anyone ever read the Iliad by Homer?
489513
Yes, it's incredibly difficult to read & I didn't enjoy it. Admittedly, I used Cliff Notes to help me.\n\nBook summaries\nBook 1: Ten years into the war, Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel over a slave girl, Achilles withdraws from the war in anger \nBook 2: Odysseus motivates the Greeks to keep fighting; Catalogue of Ships, Catalogue of Trojans and Allies \nBook 3: Paris challenges Menelaus to single combat \nBook 4: The truce is broken and battle begins \nBook 5: Diomedes has an aristea and wounds Aphrodite and Ares \nBook 6: Glaucus and Diomedes greet during a truce, Hector returns to Troy \nBook 7: Hector battles Ajax \nBook 8: The gods withdraw from the battle \nBook 9: Agamemnon retreats: his overtures to Achilles are spurned \nBook 10: Diomedes and Odysseus go on a spy mission \nBook 11: Paris wounds Diomedes, and Achilles sends Patroclus on a mission \nBook 12: The Greeks retreat to their camp and are besieged by the Trojans \nBook 13: Poseidon motivates the Greeks \nBook 14: Hera helps Poseidon assist the Greeks \nBook 15: Zeus stops Poseidon from interfering \nBook 16: Patroclus borrows Achilles' armour, enters battle, kills Sarpedon and then is killed by Hector \nBook 17: The armies fight over the body and armour of Patroclus \nBook 18: Achilles learns of the death of Patroclus and receives a new suit of armour \nBook 19: Achilles reconciles with Agamemnon and enters battle \nBook 20: The gods join the battle; Achilles tries to kill Aeneas \nBook 21: Achilles fights with the river Scamander and encounters Hector in front of the Trojan gates \nBook 22: Achilles kills Hector and drags his body back to the Greek camp \nBook 23: Funeral games for Patroclus \nBook 24: Achilles lets Priam have Hector's body back, and he is burned on a pyre \n[edit]\nAfter the Iliad: the end of the war and the returns home\nAlthough certain events subsequent to the funeral of Hector are foreshadowed in the Iliad, and there is a general sense that the Trojans are doomed, a detailed account of the fall of Troy is not set out by Homer. The following account comes from later Greek and Roman poetry and drama.\n\nAchilles fights and kills the Amazon queen Penthesilea and the Aethiopean king Memnon. Very soon he is killed on the battlefield by Paris with a poisoned arrow to his vulnerable heel. (See Achilles' Heel). After his death, Ajax and Odysseus feud over who should keep his armour. They submit their disagreement to an impromptu court and Odysseus is awarded the armour. Ajax subsequently goes mad and slaughters his livestock, believing they are the Greek commanders. He then kills himself in shame.\n\nThe Amazons come to join the battle. Philoctetes, a crippled Greek who had been abandoned by the others along the journey, was recruited by the god Heracles because it was prophesied the war could not be won without his bow.\n\nOdysseus devises a plan to take the city. He has his men build a large, hollow wooden horse, and then he and twenty others hide inside. The Greek ships withdraw out of sight of Troy, apparently admitting defeat, and leave behind the horse, purportedly as an offering to Poseidon for good winds on the return trip. The Trojans take this inside the great walls of Troy, and then feast and celebrate their victory and the war's end. At night, Odysseus and the soldiers creep out of the horse and open the gates to the other Greeks who have sailed back under cover of night. The city is sacked, and in some accounts burned for seven years.\n\nPriam is killed. According to one tradition, Hector's wife Andromache throws their son Astyanax and herself from the ramparts to save them from slavery. According to another, Astyanax was killed by Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, to ensure that Hector's son could not seek vengeance for his father's death against Achilles' son. Andromache became Neoptolemus' concubine, later to marry Helenus, Hector's brother. A Roman tradition held that Aeneas escaped wi
195417
yes when homer became homer the philosopher
800933
dude that is the best story in the history of stories...how was the blow?
579306
I had to go back and reread the poem to remember it in particular from my high school Lit Class (5 years...  sheesh!).  Anyway, its main theme is basically as everyone has said- a warning that even mankind's greatest works shall eventually crumble to dust.\n\nWithin Temptation does a song on their Mother Earth CD entitled "Never-ending Story" that sums up the main point of Ozymandias nicely with the lyrics, "We'll all be forgotten  |  There's no endless fame".\n\nHowever, we can go into a bit more depth about the secondary themes of hope and rebirth.  In lines 10 through 14, Ozymandias reads as such:\n"'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:\nLook on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'   \nNothing beside remains: round the decay   \nOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,   \nThe lone and level sands stretch far away."\n\nThese lines serve to anchor the somewhat depressing mood, but give infinite hope as well.  Even though King Ozymandias is telling us to despair, for all we do will eventually disappear, he is also telling us to look upon his works as they are in the here and now.\n\nThe boundless sea of sand that was once his great kingdom may seem like it has been destroyed, but in fact Ozymandias has *created* it as his buildings and monuments have crumbled.  Essentially, the poem is commenting that nothing mankind can build will last- but as those things are annihilated they create the soil, and in turn the plants and stone, that generations down the road will use to build their own monuments.  Even though we may die and rot in the present, we are immortal as part of the life cycle that is always recycling into the next incarnation of life.  Who knows, when we eventually croak, we might all come back as daisies!
