Thread: The Illiad And The Oddesy

Homer. Amazing writer, don't you think? and those immateur punks who thinks this is homer simpson get a life as that is an old joke...
Whats your favorite part in either or both?

the oddesy, i had to read the illiad for the Junior Cert and it was SOOOOOO BORING!!!!!!!!

what abotu the aneid, i like that too, just started reading it

It ws good also...

Homer isn't even proven to have existed, and if he did exist the copies we have today of his epics are nothing like the original tellings. First of all he was a storyteller, not a writer, and most of the enjoyment was in the telling. In spite of that, the Odyssey and Iliad are both great works.

Most of the writers at that time used pseudonyms anyways. Most of their real names aren't known.

Homer was most probably a real person, but he didn't write the tales down. They were an oral tradition for hundreds of years before they were written down. The Aeneid, however, was written by Virgil and meant entirely to capture the style of Homer's works.

the aneaid was also written to praise ceasar and agustous

Have you guys, with the exception of Achilles, read what the real books are actually called?

Well ... I never would have read those books on my own, and I may not read them again, but I really enjoyed them when I took a class on them awhile ago. All kinds of English and American literature allude to them or mimic them stylistically (Milton's Paradise Lost comes to mind). I've even used some things from them in my own work.

Oh ... And it was required in my class to be able to spell "Iliad," "Odyssey" and "Aeneid." Although I'm sure I've made some horrific mistake just for this and will be mocked accordingly.

With a name like Penelope the Odyssey was required reading and I enjoyed it so much I went on to the Illiad. Neither book was referred to when I reached secondary school but it was irrelevant.

There aren't many other 'classics' that I've read and I hestitate to determine which fits into that catagory because a 'classic' to me is a book I can read several times. I could barely choke down Charles Dickens once and couldn't even finish any of Jane Austen's, matter of fact I'd barely began before I became bored to tears.

Jane Austen... Her stuff is only classic because they were the first melodramatic romance novels.

Homer's works are just so damn sexy. My only problem with them is that Odysseus really is just a gigantic prick (Achilles, too), and the extreme patriarchy that was Greek society bleeds in to the stories (the same with The Aeneid, but it's not quite as bad and Aeneas isn't quite as big a dick as Odysseus).


I have a fun question regarding Achilles. Who can tell me where the myth of him getting shot in the heel with an arrow came from? It wasn't in The Iliad, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't in The Aeneid (but that's where we got the Trojan Horse myth from).

I don't know the names of them, but I know there are other literatures about the Trojan war which probably talk about it--I do remember teachers describing the things which happened between the Iliad and the Odyssey, or the Iliad and the Aeneid, for example. I do know some of the Greek tragedies dealt with it--what was the name of the one about the wife of Priam, the Trojan King, after the war?

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Originally Posted by Hodge

I have a fun question regarding Achilles. Who can tell me where the myth of him getting shot in the heel with an arrow came from? It wasn't in The Iliad, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't in The Aeneid (but that's where we got the Trojan Horse myth from).

No idea. I've always wondered where it came from, and what the "true" story abou this death was since the Iliad does not cover it. How did he die, anyway?

I'm having a bit of an identity crisis here.