[REVIEW] The Iliad by Homer
4/5 stars (★★★★)
"It is no small labor to rescue all mankind, / every mother's son." (15.169-170)
Rage — Goddess, Sing My Stupidly Long-Winded And Sarcastic Introduction Wherein I Try to Justify Why I’m Qualified to Read Homer Even Though Literally Everyone Can Read Homer
This is going to be another chaotic and unserious review from yours truly. I do indeed have two English degrees but I am in no way a Classics or Hellenistic scholar (nor do I know ancient Greek), so, to anyone who is actually a scholar of this time period/the literature and is choosing to read this in advance: I hope I at least amuse you with my . . . Musings . . . and, please, feel free to correct me on any of my presumptuous insights because I am going to go about this in a very silly and unavoidably ignorant manner. I know that I am a victim of modern misconceptions to these mythologies and I tried my best to educate myself as reasonably as I could before seriously diving into Homer for the first time. After about 50+ different Wikipedia and Britannica articles, 10 hour-long YouTube videos and video essays, and a humbly attentive, albeit lacking, literary appraisal of everything I knew about Classics (both from personal curiosity and the literal Classics classes I took in my undergrad), I think I’m ready to chat about it. I hope my future reviews for The Odyssey and The Aeneid aren't this long. This poor attempt at a disclaimer will be applied to them as well.
I didn’t expect to like The Iliad as much as I did (certainly not while I was reading it either; there were so many sections that dragged on), but here I am: A touch unhinged with it. I am no better than quite literally all of human history. When I was a kid the only significant glimpse I had of the Trojan War (other than the numberless unconscious references and nods to it that are constantly altered and embedded into the fabric of everyday society) was the 2004 Troy movie, which my conservative manosphere dad would watch over and over to reaffirm his antediluvian beliefs on militarism, masculinity, and how glory is only attained when you objectify women and homoerotically obsess over your fellow comrades as you passionately touch spear tips in the middle of epic battle on some beach or whatever.
Despite how he’d insist over and over on how good it was (He wanted me to be a boy so badly lol), I never actually sat down to watch the full movie with my dad because, even at seven years old, I knew it was whitewashed heteropatriarchal nonsense. But I’d see him rewatching it in the living room many times, so my childhood is reluctantly flecked with semi-vivid recollections of this movie. My dad made me believe it was this legendary masculine story about the glory of war and male honor, so when I got older I was never interested in reading The Iliad or other Greek epic poems -- even though everyone kept telling me I odyssey (oughtasee) the Trojan War’s sequel at least. (That joke was never funny).
But at 26 I decided to finally get into it. Since I’d had a very, very prolific Greek and Roman mythology phase growing up (which was exacerbated further by my adjacent and worryingly unhealthy Percy Jackson and the Olympians hyperfixation), I knew that, logically, I shouldn’t have been as intimidated as I was with Homer. I’ve read Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus. I’d also read Ovid’s Metamorphoses last summer, and, like every gay person of color with unrestricted internet access, I’d also served my time re-listening to Jorge Rivera-Herrans’ Epic: The Musical so often that he became my #1 artist for 2025. Naturally, I’ve also listened to Hadestown. I’ve dabbled in basic astrology. I was the best student in my small, mostly empty Latin class for three years in high school. (I have already made my modest testimonies regarding PJO, and, by extent The Heroes of Olympus series). Why I felt that I needed to compile a comprehensive résumé that proved my “qualifications” to read The Iliad, I do not know, but it probably has something to do with how I have unmedicated ADHD and just really like preparing for the literature I read in the same way one eagerly anticipates and plans for a vacation. Because literature is a vacation for me.
As a literary veteran, I wasn’t surprised to find that the original text of The Iliad is so gay, dramatic, flamboyant, and campy. It’s certainly sad, but it was also HILARIOUS.
The Hiliardious
The first text I sent to my friends upon finishing all 24 books and 15 693 lines was: “THAT WAS SO FUCKING FUNNYYYYYYYYY. I love seeing men suffer.” In fact, all the highlights on the epub version I had were quotes about men suffering, like, "There is nothing alive more agonized than man / of all that breathe and crawl across the earth" (17.515-516) and "How on earth can a wounded man make war?" (14.76).
Even the entire premise of the Trojan War is so funny because absolutely NO ONE wanted to be there. While doing preliminary research on The Iliad, I learned the backstories of how the main cast all somehow ended up in this dumpster-fire of a war group project and I was so fucking tickled.
