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Notes -
I think that a big reason for why I find the Iliad to be sublime is that unlike most other fiction that I have read, there is an epic objectivity about the way it presents things.
To a modern reader like me, at least, The Iliad seems to be light on propagandistic ways of viewing reality. It has no conventional good guys and bad guys. The Greeks are a bunch of honor culture-bound bandit thugs, whereas the Trojans are relatively more civilized, but the Iliad also shows you enough of the Greek leaders' thinking to make them seem real rather than like cartoonish villains, and it spends more time with the Greeks than with the Trojans.
It presents war as something that is occasionally glorious but largely horrific. When people die, you get startlingly contrasting flashbacks to earlier days when they were living in peacetime. The actual deaths are more brutal than romanticized. There is a lot of anatomic detail about spears crushing their way through people's bodies.
Hector, the character who is most sympathetic to my moral sensibilities, fights on the losing side and gets killed. There is no traditional happy ending. Even if you are rooting for the Greeks, the book ends on a somber rather than a triumphal note.
There is also a sort of modern-feeling sense of atheism about the book. The gods are to such a large extent comic relief that it is hard to see them as being divine in any sublime way. They basically just act the way that humans probably would if humans had superpowers.
Yet at the same time there is a sort of horror to this. These gods might be funny, but the fact remains that they are playing with the humans in a similar way to how humans might get dogs to fight each other, or at best the way that a rather sociopathic much older brother might treat a much younger brother.
These gods also seem rather pathetic in that despite all their powers for some reason they get deeply invested in petty human affairs. Don't they have anything more interesting to do? It seems not.
So again, there is that balancing epic objectivity that one finds all through the text. The gods can easily crush the humans, but are comic and oddly invested in human drama. The humans are pathetic when measured by raw power, but unlike the immortal gods their decisions have a sort of grandeur and weight because unlike the gods, the humans are vulnerable and their decisions actually matter deeply to them.
One does not feel like the text is trying to convince you of some political or religious ideology.
If anything makes me doubt that the Iliad and the Odyssey were created by the same people or groups of people, it is that compared to the Iliad, the Odyssey is much more of a conventional straight-forward adventure story in which the protagonist's opponents are like two-dimensional cardboard cutouts that only seem to be there so that the protagonist can overcome them in various entertaining ways.
On the other hand, the handling of the gods in the Odyssey is very similar to how they are handled in the Iliad, which supports the idea that the two texts really did come from the same source.
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