If you take a pretty girl who is the daughter of a priest of Apollo as war booty and refuse to have her ransomed, Apollo will rain plague on your troops. If an arrow or a spear were thrown at you in battle, more often than not, it would land on your nipple or thereabout. Or alternatively, it would pierce your helmet and splatter your brain. Real men eat red meat, specifically:
Searching for streaming and purchasing options Common Sense is a nonprofit organization. Your purchase helps us remain independent and ad-free. Get it now on Searching for streaming and purchasing options A lot or a little? The parents' guide to what's in this book.
Educational Value Though Homer's Iliad, which is an epic poem about the Trojan War, is taught less frequently than The Odysseyit is also an essential piece of classical, ancient Greek literature. Together, these two works form the foundation of centuries of literature that followed.
The Odyssey can be and often is read without first reading The Iliad, but The Iliad gives a complete depiction of the gods, goddesses, heroes, and conflicts that incited this fictional war, and the events that lead to Odysseus' epic journey in The Odyssey. Positive Messages There are many stories of devotion and loyalty between warriors, and between mortals and gods, in The Iliad, but there are just as many instances of capricious and petty revenge.
However, one of the strongest, and somewhat surprising, messages in this ancient poem is that there are no real winners in war.
The poem emphasizes the violence and tragedy of individual deaths, and the emotional response of the fallen warriors' comrades. Even though the heroes' bravery and intelligence are lauded, and the gods influence the action throughout, the poem does not glorify war.
Most of the other leaders among the Achaians and Trojans, however, are petty and selfish. Agamemnon, in particular, brings the wrath of the gods down on his people by stealing a beloved mistress from Achilles.
Achilles, in turn, refuses to fight in the war until his woman is returned to him. And then there's the ugliness between Achaian king Menelaos, his beautiful queen, Helen, and Helen's Trojan captor, Paris. Throughout The Iliad, women are treated as spoils of war, and men and gods choose sides and kill each other over allegiances to poorly behaved people.
Violence The Iliad is quite poetic, but it is also extremely violent. Deaths and injuries -- mostly from stabbing with spears -- are described in graphic, gory detail; there are hundreds of pages of them.
Sex There's no detail given about sex acts in The Iliad, but there's a lot of sex. We read that men and women "make love," "couple," go to bed together and feel lust for each other.
The book offers two views of the "rape" of Helen, who the Achaians believe the Trojan prince Paris kidnapped from her husband, King Menelaos. While the Achaians soldiers are told to avenge the "struggles and groans" of Helen, readers see Helen behave quite seductively with Paris.Online shopping from a great selection at Books Store.
Homer was probably born around BC on the Coast of Asia Minor, now the coast of Turkey, but then really a part of Greece. The Iliad is one of the two great epics of Homer, and is typically described as one of the greatest war stories of all time, but to say the Iliad is a war story does not begin to describe the emotional sweep of its action and characters: Achilles, Helen, Hector, and other heroes of Greek myth and history in the tenth and final year of the Greek siege of Troy/5(K).
Oct 30, · Reading his Iliad, one feels the constraint and fulfillment of meter and, as in Homer’s original Greek, the stability of the verse provides a counterweight . Aug 22, · Achilles’ vengeful rage against Agamemnon and his own comrades, and the subsequent vast death toll of the Greeks and Trojans, is the central theme of The Iliad.
The Iliad is the first book in Western literature, told cBC, it is set during the Trojan War cBC. The noble Achilles, most powerful of the Greeks, has been . Aug 03, · The Iliad is not studied by middle or high school students as commonly as Homer's Odyssey, perhaps because the war portrayed in The Iliad includes so many individual battles and characters that its plus pages become a lot to rutadeltambor.com book also weaves in and out of the "present" of the book, as character often reflect on past events; The Odyssey is somewhat more .