Agamemnon basically had to hold Odysseus’ infant son Telemachus at gunpoint to make him join because, prior to him agreeing, he was trying really hard to act crazy (like, Hamlet-running-around-picking-fights-with-his-homeboys-about-flutes-crazy) so he wouldn’t have to leave Ithaca and his family. As much as I dislike Odysseus as a person, I cannot fault Athena for making him her chosen favorite because he is a natural-born clown and there is just something so endearing about how his only reason for joining the war was to protect his son and wife. Also, Odysseus being simultaneously the smartest character in the Trojan war and the one who arguably caused it all initially due to his mutually-assured destruction ploy when the suitors were vying for Helen is some great dramatic irony. (I love the how the Trojan War epic cycle more or less starts with a king -- Helen’s dad -- having choice paralysis between so many suitors, so young Odysseus proposes a solution that will peacefully solve the problem with minimal bloodshed whilst also ensuring he also walks away with some compensation -- Penelope -- but 20+ years later it all ends with Penelope being beset by a million suitors too, but this time Odysseus' solution is to just murder them all. Because screw peaceful diplomacy once it comes to my own wife, amirite?)
Similar to Odysseus, Hector was clocking in 9-5 like that one minimum-wage employee who definitely doesn’t wanna be here (he’d rather be at home massaging his wife’s feet probably) but unfortunately he is the only one keeping this Taco Bell from going under. He was cleaning up after his strapping goatherd brother’s fuckass horny mess and his utter exhaustion with having to be The Elder Brother™ and Crown Prince of Ilium™ was as relatable as it was entertaining. (Just let him go home to Andromache, for Chrissakes).
Achilles also had to be basically dragged kicking and screaming to Troy. He isn’t at all obligated to be there and he knows joining on the Achaean side dooms him to an early death. He also knows that, even though he’ll attain glory, he’s ultimately fated to fail and die, but he still decided to be an absolute fucking BRAT about it. Sure, it’s sad he’s on borrowed time, but is it really such a solemn death sentence if he spends an entire decade fucking around and making his angst-fest everyone else’s problem? He also spends most of the last year of the war on strike, sulking in his tent with prettyboy Patroclus and broodingly whipping out his dick at the Trojan slave girls he captures! He does this almost as much as he complains to his mom Thetis about how nobody gets how he should be everyone’s super special boy! Why doesn’t everyone see that he’s #not like other Greek heroes! Ugh! (Truly, Achilles is the ultimate manchild gym-rat who would’ve peaked in high school and, if he’d lived to middle age, ended up frequently greasy and grumbling at gas station bars about the so-called “glory days” and also his totally unpredictable late-stage erectile dysfunction that he got from chugging too much Monster soda and Myrmidon special edition Viagra). (I will hate more on Achilles later).
Moving on, an argument can be made for Menelaus wanting to be there, but the dude just wanted to get his wife and then bounce, which was pretty understandable once you remember he is basically the ancient world’s poster boy for cuckoldery.
Paris may have started all this shit, but he sure as hell couldn’t finish it. He was the very definition of fuck around and find out; Hector had to drag him out to the battlefield by ear everyday only for Aphrodite to pick him up all coquette all demure and drop him back into Helen’s bed so her OTP could kiss.
Man, even AGAMEMNON tried to go home.
In conclusion, NOBODY WANTED TO BE THERE. IT WAS ALL POINTLESS AND THEY ALL KNEW IT! Everybody’s primal, down-to-the-bones feral frustration with their frankly ludicrous and nonsensical circumstances made up for a wholly amusing comedy. I get that, overall, The Iliad is sad and war is horrible blah blah blah we can’t run away from fate, but it was genuinely so funny and there were so many funny parts, which I shall list here despite how nobody asked but I shan’t care:
The best parts in this whole poem were those heavily detailed descriptions of where a character was born, their lineage, what their father did five years before they were born, how their homeland was formed, how many girls they’ve raped, etc . . . only for them to get a spear through their skulls, throats, or square in between their nipples in the first battles of the chapters. (Homer really liked describing men’s nipples, thighs, and groin areas. Which could mean nothing!)
In Book 8, Hera made Zeus crash tf out (as she often does), and, being the manchild he is, says this iconic line: “None in the world a meaner bitch than you.” That made me holler. What a beautiful, peerless compliment. That’s why she’s the queen.
