The action opens at the end of the war, when nobody’s doing much of anything. The fuse of The Iliad is not the abduction of Helen of Troy, which started the war. Hollywood would have demanded a rewrite, wouldn’t it?Ībsolutely! Hollywood would make a clever, psychological thriller. The action of The Iliad takes place not during the heat of battle but during a protracted stalemate. Every adjective evokes the destruction and tragedy of war. Old men, civilians, children, captive women or wives, as well as the warriors, like Achilles-they all decry it. But when one reads the entirety of the epic, it is unambiguously clear at every turn that the poem is evoking the blighting effect of this war on every single participant in it. It’s very easy to support that tradition by picking out four or five main scenes. You’re assigned a few books to read at break-neck speed and there’s this tradition that The Iliad is about war. In America, most people who’ve read The Iliad have read it in college in the first year of their humanities courses, as part of a survey of Western or other literature. (Discover why Homer matters.) Many people think The Iliad glorifies war and machismo. Speaking from her home in Maine, she explains how her African students in Malawi immediately “got” The Iliad why Hollywood would demand a rewrite of the epic and how Homer still has much to teach us about war and the human condition.
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