{"id":10445,"date":"2007-02-14T17:56:08","date_gmt":"2007-02-14T22:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/02\/14\/10445.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:55:46","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:55:46","slug":"book-report-the-iliad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/02\/14\/book-report-the-iliad\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Iliad"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So, tragically, when I at last sat down to read The Iliad<\/a>, it turned out to be a crap translation by E.V. Rieu, and it was nigh on unreadable. Honestly, I don’t know why I persevered. I suppose it was because I really want to be familiar with the Iliad, and not just from Classic Comics.\n

So, what did I learn? First of all, the Greek Gods were a bunch of jerks. I mean, I knew that, but they are really<\/I> a bunch of jerks. Second, everybody in the whole thing is big, hunky, brave (even the ones who run away, and even while running away<\/I>), strong and dimwitted. All their armor is well-made, strong, polished, well-fitted and totally ineffective. All their spears are long, strong, hard, straight, immense and cast long shadows. Even the rocks on the ground, when picked up to throw, are immense. Everything is peculiarly well-made or outsized or perfect in some way. The men are all strong, the women are all good looking and the children are all above average. Oh, and their fathers were all particularly impressive youths, back in the day, when they killed sixteen giants with one blow, and seduced the Statue of Liberty before bedtime.\n

I’d be surprised if nobody has done a spoof where somebody, at least one guy in these immense armies, is a sniveling little weakling.\n

. Next to the mighty ships, the Ill-formed Pansius, then, took up his lightweight spear, and made as if to fling it. Like a broken-winged sparrow plummets to the earth after a shepherd, bored with his responsibilities at the end of a long day, flings a pebble at it and lands a lucky shot, so did the spear of Pansius flutter to the ground. This was the son of Afraedes, who in battle would shy from the tiniest noise, like a rabbit who does not wait to see if the twig has been broken by a hungry lion or by a mild deer but cowers in his burrow until the beast has passed. Such was Afraedes, the father of Pansius. Now Maukus of the horse-taming Trojans singled out Pansius. He cast a long-shadowed spear, thirsting for blood, but Pansius saw it coming and shrank behind his shield. This shield, tiny and ill-made, had only two layers, of cracked and discolored leather, badly bound together. Pansius had found it, discarded by the mighty Argives after they had sacked his village. Creeping out from his hiding place after dark, he retrieved the trampled shield that the well-formed warriors had disdained, and this shield now he held up to try, however vainly, to deflect the bloodthirsty spear of Maukus. But aegis-bearing Zeus did not intend for Pansius to die that day, and pushed aside the spear as if it had been a leaf in a breeze.<\/blockquote>\nAnd on for pages and pages.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, tragically, when I at last sat down to read The Iliad, it turned out to be a crap translation by E.V. Rieu, and it was nigh on unreadable. Honestly, I don\u2019t know why I persevered. I suppose it was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10445"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17968,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10445\/revisions\/17968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}