697288
I haven't read the Odyssey, but these sites may help you.  You can use your imagination since you have to pretend you are Odysseus.  Best of luck with your work.
905920
O.k. I'll give it a shot.\n\nLets cast Hector as the American right; the traditional American that's willing to fight and die for his country simply because he know that those without the walls would love to smash down his walls, make off with all his wealth, and dash his children against the barren crags without and all the other innumerable ills that are cast like a shadow upon those who could not obtain the mastery of their adversaries in  war.\nLet us also cast Paris as the American left, that liberal lover of pleasure more than a lover of virtue, yet sometimes gallant but unreliable.\nAnd Hellen & her lasadamonian spoils are the image of the crude exports of the post-christian west, Pornogrphy,the disintergration of the nuclear family, Atheism and the like that infuriate the arab-street.\nWe'll also cast Argamemnon as the theological ideal that geathers so much support in the Islamic world and Archillies as unity of action which Argamemnon in his irrational pride and rage has cast out of his camp, his crisis if you will.\n\nEast V. West, ah um... o that's it, East=West & West=East \n ha ha ha!\n\nIllium (Troy) is America the sidadell of the west, and Creat, Athens, The Pelopponees, Lidia and the rest are the Islamic world or the evil confederates\n\nHector them of Troy drive the Islamists away from the wall (twin towers) and back into the plain (desert=Islamic lands)\nHector and his army fights bravely but he needs his brother Paris but Paris loves pleasure more than virtue: that is to say Paris is more worried about taking his fill (political power) at home and he dosen't help hector. He trys to bribe Argamemnon but it dosen't work. Ultimatly Troy falls becuase a house divided can not stand. And the Arabs kill Hectors son (liberty) and inslave Troy.\n\nHopefuly we'll unify our house and defeat Argamemnon before Archillies retures to his camp.\nSo what do you think? Sean
969154
I'm glad you asked that, not because I have the answer but because me and my daughter, well . . . me anyways, are reading Moby Dick, and I never remembered it being so detailed on Cetology or in the beginning of the novel before he meets Queequeg.   Maybe I cheated back in my highschool or junior high days and got the Cliff Notes, but I coulda swore I read the book.  Oh well, that's been many decades ago.  I just got past the part where Captain Ahab kicked Stubb (First Mate isn't he??) and Stubb had the dream where someone asks him why is it so bad to be kicked by Ahab since his leg is made of ivory,etc..  My daughter, who lives with her mother about 65 miles southeast of me, probably hasn't read one word of it since she's a lot like her mother, who didn't like to read.  I read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to her when she was pregnant with either our son or daughter, I can't remember which.  She liked to be read to but wouldn't do it herself, so, I doubt my daughter has read any of "Moby Dick" since she hasn't said anything about it.  Oh well, I'm rambling on.  Sorry.  Maybe I'll continue the book, but the Cetology part is way too detailed and "informational" for me.  I want more "action", and am becoming too addicted to the brainless tv, and too lazy to read fine novels.  I hope you finish the book.  It's a wonderful piece of literature.  God Bless you.
366342
I googled 'Iliad, culture and values' and found out for myself here: http://library.thinkquest.org/19300/data/homersgreece.htm I suggest you do the reading yourself as asking people to tell you the answer will not help you in the long run.
1013970
I have.\n\nA very good book if you are into esoteric history.\n\nIf you are a Freemason, don't read it--for some reason it seems to really upset them.
746731
i tink i have it if u want it message me ... its in acrobat ... Christopher Paolini - Eragon.pdf 2mb
796881
Hello again....\n\nI was always intrigued by the story of the Minotaur and the great Labrynth of Knossos....or was it Crete, nope that was the king, I believe....anyway, I digress...\n\nThe story of Perseus and Medusa also struck a chord - as a girl I was busting to have a horse just like Pegasus.\n\nThe first movie I ever went to see (that I remember) was Clash of the Titans and I don't think I ever got over the romance of it all......
272886
Excellent, tragic book.\nI loved it, but it was really intense.  I have not read it again, as I usually do with a good book.
157624
"The Odyssey Unleshed" Sounds cool to me...hope you like.
1083395
Yes, I read it. Excellent book. Jon Krakauer, right?\n\nPlease write your own poem.
169263
I attached a link below. It doesn't give much info on Homer, but just enough to get your research started. The site mentions Homer at the very bottom of the page. Hope this helps. =o)
494096
I clicked on the link, but I saw that you had already been helped!\n\nPerhaps Odesseus/Ulysses was a comic hero?  I mean, come on!  A big wooden horse to defeat the Trojans?  Somehow I think this was a play on Trojan ego...  Was the giant wooden horse compensating for something?  Sorry.  I love double meanings...
157717
The Odyssey and the Iliad are usually attributed to Homer, but scholars are still trying to determine whether or not he actually wrote these epic poems.\n\nOther literary works have been falsely attributed to Homer such as the Homeric Hymns and the Margites and The Battle of Frogs and Mice.