They Didn’t Choose the Hero Life

I finished my daily dose of The Iliad a few minutes ago, and I feel I have to come here and vent until the pain in my wounded soul subsides.

I am very disappointed in the Greek concept of heroism. These guys stab other guys while they’re running away. They run like hell when they think the other guy has a god’s favor. When a god saves and heals them after they’ve been beaten, they come back and talk smack. Like having mommy pull you out of a fight makes you a tough guy.

The whole premise of the book is ridiculous. One idiot steals another idiot’s wife. A bunch of other idiots go to war to get her back, offering their lives in exchange for the return of what is essentially a common strumpet. The gods take sides, helping them kill each other, but they’re not consistent. Zeus’s brilliant plan is to help the Trojans mess up the Achaians until they burn one ship, and after that, to let them sack Troy, burn it, and force themselves sexually on everyone they can catch.

What is the point? Why would you help the Trojans if you plan to wipe them out a week later?

How about this idea: stay home and grow old while making money. Live to see your children marry. Don’t go to war unless someone bothers you. Am I crazy? Am I the only one who sees this as the obvious course of action?

You know what the Iliad characters are? Gangsters. Punks. They’re just like the simpletons in New York and L.A. who run around killing each other out of boredom. Your life is dull and pointless, so instead of finding an actual purpose an adult can be proud of, you stir up crap and get off on the stress.

They talk constantly about glory. It’s okay if some Trojan with Zeus on his side spreads your intestines out on the beach in an unfair fight, because you get glory.

You can’t spend glory. You can’t put it on toast and eat it. If you believe in the nutty Greek religion, after you get speared, you expect to be in hell, where you can’t even enjoy your glory. How stupid do you have to be to fall for a deal like that?

The characters are imbeciles. The gods are sociopaths. I don’t care what happens to any of them. They’re all jerks.

I’m still only on page 593. You want to hear about a mythical Greek figure I can relate to? Here it is: Sisyphus.

Reading The Iliad is like going to see the Mona Lisa. You don’t go to be impressed or to see something which is done well. You go so you can have the experience of seeing it.

The Mona Lisa is fat and ugly. The landscape behind her is amateurish. The colors are basically shades of cockroach-wing brown. The composition is right up there with the photos on baseball cards. But it’s an important painting, so you pay money to go to the Louvre and look at it.

I am looking at The Iliad. It’s like a Mona Lisa that takes two weeks to take in.

I’m starting to feel better now.

Every day, I’m eager to sit down and read this book, simply because I know it will make it be over that much faster.

I’m open-minded. People have different tastes. If you like Homer, you have something wrong with you. But I respect you.

Just to show that I’m a classics fan at heart, I’ll post a video that shows how a true artist presents a great work of literature. It’s Kirk Douglas in the Mexican version of 1954’s Ulysses. I don’t know why Homer couldn’t have presented it this well.