Again, in Book 14, Zeus -- who has the most serious case of ADD I’ve ever seen -- wanted to make things worse (when doesn’t he?) for the Achaeans, so Hera decides to seduce him long enough for the Greeks to push back the Trojans in battle. There’s a part where she dolls herself up and puts oil in her hair, giggling, kicking her feet, and then basically thrusts herself onto Zeus and he falls for it hook, line, and sinker. Their almighty sex was abominably hilarious. The way Homer describes them banging uglies is insane: They go at it for hours -- Sims-wahooing-under-the-blanket-style -- and, by the end of it, they both pass out from exhaustion. Meanwhile there’re thousands and thousands of men heroically dying out there in the goriest way possible, but no Homer’s suddenly narrating a B-rated porno with Zeus sexily putting Hera down on the grass and they’re breeding so hard that flowers bloomed from the wet ground and the musky soil was ripe from their holy ejaculate. It’s just so bizarre. And Homer kept bringing up the fact that Zeus and Hera were brother and sister too, so I felt like I was reading Flowers in the Attic fanfiction sprinkled in with wacky circus gymnastics because what bitchass positions are those two even doing to warrant this much crazy pathetic fallacy???
The sole reason Poseidon was pissed at the Trojans was so ludicrous, I couldn’t believe that was his problem. (But it was).
War in the ancient world was insane because most of this poem had guys killing each other in the most gory, most mutilated ways possible -- but only during the day, because when nighttime comes we go back to our tents at the beach so we may greet the ships bringing in all our wine. Once the booze has finally arrived we literally party all night and eat red meat and kiss each other while drunk and sing songs and then tomorrow morning we bury our dead and wonder why this war has gone on for 10 years. Can you imagine being the guys who had to transport and supply all that wine everyday? The tariffs must’ve been crazyyyyyy.
Ares got wounded in battle and his GF Aphrodite tried to take him away from the fighting, but Athena decided to be a beast and roasted both their asses, which left them blubbering pathetically in one another’s arms.
At one point Hera also punched Aphrodite in the tits.
(Athena and Hera had absolutely no shits to give in The Iliad.)
EVERYONE HATED APHRODITE AND DISRESPECTED HER LEFT AND RIGHT IT WAS SO FUNNY.
When the poem starts, Agamemnon (amongst his many fuckups) takes the Trojan girl Briseis, who was meant to be Achilles’ sidepiece, so Achilles goes and whines to Thetis, clinging at her robes sobbing, and asks her to tell Zeus to make the Trojans start winning against the Greeks out of spite. He literally pulls a tantrum and runs to his mommy, demanding she make the big meanies who aren’t letting him get what he wants die horribly in battle. Achilles really said, “We can have a little Greek carnage and Trojans massacring my countrymen -- as a treat. God forbid I go to therapy.”
During Paris’ big important duel to the death with Menelaus, Aphrodite feels bad for him and literally plucks him from the battle on the very austere grounds that he’s her blorbo. She dumps him in Helen’s bed far away from the battlefield and Helen starts her own one-woman self-loathing convention. Seriously: Helen’s intense degradation kink and how she repeatedly called herself a nasty whore and a dirty bitch every scene she was in definitely made her an interesting figure at the centre of all this chaos, but it was also Homer (and Robert Fagles, the translator) obviously being a sexist pig.
Book 10 was just Odysseus, Diomedes, and a bunch of other hoohas going stealth mode and doing a sneaky-sneaky all-boys side quest for fucksies. Literally nothing happens to progress the war while they’re marauding. It starts when Agamemnon and Menelaus propose they infiltrate Troy by themselves (like that’s gonna work) and there’s this part where they basically go, “Ah, yes, we must take Odysseus too, as he is the only one here who can think. Ah, how marvelously he thinks! Also he has beautiful naked hulking thighs!” Gotta love that Odysseus is literally the ONLY dude in the war that actually has a brain and doesn’t just jump into death traps for the sake of honor -- but, of course, he is also irrevocably dumb, as is proven when they actually go out on their little vigilante mission and Odysseus proceeds to attack the first Trojan scout they encounter, and, even though the poor guy is more than willing to tell them information, Odysseus just ??? Beheads him ??? And the entire episode doesn’t even amount to anything other than that. Like they steal a couple chariots and other hehe booty from Priam’s army, but then they scurry back to the beach evil chuckling to themselves over all the useless crap they plundered at the cost of some rando’s undeserved decapitation. Man.
Achilles’ entire crashout over Patroclus dying even though it was literally all his fault.
When Achilles killed so many Trojans that their corpses were clogging up a river so the god of the river manifested and was like, “Bro wtf stop I need to drown you now???” and Achilles was like “Hm! No! <3” and somehow survived????
