it's better than you'd think. the dismissive and cynical will glance at it and figure that it's basically ancient capeshit (and not even good capeshit, at that), an endless series of battles in which random people have their entire life set out in a few lines before someone actually relevant (read: favored by the gods) stabs them, while the interim is filled with contrivances and generally head-scratching motives.
despite all this frickery, it's quite moving. it's easy to see why many athenian tragedians (and their modern literary descendants) draw from the troy-mythos, considering that that's really what the iliad is at its core: tragic. it feels bad, most of the time. you should read it, if only because there are very few books that can conjure up that tragic feeling in the way homer can
The repeated phraseology and extended similes are always mocked (pic related) but that is a key part of the Homeric style. It is best looked at as an historical record of war as it was intended to be viewed as.
It really isn't. I'm forcing myself through it at the moment and it's a thing I'm reading at work. A bunch of guys fight and (for obvious reasons) it reads like my understanding of how an action movie works, whoop-dee-doo. Here we have a classic case of "it's old and wasn't lost therefore it's good".
Capricious butthole gods and a bunch of guys who care about stupid shit like fame and glory. Invent a gun, you idiots!
The old world, speaking strictly, knew but one poet, and named him "Homeros." The Greek word "Poietes," which the Latins—unable to translate it—reproduced as "Poeta," recurs most naïvely among the Provençals as "Trouvère," and suggested to our Middle-high Germans the term of "Finder," Gottfried von Strassburg calling the poet of Parzival a "Finder wilder Märe" ("finder of strange tales"). That "poietes"—of whom Plato averred that he had found for the Greeks their gods—would seem to have been preceded by the "Seer," much as the vision of that ecstatic shewed to Dante the way through Hell and Heaven. But the prodigy of the Greeks' sole poet—"the"—seems to have been that he was seer and poet in one; wherefore also they represented him as blind, like Tiresias. Whom the gods meant to see no semblance, but the very essence of the world, they sealed his eyes; that he might open to the sight of mortals that truth which, seated in Plato's figurative cavern with their backs turned outwards, they theretofore could see in nothing but the shadows cast by Show, This poet, as "seer," saw not the actual (das Wirkliche), but the true (das Wahrhaftige), sublime above all actuality; and the fact of his being able to relate it so faithfully to hearkening men that to them it seemed as clear and tangible as anything their hands had ever seized—this turned the Seer to a Poet.
Was he "Artist" also?
Whoso should seek to demonstrate the art of Homer, would have as hard a task before him as if he undertook to shew the genesis of a human being by the laborious experiments of some Professor—supramundane, if you will—of Chemistry and Physics. Nevertheless the work of Homer is no unconscious fashioning of Nature's, but something infinitely higher; perhaps, the plainest manifestation of a godlike knowledge of all that lives. Yet Homer was no Artist, but rather all succeeding poets took their art from him, and therefore is he called "the Father of Poetry" (Dichtkunst). All Greek genius is nothing else than an artistic réchauffé (Nachdichtung) of Homer; for purpose of this réchauffé, was first discovered and matured that "Techne" which at last we have raised to a general principle under name of the Art of Poetry, wrongheadedly including in it the "poietes" or "Finder der Märe."
The "ars poetica" of the Latins may rank as art, and from it be derived the whole artifice of verse-and-rhyme-making to our present day. If Dante once again was dowered with the Seer's eye—for he saw the Divine, though not the moving shapes of gods, as Homer—when we come to Ariosto things have faded to the fanciful refractions of Appearance; whereas Cervantes spied between the glintings of such arbitrary fancies the old-poetic world-soul's cloven quick, and sets that cleavage palpably before us in the lifelike actions of two figures seen in dream. And then, as if at Time's last stroke, a Scotsman's "second sight" grows clear to full clairvoyance of a world of history now lying lost behind us in forgotten documents, and its facts he tells to us as truthful fairy-tales told cheerily to listening children. But from that ars poetica, to which these rare ones owed no jot, has issued all that calls itself since Homer "Epic poetry"; and after him we have to seek the genuine epic fount in tales and sagas of the Folk alone, where we find it still entirely undisturbed by art. >To be sure, what nowadays advances from the feuilleton to clothe the walls of circulating libraries, has had to do with neither art nor poesy. The actually-experienced has at no time been able to serve as stuff for epic narration; and "second sight" for the never-witnessed does not bestow itself on the first romancer who passes by. A critic once blamed the departed Gutzkow for depicting a poet's love-affairs with baronesses and countesses, "things of which he certainly could never have had any personal experience"; the author most indignantly replied by thinly-veiled allu sions to similar episodes that actually had happened to himself. On neither side could the unseemly folly of our novel-writing have been more cryingly exposed.—Goethe, on the other hand, proceeded in his "Wilhelm Meister" as the artist to whom the poet had refused his collaboration in discovery of a satisfactory ending; in his "Wahlverwandtschaften" the lyric elegist worked himself into a seer of souls, but not as yet of living shapes. But what Cervantes had seen as Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa, dawned on Goethe's deep world-scrutiny as Faust and Mephistopheles; and these shapes beheld by his ownest eye now haunt the seeking artist as the riddle of an ineffable poet's-dream, which he thought, quite un-artistically but thoroughly sincerely, to solve in an impossible drama.
