/lit/ - Literature

>>15633669
How does it make you feel that it seems that multiculturalism seems to have backfired on the Jews in that many (secular Jews from what little I've seen) are also being assimilated/corrupted?

On a tangent, do you have any opinion whatsoever on Isidore Epstein? It's okay if you don't, I'm just wondering since I'm currently reading his layman accessible overview of Judaism.

Can't quite figure out yet how to coalesce my "take" on Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance other than "not comfy". It also reminds me of /lit/ shitposting but in a bad way. Also, makes me want to continue with the Greeks, where that's literally the most comfy part, when Phaedrus takes a graduate level ancient philosophy course on rhetoric and BTFOs the professors. Probably solid midwit-core, I guess.

The weather outside was nice enough to read in.

So, I want to get into philosophy and started with the Greeks. After diving into the basics of mythology I finished the Iliad and currently I'm trying to make sense of it. There are a lot of interesting themes in this book but while reading I sometimes got the feeling reading an ancient poem version of The Avengers. There was good stuff and there was mundane stuff. That's not necessarily bad, but I'm wondering what do I need to get out of the Iliad in order to understand Plato and Aristotle?

I got an idea but I'm a brainlet and afraid that I focused and overanalyzed irrelevant stuff. So I would like to hear /lit/'s opinion on that:

The main thing I took away is that Ancient Greece was all about class and hierarchy. Power and glory did not came to the one who struggled for it but to the one who was destined for it, either by fate, gods, ancestry or social rank. The clearest manifestation is in the penultimate book:

>Achilles holds a chariot race to honor the death of Patroclus
>Antilochus has the shittiest horses, but tries to win the race not by strength but by cleverness
>He races head to head with Menelaus who has a higher rank, better horses and should be destined to come in before Antilochus
>However, Antilochus has the bigger balls and so he rushes towards the turning point not giving a fuck what happens when they both crash
>This strategy works, Menelaus chickens out, Antilochus comes in second, Menelaus third (the winner Diomedes won because the Gods interfered with the race)
>Menelaus goes full Karen and blames Antilochus of foul game
>Antilochus is smart enough to appease Menelaus by offering him his price
>Manelaus gets his shit together and relinquishes the price to Antilochus
>However, he warns Antilochus "to never overtake someone who is better than you"

But Menelaus was not better, because then he would have won, Homer. Of course you could say that Menelaus just acts retarded, but usually when a character does something "bad" (in the sense: Homer perceived it as bad) in the Iliad other characters stepped in to correct them, but this does not happen in this case. To me this shows that Homer (and the Ancient Greeks) also thought that Menelaus was clearly the better driver because of his rank.