Apollo in mortal cosplay taunting Achilles like he’s wagging some shiny carrot stick in front of a dog so Achilles chases him around long enough for the Trojans to get back into the city while Mr. Invincible (Except the Heel, though I realize that’s a recent add-on to the myth) was essentially playing fetch with Phoebus??? And when Apollo’s finally like “nyehehehe it was I! The deathless god of the sun all along! I have tricked you, you gullible ADHD fuck!” Achilles falls yet again for his divine ragebait and thus wants to kill Hector even more now.
AND THAT’S NOT THE ONLY NOTABLE CHASE SCENE EITHER BECAUSE ACHILLES DOES IT ALL OVER AGAIN WITH HECTOR AROUND TROY AFTER THEY FINALLY MEET UP?!?!? THEY CHASE EACH OTHER ROAD RUNNER AND WIL. E COYOTE STYLE IT READS LIKE FUCKING SLAPSTICK.
When Hector actually dies his mom Queen Hecuba takes out her full boob in broad daylight and starts screaming and crying about how once upon a time he used to suck on her boob but now he’s dead and that’s lol rippies.
King Priam’s reaction to his son’s death was to cover himself in shit. Valid.
Book 24 starts with Achilles longing for “Patroclus’ manhood, his gallant heart.” Like okay. (There were many homoerotic moments in this poem, but that one had me actually raising my eyebrow at 4 AM in the morning because you gay bitches cannot be serious).
The whole war is interrupted by literal Olympic games for Patroclus’ funeral bruh. Achilles hosts the entire thing and gives off prizes that he just had lying around to whoever won the trials, but he himself sits out from playing because he already knows he’d smoke everyone’s asses.
Apparently in Sophocles’ Ajax play, these games were also when Ajax DIES because he loses to Odysseus at some point, so he kills himself out of shame. WHAT?!?!?!? THAT’S IT?!?!??! YOU LIVE THROUGH TEN YEARS OF THE TROJAN WAR JUST TO COMMITT SUICIDE OVER THAT CHUD BEATING YOU???!!
(Yeah everything was so out of pocket from start to finish. Book 23 felt like a fever dream).
Homer also says that “[w]henever renewed grief for the loss of his friend overcomes him, [Achilles] drags Hector’s body around Patroclus’ grave.” Like yeah just to take the edge off. I needed a break from my sad times black parade games anyway might as well take my slain enemy’s royal desecrated corpse out for a test drive. Even before starting The Iliad I was already such an Achilles hater, but you gotta respect his unmatched haterism and theatricality. He was here for a bloodthirsty cunty gayboy time, not a long time.
Hector >>> Achilles
Everybody else but Achilles was interesting to me, although I did like the Trojans a lot more than the Achaeans/Greeks. Menelaus was insufferable, but he for real dodged whatever primordial curse was placed upon the House of Atreus just by being proximate to his shithole brother Agamemnon, who is significantly so much more hateable that the curse just lasered in on him instead. Odysseus made me laugh; he is my eternal jester. Diomedes was a beast. I also really liked Priam. But Hector was my favorite.
In the Troy movie, Agamemnon says, "Hector fights for his country, Achilles fights only for himself!" This was an excellent quote to sum up both the warriors -- namely, one is actually a real hero and the other’s a selfish incel who’d call me a racial slur after coming out of discus practice or something.
The stark contrast between Hector and Achilles was astounding: Here is the difference between a true protector and a lame gloryseeker. As stupid as heteropatriarchal patriotism is, Hector was actually a real man. Even though Achilles was a better fighter (he was basically groomed to be), he was just a snot-nosed little boy constantly throwing a tantrum compared to Hector. Hector loved his family, fought for his country, and, even though he knew he would lose to Achilles, he still went out there for all ten years and fought with courage.
I loved Hector: He is a timeless hero and a true man. He doesn’t fight for glory. He would rather die nameless than sit back and watch his family and country suffer meaninglessly. He's not a legend, but he faces one head-on without turning back. That’s real strength. What's more, he does all this for something that's not even his business. His stupidass brother made the mistake of abducting Helen, but, since he’s the heir to Troy, since he’s a true leader, Hector still fights in a war that he viciously resents. He has no illusions of grandeur or egotistical dreams of becoming one of the greats -- he really just does it for love and protection of what he loves.
