The most amazing aspect, apart from the grim battle scenes (and they are unflinchingly gory), is the depth to which Homer explores each of the major characters.

The majority of pages are undamaged with some creasing or tearing, and pencil underlining of text, but this is minimal. In The Iliad Homer sang of death and glory, of a few days in the struggle between the Greeks and the Trojans.

Martin Hammond's acclaimed prose translation is accompanied by an introduction which discusses the central themes of The Iliad and provides a lucid synopsis of the work. you fat-wrapped thigh-bones of bulls and goats, grant this my prayer: may the Danaans pay for my tears with your arrows. As stated in the Preface, the purpose is to provide those reading the Iliad for the first time with a useful tool enabling them to understand and appreciate the basic characteristics of what is considered to be the first masterpiece of our Western Culture, through a detailed commentary based on the most widely used translations, namely: E.

He is celebrated for his argument tying the creation of the Greek alphabet to the recording of the Homeric Poems, but is also well known for his textbooks on Greek myth and Greek history and his work on the history of writing. You're not supposed to read `The Iliad' like a normal book, but that's all you can really do with a prose translation like this. This year I've decided to dive deep into the mythology of the ancient world: a form of literature that changed our art and history as we know it. The same occurs later, when talking about the repeated patterns of common scenes and mentioning some of them (pp. It doesn't waste time describing architecture or places but instead words are spent on beautiful descriptions of lineages, armors, shields, and alliances.A nice touch is that Hammond has given the different characters names that are far closer to the original Greek then the ones often used in other translations (e. Jones misses unfolding this aspect in the General Introduction as well as in the commentary on the 1st Book (p. seems to be hortatory, which indeed would express propelling and hastening instead of waiting and delaying, as supposed by Jones. Epic masterpiece chronicles last days of Trojan War - quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon, siege of Troy, death of Hector, Trojan Horse, many other incidents and events. Even we ignore the last context, it feels EPIC to give importantance to minor insignificant detail since these fill the story with meaning, making you believe that this truly is happening right in front of you.