There may be something to learn from this, even for our members of the "German Poets'-grove" who feel neglected by their none too ardent publishers. For alas! one must say of their novels, their spirit's ripest fruits, that they have sprung from neither life nor tradition, but simply from theft and traduction. If neither the Greeks at their prime, nor any later great nation of culture, such as the Italians and Spaniards, could win from passing incidents the matter for an epic story, to you moderns this will presumably come a trifle harder: for the events they witnessed, at least were real phenomena; whilst ye, in all that rules, surrounds and dwells in you, can witness naught but masquerades tricked out with rags of culture from the wardrobe-shop and tags from the historical marine-store. The seer's eye for the ne'er-experienced the gods have always lent to none but their believers, as ye may ascertain from Homer or Dante. But ye have neither faith nor godliness.
>cheat skills demigod MC >gods that intervene to grant the MC fated victory >braindead power fantasy, male characters solely there to get owned and make MC look powerful, female characters solely there for fanservice
It's literally a native-isekai. Greeks were the progenitors of isekai and shonenshit tropes
I liked how realistic the antagonists are and how no one is the perfect archetype of justice. Hector has to be tricked into fighting Achilles by Athena because he was trying to flee from the battle for instance.
There isn’t right or wrong in Homer. There are clashing personalities who each seek to etch out a place for themselves and to gain in some way while the others oppose them for some reason. Agamemnon was responsible for the plague of Apollo sure, but in his role as king it was customary for him to take the woman as well as to take the one from Achilles whom had disrespected him with his vituperations. That is how it is.
It does however, Paris taking Helen also wasn’t exactly Paris’ fault as Aphrodite allowed her to leave with him. The whole thing is a crash course in the problems of etiquette in archaic Greek society because none of the main players really did anything wrong from the perspective of their social position
The enjoyment depends on the translation, I guess.
Before anyone asks, I'm ESL and read it translated in my own language, so I can't say which English translation is better.
The most accepted seem to be Pope's (It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but you must not call it Homer), gayles' and Fitzgerald's. I've also seen some Lattimore praise.
I went for Fitzgerald and enjoyed myself greatly. I might also go for Pope in the future on a reread.
Pope's Odyssey, at least, is incredible. I haven't read his Iliad. >He answer’d with his deed: his bloody hand >Snatch’d two, unhappy! of my martial band; >And dash’d like dogs against the stony floor: >The pavement swims with brains and mingled gore. >Torn limb from limb, he spreads his horrid feast, >And fierce devours it like a mountain beast: >He sucks the marrow, and the blood he drains, >Nor entrails, flesh, nor solid bone remains. >We see the death from which we cannot move, >And humbled groan beneath the hand of Jove. >His ample maw with human carnage fill’d, >A milky deluge next the giant swill’d; >Then stretch’d in length o’er half the cavern’d rock, >Lay senseless, and supine, amidst the flock. >To seize the time, and with a sudden wound >To fix the slumbering monster to the ground, >My soul impels me! and in act I stand >To draw the sword; but wisdom held my hand.
>Then forth the vengeful instrument I bring; >With beating hearts my fellows form a ring. >Urged me some present god, they swift let fall >The pointed torment on his visual ball. >Myself above them from a rising ground >Guide the sharp stake, and twirl it round and round. >As when a shipwright stands his workmen o’er, >Who ply the wimble, some huge beam to bore; >Urged on all hands, it nimbly spins about, >The grain deep-piercing till it scoops it out: >In his broad eye he whirls the fiery wood; >From the pierced pupil spouts the boiling blood; >Singed are his brows; the scorching lids grow black; >The jelly bubbles, and the fibres crack. >And as when armourers temper in the ford >The keen-edged pole-axe, or the shining sword, >The red-hot metal hisses in the lake, >Thus in his eye-ball hiss’d the plunging stake. >He sends a dreadful groan, the rocks around >Through all their inmost winding caves resound. >Scared we recoiled. Forth with frantic hand, >He tore and dash’d on earth and gory brand; >Then calls the Cyclops, all that round him dwell, >With voice like thunder, and a direful yell. >From all their dens the one-eyed race repair, >From rifted rocks, and mountains bleak in air. >All haste assembled, at his well-known roar, >Inquire the cause, and crowd the cavern door.