Bernard Knox summarizes my thoughts well in his introduction to my edition (and yes I am going to include huge block quotes here because I think Knox’s treatment of Hector’s character is so eloquently done):
“[I]f it is to survive it will do so because of the devotion, courage and incessant efforts of one man, Priam’s son Hector. On him falls the whole burden of the war. He is a formidable warrior, formidable enough so that in Book 7 no Achaean volunteers to face him in single combat until they are tongue-lashed by Menelaus and then by Nestor. But war is not his native element. Unlike Achilles, he is clearly a man made for peace, for those relationships between man and man, and man and woman, which demand sympathy, persuasion, kindness and, where firmness is necessary, a firmness expressed in forms of law and resting on granted authority. He is a man who appears most himself in his relationships with others. It is significant that our first view of him in action is not in combat but in an attempt to stop it.”
Knox later goes on to add,
“But deep in his heart he knows that the effort is futile, that Troy is doomed. He realizes what that will mean for her and hopes that he will not live to hear her cries as she is led off to slavery. He is distracted from this dark vision of the future by the terrified cries of his own baby son, who recoils screaming from the bronze-clad man who moves to embrace him. Forebodings of the future, no matter how well-founded, have to be brushed aside if life is to go on, and Hector now speaks in more hopeful terms as he prays that his son will grow up to be a greater man than his father and then comforts his sorrowing wife. This scene reveals the greatness of Hector as a complete man . . . It is Hector’s misfortune that Troy is not at peace but at war. He must return to the battle, which now, in accordance with the will of Zeus, turns against the Achaeans. Hector fights courageously, stubbornly, at times exultantly in the near madness of victorious slaughter. But even this berserk fury is still the fighting spirit of the man of the polis, the protector of the community, not the individual rage for glory and booty of a Diomedes or an Achilles.”
If anyone could be called a hero, Hector is one. I loved the narration Odysseus says at the end of Troy (2004): "If they ever tell my story, let them say I walked with giants . . . Let them say I lived in the time of Hector, tamer of horses." Above all, everyone revered him with respect -- more so than fear or loathing, because he was doing what he knew was right, even in the face of ultimate doom. He represents tenacity and an indomitable human spirit, embodying perfectly both the stupid folly and enviable tragedy of mankind.
Achilles, meanwhile, is a washed-out legend to me, but if I was allowed to yap about how much he bores me, I would be here all day. One of the only things Achilles has done that’s impressed me was when he shamelessly chose to drag Hector’s corpse from his chariot after their battle. This part in The Iliad is rightfully framed as an act of the extremest disrespect: a cruel, brutal show of triumph and pettiness. And I agree, but that's really underselling both Achilles' HBIC intention and the unfathomable horror the Trojans must’ve felt as they watched it happen.
We know as the readers that Hector's corpse is divinely protected, so it can't be damaged by Achilles or the Greeks; all that effectively happens to his body is that it gets kind of dirty. But under normal circumstances, -- for which we are given graphic privy to throughout this poem because of Homer’s badass descriptions of how these men are killed on the field -- the physical reality of dragging a corpse along rough, stony ground for miles along the Turkish landscape would’ve resulted in severe disfigurement -- to put it lightly. It would’ve been gross. First, the skin would be peeled off like fruit slices, then the soft tissues would rip away, and then the extremities would start to detach. It would’ve been sick, gory, unsanitary, and heartbreaking. There’s also the slight medical possibility that Hector might’ve even been still alive when Achilles was dragging him (I doubt he checked for a heartbeat after spearing through the guy’s throat), so it truly was unimaginably brutal.
And Achilles (who doesn't know that Hector's body has been granted divine stasis) doesn't just want to parade his enemy's corpse around like a trophy, he wants to tear it apart like a butcher. He wants the corpse to not resemble a human being anymore. That's what the gods are preventing from happening; they're not just keeping the corpse fresh for Priam to pick up and bring home later. The Olympians know Achilles wants Hector's blood and flesh to be scattered across the country he died in vain fighting for; he wants to make it impossible for Hector's family to gather the pieces of him to give proper funeral rites to, meaning Hector's spirit wouldn’t find passage into the Underworld and, as the Troy movie states, “You won’t have eyes tonight. You won’t have ears or a tongue. You will wander the Underworld blind, deaf, and dumb and all the dead will know: This is Hector, the fool who thought he killed Achilles.” Like, holy shit??? It wasn’t just personal, dude. It was such a fucked-up demonstration of colossal sacrilege and defilement that it came close to intimacy.
On Achilles, Knox says, “Heroes might be, usually were, violent, antisocial, destructive, but they offered an assurance that in some chosen vessels humanity is capable of superhuman greatness, that there are some human beings who can deny the imperatives which others obey in order to live.” I agree. When he did that to Hector’s body, Achilles surrendered his humanity. I knew I wasn’t watching a person anymore, I was witnessing a creature of the same ilk as the savage Titans.
