sbarnes1346 's review for:

The Iliad by Homer

3.0

---

She’s just not the Odyssey, nor is she the Aeneid. I feel like this epic is filled with repetition and far too many characters to the extent where I really didn’t care about most of them and most of them fell flat for me, even Odysseus, who barely features to be honest. I do like the themes and the questions it poses, but I do genuinely feel like the Aeneid answers and covers them far better, which makes sense since it was written over 800 years later. But still. I loved the themes of mortality vs immortality and the deaths of the young and the conversations had by Achilles and Hector where they both show an awareness of the fact that the Trojan war will kill them, and the different ways they cope with that. The best part of this book was definitely the differences between the behaviour of Achilles and Hector, how neither of them want to fight because they know they will die, but Hector fights to protect his family and city, and Achilles fights for his honour and to be cemented as the best of the Greeks.

It did have some strong points though, especially the final book and the dialogue between Priam and Achilles (especially “I have endured to do what no other mortal man on earth has done - I have brought to my lips the hands of the man who killed my child.”) and how it stands very discordant from how Achilles treats Hector. I just don’t think that I enjoyed the monotonous nature of the majority of the epic.