I've read/translated some fragments of the Iliad in Greek class back in eleventh grade, but that must've been perhaps 100-150 lines in total, with liberal help from the textbook on all difficult words. With that kind of help, the passages selected from the Iliad and Odyssey are arguably easier than some other texts, or so the creators of the curriculum in here seem to think (the Odyssey passages are read already in tenth grade, with only Herodotos and Xenophon tackled still earlier on). But of course that's nothing like reading the whole thing in a more serious scholarly edition.
Fascinating review - I've actually never read the whole thing even in translation yet, much like a lot of other classic Greek / Latin works - figuring, rather optimistically, that I'd try to read them in the original some time. Not going to happen, so I really should read the full translations.
View original postHe persists in his petulance even when Odysseus and Ajax offer, on behalf of Agamemnon, to restore Briseis, along with seven other women. It must be said that neither Achilles nor Agamemnon come off as sympathetic in this childish argument. Not only that, but when Briseis finally speaks for the first and only time in the
Iliad, in Book XIX, she doesn’t seem to reciprocate Achilles’s affections as she weeps upon seeing the body of Patroclus:
That's pretty much how I remember it - that Hector was the only decent one of the lot. Odysseus some of the time, but he also does/says some nasty things.
View original postI believe Book XIV also has the earliest recorded use of the verb “fuck” in any Indo-European literature:
View original postThe verb,
φοιταω, literally means “to go back and forth” and is used elsewhere to mean wandering aimlessly, but is also cognate with the Latin
futuo (
futuere), from which are derived the French
foutre, Italian
fottere and Spanish
joder (earlier Castilian
foder). Here, it is clearly being used in that second, sexual sense. I experienced the same surprise when I came across this line as when I read Deuteronomy 28:30 in Hebrew and saw “and he will fuck her” along with the annotation that the verb in question is to be replaced by a less offensive one when the passage is read aloud. I have yet to see an English-language Bible that faithfully translates that passage.
I have to look this up now.
View original postAs I mentioned earlier, the overall tone is one of loss, sorrow and death. To underscore this, Hector dies in Book XXII, and the remaining two books are devoted to how Achilles and Priam deal with the grief of having lost a dear friend (some say lover) and son, respectively. In the final book of the epic, Achilles mentions how the gods apportion joy and sorrow to mortals:
Some?
That's pretty universally accepted, no? I remember that when I was in HS, the movie Troy came out, and we had fun endlessly mocking that movie's description of Patroclus as Achilles' "cousin". There were other mistakes, anachronisms or dubious plot elements, but that one was the funniest.
