I enjoyed the Odyssey – there was a sort of rough naivety about it that was lively, and gave me a sense of human minds looking out at the world at a time when the the Bronze Age was simply the thing you woke up to every morning – but I’m getting bored of the Iliad. I started losing interest during a seemingly endless account of a battle between ‘mighty’ ‘brave’ ‘handsome’ ‘god-like’ kings and princes: Thisos, Son of Thatos, ‘Lord of Horses’, ‘ruler of the fair city of…’ etc etc etc
The aim of it all is to raze to the ground a city, and kill or enslave all its inhabitants, because a prince from that city had the gall to kidnap the pretty wife of Menelaus and won’t give her back. (The besiegers also kidnap princesses and use them for sex, but that’s different, right, because this is war and that was just stealing?) I haven’t reached the end, and I don’t think I will, but I seem to remember from versions I read as a kid that, when Menelaus finally does recover Helen, he is briefly tempted to kill her because of all the trouble she’s ’caused’. But then he sees how pretty she is and changes his mind. Awww!
What tosh it all is, what utter tosh, this stuff we’ve been fed for centuries as something big and uplifting and heroic and important.