I really liked Knox’s analysis of Achilles as achieving both godhood and total barbarity:
“This is no formal duel, and Achilles is no Ajax; he is hardly even human: he is godlike, both greater and lesser than a man. . . . Achilles exults over his fallen enemy, his words bring home again the fact that he is fighting for himself alone; this is the satisfaction of a personal hatred. The reconciliation with Agamemnon and the Greeks was a mere formality to him, and he is still cut off from humanity, a prisoner of his self-esteem, his obsession with honor — the imposition of his identity on all men and all things.”
However, I really just hate him, so I disagree with Knox that, by the end of the poem, Achilles “has come at last to the level of humanity, and humanity at its best; he has forgotten himself and his wrongs in his sympathy for another man.” I don’t see him as the greatest tragic Greek hero. He feared oblivion so much that he made himself incapable of compassion, of a human spirit -- and thus of anything worth actually fighting for.
Mount Ida More like Mount IDGAF
And this brings me to the gods. In his introduction, Knox says, “The Olympian gods are a family like many a family on earth. It has an all-powerful, philandering father, who cannot be defied but may be deceived, a watchful, jealous and intriguing wife, and sons and daughters who vie for their parents’ favor as they pursue their individual aims.” This description was funny, but I found it took for granted the Western idea of a patriarchal family unit. It made me wonder how the Trojan War might’ve gone if the gods were, say, Egyptian, who had different notions of what makes up a “family.” I wondered: Which sides would Osiris or Isis have been on? Would Horus and Set’s infamous rivalry parallel something like Hector and Achilles’? Would Anubis had been pissed with the torrential backlog of souls he would’ve had to judge using the feather and scale? These are the ridiculous questions that haunt me. It’s truly a blessing that I never went into Classics or anything having to do with studying folklore, fairytales, mythology, etc.
Idiotic hypotheticals aside, the entire Iliad from the Olympians’ perspective is a fucked-up comedy. It was both amusing and tragic that Achilles was so self-aware of how much they were all just set pieces in a game: "Let us put our griefs to rest in our own hearts, / rake them up no more, raw as we are with mourning. / What good's to be won from tears that chill the spirit? / So the immortals spun our lives that we, we wretched men / live on to bear such torments — the gods live free of sorrows" (24.610-615).
The ancients worshipped and idolized the gods fervently -- with a devotion we now would consider fanatical and unreasonable, but Homer really puts it into perspective how terrifying they are, thereby necessitating obedience and piety. In his introduction, Knox says,
“The gods are immortal; they are not subject to time. They have all the time in the world. And so they are not subject to change, to the change brought by age, to the change brought by learning from suffering and a realization of limitations. They will always be what they are now and have always been; they are all the same at the end of the Iliad as at the beginning. They do not change, do not learn. How could they? . . . To be a god is to be totally absorbed in the exercise of one’s own power, the fulfillment of one’s own nature, unchecked by any thought of others except as obstacles to be overcome; it is to be incapable of self-questioning or self-criticism. But there are human beings who are like this.”
There really are no words to describe how depressing it is to realize that there indeed are gods -- that there are celestial beings looking down on us and who have created everything; it’s just that they do not care: “That is how the fate of nations is decided. Human suffering counts for nothing in the settlement of divine differences. The gods feel no responsibility for the human victims of their private wars.”
I obviously don’t subscribe to classical Greek mythology. I don’t believe any of this actually happened, nor do I think the Olympians are up there now judging me for my audaciously blasphemous yet incredibly charming review of The Iliad. (Although it would be very on par with my personality if I somehow got struck down by the Olympians for my bastard girl hubris). If you couldn’t tell from the everything about me, I was raised Catholic. I’m not altogether religious anymore for predictably unoriginal cultural trauma reasons, but the questions Homer brings up about existentialism and faith are older than time itself. I’ve had a deeply religious upbringing, so this poem hit me in many sensitive spots that I’d rather keep buried within the depths of my spirit (which I keep denying needs sustenance from something), but in many ways we are all born looking for meaning and sometimes that meaning’s divine. Like me, Homer from thousands of years ago looked up at the stars and wondered if this was it -- and, if it was, was something or someone staring right back and thinking the same?
Alas, The Iliad may not be as popular now as it had been in more intellectual times, but even mourning that tragedy is an exercise in futility because everything you know and everything you love is going to die one day. Even the greatest stories can’t last forever. Which is why I am glad I finally read this one. I will never have read this for the first time. I will never be here again.
