Friday, January 22, 2010

Iliad

Finished book 18!  Whew.  It contains one of the most famous scenes in the Iliad, the description of Achilles's shield.  The shield has depictions of everyday life, showing a harvest festival, a trial, a dance, and so on. Like everything else in the Iliad, it's on a huge scale -- almost 200 lines.  It's hard to imagine it even fitting into a smaller work -- it would just dominate the surroundings -- so it seems like it's been created just for this poem.  So, even though so much of the poem is made up of formular lines, I think that this scene points to the work of a single hand.

The poetry itself is gorgeous.  It's interesting to see the sort of images that are normally part of the similes take center stage -- instead of having Diomedes compared to a lion attacking cattle, the lions themselves here become the focus.

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