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Discussion question: Did Agamemnon deserve it?

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whats a reasonable time to finish the iliad? im a fucking slow reader and i want to read faster. jsut finished book 10.

The Greek meme is dead

This is now a Peterson thread.

Agamemnon's stories are a series of fuck-ups whether it's the Iliad or the tragedian's plays.

See if you can finish the rest of it in the same time that took you to get there, that'd be an improvement. Then again there's no infamously boring Catalogue of Ships to slow you down.

bro catalogue of ships was actually really good. idk im just slow, that was a good suggestion

Are you me? On book 12 of Chapman's translation here. The battle scenes are getting old. I've been reading it for about five days.

reading fagles. yeah battle scenes are actually the worst of the book, i like it when theyre paced well like book 10. book 9 was really good too, muh character development. im on 11 and its samey and hard to imagine, maybe im a brainlet

Yeah lol I find Agamemnon's bait for Achilles hilarious and a great representation of the son of Atreus's character.

His thought process is like:
I love bitches. Achilles is pissed because I stole his bitch. Solution? Give Achilles more bitches (including my daughter [what a dick]), plus the bitch that I stole from him. But I'm going to send other people to ask for his forgiveness. Also, I'm only doing this because Diomedes humiliated. Otherwise I'd be at home with muh bitches and muh wine.

And Achilles goes: Thanks for the offer of the bitches, but I only really care for the bitch that you stole from me. Also, I'm still offended, so fuck off. Also, muh prophecy.

*Diomedes humiliated me

MUH HONOR MUH RIGHTFUL TREASURE REEEEEEEE

when did diomedes humiliate atrides?

Big Atrides (BA) starts crying about heading home at the beginning of book 9 (his excuse is that Zeus is no longer with the Greeks. "'tis desperate fight in us to strive with [Zeus]; then let us fly") which leads to an awkward silence until Diomedes stands up, immediately calls out BA's hypocrisy in previously calling Diomedes "faint and weak" and says that even if BA dips, the rest of the Greeks will stay.

makes sense, i remember this but i didnt make the connection. i need 2 pay more attention!

Also, Nestor (of course) pitches in with a more thoughtful argument in favor of staying.

Nestor's interjection here makes sense, but most of the time he's my least favorite character. He drones on for pages with his anecdotes. We get it. You're old and you've seen a lot.

>Your brother gets cucked by some trojan cunt.
>"Well, guess it's time to mobilize the entire army and send hundreds of youngsters to their demiser just to save face"
>"Also I'll sacrifice my daughter for good luck, who cares lmoa"
>Disrespect the single best fighter and an overall gamechanger in our army for no fucking reason and be too autistic to back out on it even when hundreds of your soldiers have been getting killed by trojans.

He had it all coming.

I find the whole Agamemnon and Odysseus story quite interesting. I sort of read and interpreted the whole Trojan War as an event that shattered the 'old' world before the Classical period. The consequences of staying at war in a perhaps unjustified war with allies that didn't want to be dragged in were that you get cucked by your wife and her lover and then murdered because you didn't take care of business at home. To me most of the prose and poetry seems to be antiwar.

Abysmal analysis.

who else here loves Antigone?
The nigger sacrificed his daughter, not because he didn't take care of home. Agamemnon and his whore of a wife, and the piece of shit Aegisthius(?) all got it in by based Orestes.

Agamemnon is pretty good guy

When I first read the Iliad it took me 5 days and was incredibly enjoyable. The second time it took me 12 and I took as many notes as I could after doing research. Please just try to enjoy the poem and enjoy it. It may feel like a slow burn but it really is one of the greatest works of literature.

Maybe I burnt through it too quickly, but I significantly preferred the Odyssey.

>not starting with the sumerians

>5 days
wtf that's fast, took me a month, took it 30 pages at a time, roughly a chapter/book each day. you must have been doing like around 100 pages a day senpai, nice.

don't worry about it user. Just read. When I started getting into literature it took me 2-3 weeks. The next time I re-read it it'll probably take me a week max.

Deserve what? His death? It was his fate. He sacrificed iphigenia, but that was fate too. He was a cock but he was a relatively competent leader/general.

Does free will exist bros?

>not starting with the paleolithic cave paintings.

Yeah, that's about it. I read slowly but have a lot of time, so in 3 or 4 hours I could finish my daily reading. On my second reading with all the notetaking I was probably spending 5-6 hours on it, and only doing ~2 chapters a day, depending upon how much I could get out of it.
Nothing wrong with that. I do think reading through the Iliad quickly is a mistake, as reading through any great work would be. I much prefer the Iliad because I enjoy the characters and themes a lot more than the Odyssey, and because it's more somber in tone. I've always suspected that as I get older, I'll shift to preferring the Odyssey because of its treating of age, weariness, fortitude, and other things.

wtf was hercules' problem

now that you mention Hercules (Or Heracles), where do i look if i want to read about his famous labors? Is there a text or is he one of those characters that pop up in in books like edith hamiltons mythology?

Too strong. He didn't read The Republic where Plato specifically mentions that too much brawn without brain leads to someone irascible.

>Get a chance to have the most beautiful woman that exists
>To have this chance, you pledge an oath to help the successful suitor to avoid a huge war being fought over her
>You brother wins her
>Your brother gets cucked by Paris. You and every other Greek who swore the oath (which was like fucking everyone who matters because it was about the most desirable woman in the world) go to get her back.
>Artemis becalms your ships because she's a bitch or something, demands you kill your daughter to take off.
>Forced to sacrifice your daughter to Artemis, go fight for ten years
>Some priest humiliates you in front of your army with the help of the God who is the twin brother of the goddess who forced you to kill your own daughter.
>try to save face by taking a new bitch from your general who fucks a dude usually anyway
>General, who could have any woman he wants, has an absolute shit fit and cries to his mommy
>Still manage to win
>come home, your wife and her new lover kill you
>All of this is because your ancestors couldn't stop killing people and feeding them to other people/gods.
Agamemnon did nothing wrong

Is Diomedes the ultimate bull?

Instead of starting with the greeks i wanted to go earlier so i got the epic of gilgamesh. Aside from that is there anything else pre greek i should read? Is there any babylonian literature?

There is no Iliad equivalent for reading about Heracles, but you can read the relevant sections of Apollodorus' library of mythology (oxford press, pretty dry book overall), the relevant plays (heracles, heracleidae, etc.), and the relevant chapter of diodorus' histories (entailing not just the one greek legend, but the multiple distinct myths which coalesce to form our view of Heracles, combining greek and eastern legends).

Apollodorus is your best bet for a relevant greek rendition, start to finish. Read some plays later for more flavor and drama once you know the actual stories.

theoi.com/greek-mythology/heracles.html

Click on each labor for more, they have sources