Been a long time, been a long time, been a long...

So, I've been sick and busy, as usual.

Blogging definitely takes a back seat when the rest of life is filled up.

Anyway, finally finished reading The Iliad as translated by Richmond Lattimore.  Wow...It was a bit of a slog to read, mainly because of the format. The free verse has no spaces, anywhere, and so it doesn't give one a whole heck of a lot of white space on the page to rest one's eyes.  I'd have much rather have read a book that had another hundred pages or so, but let the eyes rest every once in a while.  When every line is the same length and the page is filled with lines, it is very hard not to either skip lines or reread lines, so I wasted a lot of time going backward and forward trying to figure out who was saying what.

Otherwise, it would have been eminently readable.  [When I move on to the Odyssey (not any time soon) I shall look for a prose version that isn't so uptight about maintaining line numbers with the text.]

That being said...I learned a few things and observed a few things:

• The Trojan Horse episode is nowhere in it.
• It is mainly about Achilleus (Achilles) throwing a strop over a very short period of time.  And nothing about his heel.
• The gods in the Greek worldview were extremely capricious and even Zeus couldn't figure out which side to take.
• Other than concepts such as honour and bravery and custom, there is no reference to objective right and objective wrong...Was this the ancient Greek worldview?
• The book has some of the goriest descriptions I have ever read, and they were wonderfully descriptive even in translation.
• The narrator gave even shrift to both the Achaians/Argives/Danaans on one side, and the Trojans on the other.  (However, the Trojans always needed divine intervention to make any advances in the battle, and the Greeks, for the most part, were on their own.)

Would I recommend it?  Well, it was nice to know that I have read it, so it does give one a bit of bragging rights.  And there were some bits of it that were a genuine pleasure to read.  In fact, I found there were parts I could not put down.  But knowing what I know now, I probably could have read the last six (out of 24) books or so of the cycle and still have been just as fulfilled.