The Iliad - Books 11-24 - Thank Goodness!

Wow. I finished it. That's SUCH a relief! I never have to read it (in full) again! Not a huge amount happens in the second half - main points are that Achilles' BFF gets killed by Hector (the Trojan leader) so Achilles is really ragey and RAAAH... so he decides to fight Hector and manages to kill him and the Trojans get depressed and then that's it. Exciting. As I have nothing else to say about the general content of the poem, I shall get straight on to my random musings on it...

• Firstly, the fight scenes are incredibly violent. If this was done as a film it could easily be an 18. Here is a particularly graphic quote: "clean through the heavy metal and bone the point burst / and the brains splattered all inside the casque". Charming. (Don't ask me what a casque is, I have no idea).
• Book 11, line 452 - this dude called Diomedes has a pole stuck through his foot which goes through into the ground, but he is "never flinching". This made me think about a bit in the third Ergaon book called Brisingr by Christopher Paolini when a load of soldiers have been enchanted to not feel pain, instead they feel like they're being tickled... Yeah I just thought of that because it's quite a creepy, inhuman image, of someone just ignoring a crippling pain like that.
• Book 11 AGAIN, line 579 - just a throwaway line about "wounded Lysander", but I was very concerned that it might be the same Lysander from A Midsummer Night's Dream and I felt very sorry for Hermia :(
• Book 12, line 29 - this reminded me of Paradise Lost again. Here it says "nine days hurled their flood against the wall", and in PL, Satan and his pals are "hurled headlong" for "nine times the space that measures day and night". I think Milton liked this poem... strange man.
• Book 18, line 690 - they mentioned someone called Daedalus and I was like OMG Diggle!! (as in Daedalus Diggle, a minor character in the Harry Potter series. Get with it guys).

So yeah those are my thoughts on The Iliad.

I also had to read a critcal essay on Homer by some ancient Trojan guy, and there was one bit which I thought was very interesting and can be applied to modern day life. He said,

"Most men are so completelty corrupted at heart by opinion that they would rather be notorious for the greatest calamities than suffer no ill and be unknown".

I thought that this kind of fits in with modern day celebrities - we see so many who will do anything to be famous *coughjordancough*, and they don't care why people know about them, just so long as everyone does. We should take after HazzaP who didn't want to be famous but made the best of it and came out pretty awesome in the end :]