The Iliad

[osprey_archer]

I finished the Iliad! Actually I finished it a bit ago, but I’ve spent some time mulling over the best way to explain the weird experience that is listening to this ancient epic, and finally hit on this one: it’s like watching someone playing a video game. Occasionally there’s a cut scene where some plot happens, but mostly it’s just fight scene after fight scene and “then his eyeballs popped out of his head because Diomedes hit him with a rock so hard.”

They hit each other with rocks a lot. Also, no one’s armor works unless a god is literally standing there going “Function, armor!”

You know which Iliad character has been totally shafted by history? Diomedes. There’s a cleaner named after Ajax, a tendon named after Achilles, and a word based on Odysseus’s name (admittedly, for the Odyssey and not the Iliad, but still), but Diomedes makes like 50% of the kills in this book (not a scientific estimate) and have I ever heard of him before? NO. The unfairness. He actually wounded the goddess Aphrodite! And lived to tell the tale!

There does not appear to be a follow-up story where Aphrodite gets her revenge by making Diomedes fall in love with someone totally unsuitable, like a ninety-year-old swineherd or something. How can you let this insult stand, Aphrodite? Athena turned a lady into a spider for way less.

Comments

[kore]

//squints Is Diomedes the one who gets tricked by the guest-friend of my fathers thing? At this distance it's hard to remember.

[osprey_archer]

There's definitely a guest-friend of my father's thing, but I'm not sure if it's a trick. Maybe it comes back to haunt him later?

[marycatelli]

He reappears in medieval legend as the guy who seduced Cressida from Troilus.

[osprey_archer]

See, that does not sound like Aphrodite smiting him. That sounds like Aphrodite blessing him, in fact.

Maybe he made some really nice sacrifices at her altar to make up for wounding her.

[littlerhymes]

Aphrodite played the long game - everyone else got memorialised by brand names, body parts and the like, but Diomedes? Pfft, a footnote! Revenge is best served very very cold.

[osprey_archer]

A sound theory! I like it.

[thisbluespirit]

I knew Diomedes! He's the one that runs off with Cressida, and in Doctor Who, Steven pretends to be him and Vicki Cressida, except that she runs off with Troilus and stays in Troy with him. (Companion leaving scenes could be really random in Classic Who. "Have decided to stay in Troy, what could go wrong, byeeee!")

Well done on having made it to the end. Are you also going to do the Odyssy or was that enough for one year?

[osprey_archer]

The library also has the Odyssey read by Dan Stevens, and my friend the classics Ph.D. assures me that the Odyssey is way less hack-and-slash and more entertaining in modern terms, so I might do it this year... But it might get pushed to next year depending how long it takes me to recover from the Iliad.