Even better. Read picrel if you can get ahold of a copy. Detienne and Vertant's Cunning Intelligence in Greek Society and Culture is another top tier book for really getting at metis and Odysseus as a character. Homer can be studied endlessly. I'm about to start the World of Odysseus.
There is a direct and straightforward line of progression from Mr. Samuel Butler’s secondary lit in the 1850s to Emily Wilson’s travesty nowadays. He is worse because he is what led to her being a thing.
>read The Iliad fall semester in my freshman English class in high school >read The Odyssey spring semester in my freshman English class in high school >watched Troy after we finished The Iliad >watch O Brother Where Are Thou? after we finished The Odyssey >teacher liked my end of unit project (I wrote, drew, and colored a comic re-telling the main plot points of The Odyssey) so much she kept it to show future students as an example in years to come
In hindsight, Mrs Ritter was too based. It was too long ago, so I don't know which translation we used, but it was in verse.
yes
it's better than you'd think. the dismissive and cynical will glance at it and figure that it's basically ancient capeshit (and not even good capeshit, at that), an endless series of battles in which random people have their entire life set out in a few lines before someone actually relevant (read: favored by the gods) stabs them, while the interim is filled with contrivances and generally head-scratching motives.
despite all this frickery, it's quite moving. it's easy to see why many athenian tragedians (and their modern literary descendants) draw from the troy-mythos, considering that that's really what the iliad is at its core: tragic. it feels bad, most of the time. you should read it, if only because there are very few books that can conjure up that tragic feeling in the way homer can
The repeated phraseology and extended similes are always mocked (pic related) but that is a key part of the Homeric style. It is best looked at as an historical record of war as it was intended to be viewed as.
It really isn't. I'm forcing myself through it at the moment and it's a thing I'm reading at work. A bunch of guys fight and (for obvious reasons) it reads like my understanding of how an action movie works, whoop-dee-doo. Here we have a classic case of "it's old and wasn't lost therefore it's good".
Capricious butthole gods and a bunch of guys who care about stupid shit like fame and glory. Invent a gun, you idiots!
The old world, speaking strictly, knew but one poet, and named him "Homeros." The Greek word "Poietes," which the Latins—unable to translate it—reproduced as "Poeta," recurs most naïvely among the Provençals as "Trouvère," and suggested to our Middle-high Germans the term of "Finder," Gottfried von Strassburg calling the poet of Parzival a "Finder wilder Märe" ("finder of strange tales"). That "poietes"—of whom Plato averred that he had found for the Greeks their gods—would seem to have been preceded by the "Seer," much as the vision of that ecstatic shewed to Dante the way through Hell and Heaven. But the prodigy of the Greeks' sole poet—"the"—seems to have been that he was seer and poet in one; wherefore also they represented him as blind, like Tiresias. Whom the gods meant to see no semblance, but the very essence of the world, they sealed his eyes; that he might open to the sight of mortals that truth which, seated in Plato's figurative cavern with their backs turned outwards, they theretofore could see in nothing but the shadows cast by Show, This poet, as "seer," saw not the actual (das Wirkliche), but the true (das Wahrhaftige), sublime above all actuality; and the fact of his being able to relate it so faithfully to hearkening men that to them it seemed as clear and tangible as anything their hands had ever seized—this turned the Seer to a Poet.
Was he "Artist" also?
Whoso should seek to demonstrate the art of Homer, would have as hard a task before him as if he undertook to shew the genesis of a human being by the laborious experiments of some Professor—supramundane, if you will—of Chemistry and Physics. Nevertheless the work of Homer is no unconscious fashioning of Nature's, but something infinitely higher; perhaps, the plainest manifestation of a godlike knowledge of all that lives. Yet Homer was no Artist, but rather all succeeding poets took their art from him, and therefore is he called "the Father of Poetry" (Dichtkunst). All Greek genius is nothing else than an artistic réchauffé (Nachdichtung) of Homer; for purpose of this réchauffé, was first discovered and matured that "Techne" which at last we have raised to a general principle under name of the Art of Poetry, wrongheadedly including in it the "poietes" or "Finder der Märe."
