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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