>Wow Achilles is a fuckin nigger. The original primadonna.
It's not easy to sell the idea of what an insult it is to Achilles ' honor being robbed like that to a contemporary audience. Honor is a big deal there.
>War is romanticized but Homer doesn't forget to illustrate the gore and casualties ever present in it.
But the gore and casualties are part of the romanticization. There is a pecularly Greek aesthetic of dying a beautiful death, which is why despite the years of tough fighting, you will read of so little wounded, and no mutilations or details of scars, even on experienced soldiers.
The Greeks don't have an aesthetic of wounded warrior manliness, made of missing eyes covered with eypatches, large scars, torn ears, etc. That's probably more to the taste of the Romans (source are the notes in my Italian edition of the Iliad if that wasn't clear) and contemporary folks.
The Greeks would rather have you be a handsome teenager boy, looking as beautiful like a statue that falls to ground, and to pieces, in a single instant.
Now, the relationship of fragility and beauty for poetic purposes is far from exclusively Greek, sure.
>Why did Homer decide to put in a bunch of references to people (I assume he made up) that have no bearing on the story?
Try to think about who would listen to Homer's tales. Namely, people from all over Greece. What you're reading is a "national" epic for a collection of city states. No wonder he features people from all over Greece in the book.
That's why we got two full books in the first place, and the more "local" poets came to us in tiny fragments, literal tatters.
And I wouldn't assume it's all stories the historical Homer made up by himself, rather he collected and put into hexameters.
That's his hubris.
Perhaps it's easier to fall into temptation and do something that offends the gods, when you're indeed a larger than life character, as the chief of the largest coalition of free men ever.