The "ars poetica" of the Latins may rank as art, and from it be derived the whole artifice of verse-and-rhyme-making to our present day. If Dante once again was dowered with the Seer's eye—for he saw the Divine, though not the moving shapes of gods, as Homer—when we come to Ariosto things have faded to the fanciful refractions of Appearance; whereas Cervantes spied between the glintings of such arbitrary fancies the old-poetic world-soul's cloven quick, and sets that cleavage palpably before us in the lifelike actions of two figures seen in dream. And then, as if at Time's last stroke, a Scotsman's "second sight" grows clear to full clairvoyance of a world of history now lying lost behind us in forgotten documents, and its facts he tells to us as truthful fairy-tales told cheerily to listening children. But from that ars poetica, to which these rare ones owed no jot, has issued all that calls itself since Homer "Epic poetry"; and after him we have to seek the genuine epic fount in tales and sagas of the Folk alone, where we find it still entirely undisturbed by art.
>To be sure, what nowadays advances from the feuilleton to clothe the walls of circulating libraries, has had to do with neither art nor poesy. The actually-experienced has at no time been able to serve as stuff for epic narration; and "second sight" for the never-witnessed does not bestow itself on the first romancer who passes by. A critic once blamed the departed Gutzkow for depicting a poet's love-affairs with baronesses and countesses, "things of which he certainly could never have had any personal experience"; the author most indignantly replied by thinly-veiled allu sions to similar episodes that actually had happened to himself. On neither side could the unseemly folly of our novel-writing have been more cryingly exposed.—Goethe, on the other hand, proceeded in his "Wilhelm Meister" as the artist to whom the poet had refused his collaboration in discovery of a satisfactory ending; in his "Wahlverwandtschaften" the lyric elegist worked himself into a seer of souls, but not as yet of living shapes. But what Cervantes had seen as Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa, dawned on Goethe's deep world-scrutiny as Faust and Mephistopheles; and these shapes beheld by his ownest eye now haunt the seeking artist as the riddle of an ineffable poet's-dream, which he thought, quite un-artistically but thoroughly sincerely, to solve in an impossible drama.
There may be something to learn from this, even for our members of the "German Poets'-grove" who feel neglected by their none too ardent publishers. For alas! one must say of their novels, their spirit's ripest fruits, that they have sprung from neither life nor tradition, but simply from theft and traduction. If neither the Greeks at their prime, nor any later great nation of culture, such as the Italians and Spaniards, could win from passing incidents the matter for an epic story, to you moderns this will presumably come a trifle harder: for the events they witnessed, at least were real phenomena; whilst ye, in all that rules, surrounds and dwells in you, can witness naught but masquerades tricked out with rags of culture from the wardrobe-shop and tags from the historical marine-store. The seer's eye for the ne'er-experienced the gods have always lent to none but their believers, as ye may ascertain from Homer or Dante. But ye have neither faith nor godliness.
>cheat skills demigod MC
>gods that intervene to grant the MC fated victory
>braindead power fantasy, male characters solely there to get owned and make MC look powerful, female characters solely there for fanservice
It's literally a native-isekai. Greeks were the progenitors of isekai and shonenshit tropes
I liked how realistic the antagonists are and how no one is the perfect archetype of justice. Hector has to be tricked into fighting Achilles by Athena because he was trying to flee from the battle for instance.
>native-isekai
Why are you guys using this word? You know, we have a word for it, right?
no
No, it's better.
Definitely worth reading, Odyssey is better in my opinion but The Iliad is definitely worth reading.
Yes. Too many quotable lines tbh.
True. “You sack of wine!”is one of the greatest insults in literature. I use it frequently.
Was Agamemnon right?
There isn’t right or wrong in Homer. There are clashing personalities who each seek to etch out a place for themselves and to gain in some way while the others oppose them for some reason. Agamemnon was responsible for the plague of Apollo sure, but in his role as king it was customary for him to take the woman as well as to take the one from Achilles whom had disrespected him with his vituperations. That is how it is.
No. Him taking Briseis directly mirrors Paris taking Helen, the cause of the entire war.
It does however, Paris taking Helen also wasn’t exactly Paris’ fault as Aphrodite allowed her to leave with him. The whole thing is a crash course in the problems of etiquette in archaic Greek society because none of the main players really did anything wrong from the perspective of their social position
Not really. I understand the historical and cultural value, but I didn't really enjoy reading it.