Okay I Have to Be A Little Serious Now: Thoughts on Knox and Fagles
The edition of The Iliad that I read was the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Robert Fagles’ translation, with an introduction and notes by Bernard Knox. Fagles received many, many impressive honors for his translation, and for the most part I commend its elegance. The translation itself is a masterful performance, and, ignorant as I am with the Classics, I do believe that he managed to capture Homer’s lyricism and poetic beauty. It was because of Fagles’ tireless work that I was able to have such an enjoyable and accessible first time reading The Iliad.
Knox’s introduction was also well done, since, like any good criticism, it economically articulated much of the poem’s penultimate core:
“The images of that night assault — the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector’s baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery — all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer’s presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force. . . . We are left with a sense of waste, which is not adequately balanced even by the greatness of the heroic figures and the action; the scale descends toward loss. The Iliad remains not only the greatest epic poem in literature but also the most tragic.”
This was the description that affected me the most emotionally. It’s heartrendering and so highly concentrated in its lament that I couldn’t help but pause in the middle of my laughter to take a moment of silence and really appreciate The Iliad’s legacy.
The Greeks perfected tragedy and the tragic formula, so it makes sense that its most grandiose saga is just an overglorified chronicle of meaninglessness. Like I said, everyone involved in the Trojan War bitterly knew it was stupid and that they were all dying for nothing, which is the very essence of human tragedy:
“. . . Homer’s view of the war is more somber still. From the point of view of the powers that rule his universe, the gods, all the human struggles, the death of heroes, the fall of cities, are only of passing interest, to be forgotten as they are replaced by similar events played out by different actors. Troy will fall now, but so someday will the cities of its conquerors. And the great wars that brought glory and death to the heroes will not even be allowed to leave a mark on the landscape.”
Yeah that about sums it up. (Kowa-bummer dude).
While researching for the poem, I also came across Emily Wilson’s introduction to The Iliad, which I thought was also quite poignant: “You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.”
I love tragedy but can’t express why. I’ve read scholarship deconstructing its history, its form, and its timeless execution, but even now I’m at a loss when describing such cosmic loss. I’ve always understood that The Iliad should be respected -- that simply nothing else in the Western canon can compare to its unmatched dignity and grand throne amongst world literature. But of course I didn’t fully grasp the privilege of knowing the story and then telling it again, and again, and again, until I myself, like countless people before me, asked the Muse to rage once more.
Since Fagles’ translation is the only one I’ve ever known, I cannot speak of its overall merit, nor can I wholly recommend it as the translation anyone should pick up if they want to start The Iliad. I will say though: His male gaze was almost painfully prominent throughout this translation, along with Knox’s thinly-veiled chauvinism and homophobia. Fagles’ treatment of women specifically didn’t sit right with me. Even though I know Homer in the original Greek wouldn’t have been the most feminist narrator, Fagles’ work seemed to exacerbate the misogyny in places where it was not totally due. (Plus Knox claims “the text gives no warrant” that “Achilles and Patroclus were lovers,” which he states was a “later Greek idea.” Okay). If I reread The Iliad again, I’d like to see it translated by a woman, which I know has been done and is still being done. Fagles’ rewards and high praises, though remarkable, are almost nothing to me due to how extremely little he considers women in this poem. I cannot prove it, but it’s just a gut feeling: I wouldn’t have liked talking to Fagles or Knox at all, brilliant as they were.
Troy (2004): Masculinity is a Form of Drag
Lastly, I want to talk about Troy (2004), which I rewatched immediately after I finished The Iliad. It had been about a decade and a half since I’d seen the film on screen and Orlando Bloom as Paris gave me a jumpscare. (Would’ve loved to see Bloom act out what eventually happens to Paris’ pee pee in the end . . .) Just like kid me, I hated yet still reluctantly accepted Brad Pitt as Achilles (like yeah that’s him) because he’s so goddamn unsympathetic and cocky. (I knowwwwwww what you were doing to Angelina Jolie back then you’re not a hero you’re a hypocrite who needs to be euthanized). Pitt also desperately needed a shower in this movie like holy Christ his hair grease could’ve cooked my Thursday night dinner for me. ALSO SEAN BEAN AS ODYSSEUS?
I had a jovial time, even though I know the film is objectively not a worthwhile adaptation, all things considered. I saw several video essays tearing down its production and I am inclined to agree with all the critics: It truly is badly written. Yet, I am rewatching this 2004 movie from 2026 and I cannot help but like it. I’m going to sound like a bitter old man on his porch, but movies used to have good lighting. People used to give a shit about practical special effects and camerawork. Men also used to go to war and died. Yippee! When’d we stop doing that?
