Is this generally recommended? I had a good time with the Iliad, but I feel in order to let it stew a bit, I should read something else for the time being.
>>24792986>I feel in order to let it stew a bitIn that case, you should contemplate the morals and archetypes that are contained in the Iliad https://youtube.com/shorts/UwaIJb_R4Kw?si=_2UUfTehf5c9YVlB
>>24792986>Is this generally recommended?No. The fall-off in quality would be too stark.It's best to read the Odyssey after you've forgotten how good the Iliad was.
>>24792986Yes. It's a kino adventure story, but it drops off hard when he arrived at his city.
>>24792986tf is there to let stew about the iliad?
>>24792986nah just read The Iliad 3 times then The Odissey 3 times
>>24792986Read milking farm first.
>>24792986Yes, so that you can get to the better and more interesting work with the needed context immediatly after making it through the long horrible slog of the prior work which sucks, is boring, and is read for no other reason than that it is old. Thersites had the right idea.
>>24793427>people like the Odyssey because it's good>people only pretend to like the other work by the same guy just because it's oldFiltered and coping
>>24793440Incorrect, there is a marked difference in quality between the two works. Your second claim is also plainly correct on its face. That's the main reason why people keep reading it. It's an old war story that survived extant.The amazing thing about the Iliad is that it manages to bore, despite repeated imagery of killings and violence, exactly the sort of thing which is supposed to teach young men what poetry can really be.
>>24793448You know you can not enjoy a work without concluding everyone who does like it is just pretending, right?
>>24792986The Odyssey will be a breeze after the Iliad. It's shorter and not nearly as dense.
>>24793021According to modern scholarship, the Odyssey and the Iliad were written by two different authors, and it definitely feels like it.
>>24793448The repeated, constant violence is the point. It shows the same image, that of two great men killing each other senselessly, through different angles and lenses, through constantly shifting language. It shifts the focus from the events (the plot) to the language itself, to the atmosphere it creates and the different permutations it undergoes.>exactly the sort of thing which is supposed to teach young men what poetry can really be.The Iliad was my poetic awakening. I always found it confusing and dull. The Iliad pulled me into its rhythm, the relentlessly marching metre and the soaring language depicting the same event over and over and over again. It marked the moment I stopped being a plotfag and it prepared me for the greatness of Paradise Lost and Moby-Dick.
>>24793854Yeah, having read what remains of the other Trojan War epics, the Odyssey seems much closer to the later epics. It's got far more mythological and magical content than the Iliad, it's far more episodic, it has more diversions, and more extensive references to the wider Trojan mythology (heck, in the early books you have micro-epics about the fall of Troy, and the shipwreck and return of the other Greeks). In my opinion it overall has a more whimsical and melodramatic tone than the Iliad, which is more gritty and melancholic.
>>24793922The Odyssey is pretty impressive structurally. Telemachiad, nonlinearity, Odysseus telling his story himself. But man do I prefer the Iliad. Its utter devotion to telling the realities of war, both its glory and its horror, makes it something truly special.
I chose to read the Aeneid right after. Whatever you do, continue with the story since the characters and events will be refresh on your mind.
>>24793962Yeah I like its complex structure, it comes across as far more self-consciously literary than the Iliad which brutally blugeons you with the repeated violence and mourning for the dead.
>>24793854Fuck the modern scholarship. Writers just age with more experience. Homer started with Illiad and settled into a different style by Odyssey, doesn't mean some other hick wrote it or he didn't exist.
>>24794553What I like most about it is its embedded transformation of character. Since the tale is being told by Odysseus himself, he could have just lied about the more unsavory parts in order to preserve his name (he is after all a trickster), but he doesn't shy away from revealing his own mistakes. The honesty of his tale is itself a marker of his transformation.
>>24794553I particularly like how it influenced later authors. Iliad with its single-minded dedication to its theme clearly influenced Blood Meridian. And Odyssey with its nested storytelling, shifting points of view and perspectives influenced the Manuscript found in Saragossa.I could name more examples, but these two make their heritage particularly clear.
>>24793962isn't that just the worst reason to like the iliad? homer's implicit attitude was a loathing of war. the battles were cartoons to sate his reactionary and anti-intellectual audience. he barely bothered to get his military background accurate, his fighting is a careless muddle and he indiscriminately mixed up modern and outmoded weapons. he was really contemptuous of the stupidities of war.
The eighteenth-century scholar Richard Bentley said the Iliad was written for men and the Odyssey for women.
>>24794566Both were written by time traveling aliens who tried to pass it off as being written by a popular, contemporary public figure. They figured everyone would know Homer Simpson by his first name, but fucked up the placement in time.
>>24793640The Odyssey felt incomplete to me, the Phaeacian treasures remained in the cave Odysseus hid them in and more importantly Tiresias' prophecy remained unfulfilled.
>>24794566and you can take this guys word on it because he’s read the lattimore translation of both
>>24794781>homer's implicit attitude was a loathing of warI think that's a misreading. He acknowledged both its stupidity and absurdity, but also its glory, the camaraderie it builds among the participants, its inevitability.I also think lambasting him for historical inaccuracies is not right. With no writing, with no historical documents and no archaeology, they relied on the oral tradition and the aoidoi to remember their history. They had no systemic way to say for sure "this particular set of weapons was used from 1300 BC to 1100 BC".
>>24794817it's not about precise archaeology - it’s about narrative carelessness. remember homer had to earn a living, he had to strain his imagination in describing novel varieties of manslaughter, which he credited to the ancestors of his hosts (typically crass, snobbish princelings). he's so careless, too, about the names of trojans killed - greek sword-fodder - that erymas, acamas and chromius get dispatched twice, and chromius lives to tell the tale.we're introduced nine years into the war, at the argument between achilles and agamemnon, and it ends before troy falls, when achilles returns the corpse of hector. because the story isn't about the trojan war, it's about the anger of achilles.
>>24792986Yes. Then the Aeneid, Metamorphoses, the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and read a bit of the Bible between each of them and you'll have done a basic crash course of the western canon.
>>24795064
>>24795110I found the Aeneid (Fitzgerald translation) very readable and emotionally charged.Divine Comedy felt like homework.Paradise Lost was brilliant, and fully deserves the "superhuman eloquence" title. But then again so does Shakespeare.
>>24795110This has nothing to do with what I posted.
>>24795246if you’re using milton and dante in the same breath as homer (while somehow excluding shakespeare) you can only be implicitly wrong.
>>24795110Shakespeare has low entertainment value as well tho
>>24795304shakespeare wrote for the groundlings, the unscholarly globe patrons who walked in from the cockfight on the street. all those whose blood courses hot through their veins can understand his lines.
