Book Review: The Iliad

Here is a quick summary. Thisguy the son of Fatherguy threw his spear at Thatguy and it struck him in this very specific body part, causing this other specific body part to spill onto the ground, and he died. While Thisguy was stripping the armor off of Thatguy's body, Thisotherguy threw his spear at Thisguy and it pierced some specific body part so that he never returned home to Fatherguy in Theirhomeland.

I now understand why my ninth grade English teacher made us read The Odyssey instead. To those of you who were stuck with The Iliad: I'm sorry. And to those of you who find yourselves facing The Iliad in the future, remember this: read the first chapter and the last eight chapters and use the above summary for anything in between. As riveting as the lists of Achaean generals can be, I suggest you cut directly to the lengthy dialogue and abrupt ending.

The only thing that most of us know about The Iliad is that the city of Troy gets sacked by the Achaeans because of some girl named Helen. Dig a little deeper and we might mention something about a wooden horse that has since become a household description of a type of computer viruses. But the horse fails to make an appearance in The Iliad. Instead, it appears in the fifth chapter of The Odyssey in a brief story tucked into one of those dialogues I mentioned. The Iliad ends with the death and funeral of Hector the son of Priam who was killed by Achilles for killing his friend Patroclus. Sound familiar?

Redeeming value: If you can suffer through it, The Iliad offers a window into the ancient Greek mind. In this world view, there are two levels of reality. On the surface, humans love, fight and travel as they will. But behind the scenes, a hierarchy of gods controls the human world through direct or indirect intervention. Some gods control simple natural forces while others have more developed realms. This worldview answers the failure to the gods to answer prayers by positing god against god in competing schemes. Even the strongest god falls prey to the tricks of others. In addition, there is an overarching sense of fate that controls humanity, to which even the gods must submit. This is just the basics of the Greek worldview that dominated the ancient near east.

Bottom line: Someone needs to hire me so that I have better things to do with my free time.