Rewatching Troy, I couldn’t help but think about how men are so immensely stupid. Like you just watch these big epic fight scenes and think wow you put your little shiny armor on from the rocks and metal you viciously ripped out from the land that you think you own and conquered and you’re gonna put on your stupid little armor with your stupid little sharp weapons that you use to carelessly kill and take life and you’re not even gonna talk to one another you’re just gonna Naruto-run fullspeed at each other while screaming and sweating and you think you’re hot shit because there are beautiful girls crying for you back home so that’s what makes you honorable that’s what makes you a man when really all this could’ve been solved in an email. Maybe a quick Zoom call with women as highly-paid arbiters. You could’ve just not done all this. Masculinity is so stupid.
It’s even more stupid that, since The Iliad and Homer are quite literally the foundational backbone of Western civilization, men’s stupidity has become so prevalent and normalized that we all genuinely think this is just the way things are and have to be: That carnage and combat are inevitable, that we can never be better and use our brains, we are all just dumb animals killing, raping, and pillaging one another because war is in our heritage, and so death is our very birthright. Womp womp. Shut up.
Knox discusses the permanence of war being an unending theme in Greek literature:
“[M]an’s instinctive revulsion from bloodshed and his susceptibility to the excitements of violence. And they are typical of the poem as a whole. Everywhere in Homer’s saga of the rage of Achilles and the battles before Troy we are made conscious at one and the same time of war’s ugly brutality and what Yeats called its ‘terrible beauty.’ The Iliad accepts violence as a permanent factor in human life and accepts it without sentimentality, for it is just as sentimental to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as it is to deny that it has its own strange and fatal beauty, a power, which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage and self-sacrifice that peacetime, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command. Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect; we are still lovers and victims of the will to violence, and so long as we are, Homer will be read as its truest interpreter.”
This apt observation reminded me of that quote that said men must’ve invented war to chase pain outside of themselves because violence is the only way they know how to touch one another. Troy is such a man movie. It romanticizes conflict and jacks itself off on the ridiculous belief that, to make something of yourself -- to become a man -- you need to destroy. What wooden horseshit.
I will say, though, rewatching this movie, the budget goes pretty hard. The fight scenes were fun to watch even though there wasn’t much gore or special effects. The script had some baller lines (“You are still my enemy tonight, but even enemies can show respect.”) The acting was superb -- even Orlando Bloom played little shepherd wee wee pissboy prodigal princey Paris so well. The cinematography was beautiful. A lot of (misinformed) detail and attention was put into the sets, the costumes, the props, etc. I miss when movies looked like that. I understand why my dad’s undiagnosed autistic ass kept watching this over and over again.
Some closing notes though:
Troy didn’t include the gods at all, which was a Choice. I guess the inclusion of the Olympians, on top of being expensive to portray in all their awesomeness, would’ve shattered the movie’s gritty realism. Without the gods, the characters’ mistakes carry more gravity and consequences, since they truly are pulling the strings that they’ll tie around their own necks later on. I don’t know if I would’ve preferred an adaptation with the gods present, but I think, again, if they were there, it would’ve been more whimsical and hilarious, so I get why the movie completely cut them out of the equation entirely.
They, however, made a lot of strange revisions to The Iliad that seemed to come out of nowhere. For example, they made Hector kill Menelaus (which they did not pronounce correctly) within the first 15 minutes of the war breaking out. He did it to protect Paris, who was just about to be slaughtered in his duel with Menelaus. (I mean Aphrodite wasn’t gonna come and bail him out). I suppose this fit with the movie’s interpretation of his character, but it was just so strange. I don’t think there’s any other version where Menelaus gets kicked out of the action that quickly.
The movie also makes it seem like the Trojan war happened in like 10ish weeks, not 10 years.
Achilles and Patroclus were cousins in Troy, which, and it goes without saying, is peak het nonsense. I’m really supposed to believe Achilles cares about women -- particularly Briseis? Yeah no. There was too much kissing and sex in this film. It genuinely made me disgusted.
But young Eric Bana as Hector was really hot. IDGAF. The sun was a paid actor during that final duel scene between Hector and Achilles. Brad Pitt looked like an overdone toasted strudel but Bana with his big brown smoldering eyes and shiny decorated historically inaccurate armor all covered in bruises and cuts and his big man-shield and stoic resignation to fate and death, like ohhhh brother he looked like paradise like his blood was dripping sweet ambrosia like yes he lost the battle but that LETHAL facecard won him the fucking war -- and it should’ve also won him an Oscar.
