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What You’ll Love about… The Iliad
Not everyone loves The Iliad. It is old. It is long. It is violent. It can be dull for long stretches. It focuses on the problems of kings and princes, which I don’t care a lot about. It doesn’t represent women very well. But the struggle between Achilles and Agamemnon is one everyone will probably face multiple times in their lives. You will probably be in a situation where someone you despise has authority over you, and there won’t be much you can do about it. The payoff in the end is one of the most satisfying moments I’ve experienced in literature, so stick with it until the end, and I think you’ll be impressed.
The Iliad was constructed by many people over the span of many centuries, but many sources still insist on attributing The Iliad to an author: Homer, the blind poet. This is ridiculous. Homer isn’t real. He never existed. I don’t know why people insist on perpetuating this fiction. I guess it goes to show how powerful tradition can be in overriding inconvenient facts.
Most sources will probably tell you that Achilles is the hero of The Iliad. You should think critically about this. From my point of view, Achilles isn’t very heroic. He lacks restraint in his conflict with Agamemnon. He makes an astonishing request to Thetis when he asks her to beg Zeus to give the Trojan forces (yes, Trojan, not Greek) the advantage in battle. Achilles overreacts to…