The enjoyment depends on the translation, I guess.
Before anyone asks, I'm ESL and read it translated in my own language, so I can't say which English translation is better.
The most accepted seem to be Pope's (It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but you must not call it Homer), gayles' and Fitzgerald's. I've also seen some Lattimore praise.
I went for Fitzgerald and enjoyed myself greatly. I might also go for Pope in the future on a reread.
I read Lattimore and enjoyed it immensely.
Pope's Odyssey, at least, is incredible. I haven't read his Iliad.
>He answer’d with his deed: his bloody hand
>Snatch’d two, unhappy! of my martial band;
>And dash’d like dogs against the stony floor:
>The pavement swims with brains and mingled gore.
>Torn limb from limb, he spreads his horrid feast,
>And fierce devours it like a mountain beast:
>He sucks the marrow, and the blood he drains,
>Nor entrails, flesh, nor solid bone remains.
>We see the death from which we cannot move,
>And humbled groan beneath the hand of Jove.
>His ample maw with human carnage fill’d,
>A milky deluge next the giant swill’d;
>Then stretch’d in length o’er half the cavern’d rock,
>Lay senseless, and supine, amidst the flock.
>To seize the time, and with a sudden wound
>To fix the slumbering monster to the ground,
>My soul impels me! and in act I stand
>To draw the sword; but wisdom held my hand.
>Then forth the vengeful instrument I bring;
>With beating hearts my fellows form a ring.
>Urged me some present god, they swift let fall
>The pointed torment on his visual ball.
>Myself above them from a rising ground
>Guide the sharp stake, and twirl it round and round.
>As when a shipwright stands his workmen o’er,
>Who ply the wimble, some huge beam to bore;
>Urged on all hands, it nimbly spins about,
>The grain deep-piercing till it scoops it out:
>In his broad eye he whirls the fiery wood;
>From the pierced pupil spouts the boiling blood;
>Singed are his brows; the scorching lids grow black;
>The jelly bubbles, and the fibres crack.
>And as when armourers temper in the ford
>The keen-edged pole-axe, or the shining sword,
>The red-hot metal hisses in the lake,
>Thus in his eye-ball hiss’d the plunging stake.
>He sends a dreadful groan, the rocks around
>Through all their inmost winding caves resound.
>Scared we recoiled. Forth with frantic hand,
>He tore and dash’d on earth and gory brand;
>Then calls the Cyclops, all that round him dwell,
>With voice like thunder, and a direful yell.
>From all their dens the one-eyed race repair,
>From rifted rocks, and mountains bleak in air.
>All haste assembled, at his well-known roar,
>Inquire the cause, and crowd the cavern door.
Even better. Read picrel if you can get ahold of a copy. Detienne and Vertant's Cunning Intelligence in Greek Society and Culture is another top tier book for really getting at metis and Odysseus as a character. Homer can be studied endlessly. I'm about to start the World of Odysseus.
Lattimore is great.
>robert gayles
i'm reading the one by samuel BUTler
>she isn't reading Emily Wilson's complicated translation
Ugh, I'm getting the ick.
Mediocre translation and a mediocre classicist. He is the man responsible for the Homer was a woman meme.
It just made Homer more modern
>Hector calls out to his horses: “Now Swiftfoot, Blondie, Flame, and godlike Sparkle,”
There is a direct and straightforward line of progression from Mr. Samuel Butler’s secondary lit in the 1850s to Emily Wilson’s travesty nowadays. He is worse because he is what led to her being a thing.
Oh I am sorry. I intended this
comment for this comment
Samuel Butler authored Authoress of the Odyssey. Still though my point does stand.
Yeh, also, why can't the Aeneid be as good as the Iliad and the Odyssey, I'm bored as frick
Aeneid > Iliad > Odyssey
Hello Augustus
About 80 pages away from finishing it. It’s been a great read. I enjoy the verse format. Can’t wait to start the Odyssey.
Yes but the Pope translation instead.
>read The Iliad fall semester in my freshman English class in high school
>read The Odyssey spring semester in my freshman English class in high school
>watched Troy after we finished The Iliad
>watch O Brother Where Are Thou? after we finished The Odyssey
>teacher liked my end of unit project (I wrote, drew, and colored a comic re-telling the main plot points of The Odyssey) so much she kept it to show future students as an example in years to come
In hindsight, Mrs Ritter was too based. It was too long ago, so I don't know which translation we used, but it was in verse.
Ttt
Tttt