his butt!!!). Or the great scene at the end, where Achilles finally meets Hector. Hector strides out of the gates, sees Achilles heading right for him, has an "oh crap" moment and starts running...the pair of them run around the walls of Troy THREE TIMES! I just had a vision of a old-school cartoon with them zipping around with smoke coming from their heels and their legs a blur. And umm...ok I get when you kill someone you want the spoils, so in the middle of battle you stop, bend over, and strip the body for the armour (and apparently everyone has squires idling about to carry the stuff or lead the horses you won back to your hut, maybe there's a rule about not killing them?) while in the meantime there is a freaking battle ranging around you. And yes, sometimes a guy would get killed while he was busy with his loot instead of paying attention to what was going on around him. And the best *cough* is when they decided to fight over a body, and you'll get one guy grabbing the head, another pulling on the ankles and doing a tug of war on a corpse...yep, I'm definitely not into the same kind of imagery as those ancient Greek guys clearly were!

There are also about a billion characters who get named, and about half of them you get their entire lineage, though there's probably only about 20 that are worth remembering, everyone else is killed right about the time they are introduced. I wonder if Homer had piles of notes to keep track of everyone and who they were related to, or what god their bloodline decended from.

Ok, so if I had downloaded this book from an indie author I would probably say it was in desperate need of a good editor. There's the repetition, the scenes where characters do completely nonsensical things, and battles that just go on and on and on. But it's not an indie book, it's historical and in the end, and yet, it wasn't so boring that I had to give it up, I had to skim at times, but the occasional creative way of killing something could keep one reading. It's a non stop fight after all, and if some of the posing and boasting of the characters can make your eyes roll with their arrogance, it was still an adventure ride. And you got to see how the ancient Greeks viewed their gods, not how Rick Riordan portrays them (though frankly, they aren't much different!). It won't be a book for anyone, it does take effort to get all the way through it, maybe try to find a more modern friendly translation (thee and thou is unnecessarily archaic), but it's not the boring slog you might have believed it would be.

Oh...there's no Trojan horse though. Bit of a disappointment, though Achilles has a talking horse! Apparently it might show up in the "sequel", The Odyssey, which I'll read next month, will let you know...