/lit/ - Literature

>>16196549
too soon

iliad

Iliad. Odyssey was clearly the most influential though.

>>16196569
This, maybe after 100 years we can decide

>>16196608
Make that 1000

Like asking if you prefer a comedy or a tragedy.
One is a war story, the other a journey.

>>16196691
Not at all stupid idiot.
Also tragedy is obviously a far greater form of art than comedy

>>16196549
Who was a better hero, Achilles or Odysseus? Plato couldn't answer it, Ion couldn't answer it maybe an anon here can.

>>16196691
>>16196703
mommies are fighting

>>16196713
Nestor, of course.

>>16196713
Achilles cried to his mom to tell Zeus to protect the Trojans lmao

>>16196604
>>16196578
>Iliad
Why?
>>16196604
>Odyssey was clearly the most influential though.
How so?

>>16196833
Shaping every other story that was published after it

>>16196713
Diomedes.

>>16196856
Illiad shaped Odyssey

>>16196713
Kek.

>>16196866
>literally carried by Zeus

>>16196713
Fuck not Ion I meant Hippias, now I look like a retard.

>>16196974
you always do anon

>>16196549
Iliad is a better story with ups and downs of the trials of larger than life men, but the Odyssey is a better read with the singular journey of one man and his crew against Poseidon.

>>16196877
imagine not understanding that man, no matter how skillful or strong, may only be made truly great by interaction with divinity

>>16197034
Word. Because divinity is everywhere and everything of importance is inspired by it.
Courage is divine. Great treachery is divine. It's literally impossible to be independent from beings who literally are the world.

>>16196549
The Iliad has a great cast of amazing characters, the Odyssey is carried by one twisty boy with sexy thighs.
Also, Diomedes. An epic with Diomedes is by default superior to an epic devoid of his badassery, devotion and bro-ness.

>Called The Odyssey
>Character called Odysseus doesn't appear until 5 books in

>>16197148
>When Diomedes just fucking stabs Aphrodite

The Iliad > The Aeneid > The Odyssey

>>16197001
>Odyssey is a better read with the singular journey of one man and his crew

You should've stopped at "one man". The crew is pretty much nonexistent as characters and only serve to highlight the protagonist. (Or show the possible pitfalls he could have fallen in.) Odyssey is really just about Odysseus being pulled along by gods and women back to his home so he can massacre all the suitors. (Even the ones he said would be spared.) He barely had any input on anything he did.

I don't remember a single character's name from Odyssey (other than the gods and Odysseus himself), but I distinctly remember Agamemnon, Patroclus, Hector and Menelaus from the Iliad, which is why I consider it a better story.

>>16196549
The highlights of the Illiad easily beat the highlights of the Odyssey but from a modern perspective the Odyssey is the better story overall.

>>16196549
>I always thought those were the same book "illiad: the Odyssey" until very recently

>>16197034
Funny, Diomedes agrees that being carried by Gods is dishonorable

>>16196703
>tragedy greater than comedy

holy fuck youre embarrassingly stupid

>>16197156
this is what makes it inferior to me, the actual journey is maybe 25% of the book, the rest is his faggot son and the planning of the suitor murders. read sinbad if you want a version of the odyssey without shitty filler

>>16197299
It's dissapointing when you first read it for sure. The Telemachy is pretty boring without The Iliad for context but it comes to a nice close when Telemachus becomes a decisive man at the end of the poem. I quite like the slaying of the suitors though. I always love to see the return of the rightful king.

>>16196713
That's because they were sleeping on Aeneas.

>>16196756
>it's a nestor talks about how if it were back in the day he coulda handled the problem singlehandedly
Its like having a Greek grandpa on the battlefield. Comfy

>>16196713
For me, its Agamemnon

>>16197163
>read Iliad before gigachad meme
>this is how I pictured him, albeit with armor
I-is it a coincidence

>>16196549
Iliad is better, except for the ending.
Odysseus return home is better than Achillies accepting Pat's death.
>Argo the dog finally seeing his master is back home where he belongs knows he can rest finally because his master is safe and he will keep the family safe too
>Agamemnon cheering in the house of the dead because Odysseus his brother in arms made it home safe and killed those who sought to usurp his home, doing what Agamemnon failed to do
>odysseus finally getting to see his wife again after so many years
Etc. Happy ending is better than a somber one

>>16197156
>>16197299
The structure of the Odyssey is one of the best aspects about it. The Telemachy perfectly establishes how badly Odysseus is needed on Ithaca, nicely introduces the whole theme of xenia and tells the fortunes of the other Achaeans which is also crucial to the story overall. Starting the book like this effectively raises the question that all of Ithaca is asking themselves: "Where is Odysseus?" and I think thats very much intended. I also love how all of the crazy shit is put into a narration by Odysseus where he would obviously be compelled to exaggerate to get more loot from the Phaeacians, that way it's perfectly compatible with much more realistic other books.

>>16197478
I see you've listened to The Great Cources Plus series on The Odyssey too

>>16196549
Odyssey, significantly so.

>>16196713
Ajax the Great was truly /oursperg/.

>>16196604
90% of quotes comming from the classics were taken from the Illiad.

>>16197404
He just wanted to motivate the scared faggots

>>16197532
Based, but also stop exposing me wtf

>>16197478
Cringe r*ddit academicuck opinion.

>>16197478
even if this were true (which its not because its called the odyssey not odysseus and son), theres no reason it should be 5 cantos of "wheres my daddy" bullshit. im amazed you autists were this entertained by these sections theyre incredibly dull and the language pales in comparison to that of the iliad. the work as a whole feels like homer was experimenting with story structure and tried to do more than was necessary.

>>16197615
If you're gonna read these books like you would a comic book you're missing like 90% of their meaning and might as well read some shitty historical fiction at that point.

>>16197654
Names can be quite arbitrary in Antiquity. Also the whole part about Telemachus isn't some random minibook - It's literally crucial to the story as a whole and gets connected in the end to Odysseus storyline. And it's about way more than just "wheres my daddy". Consider rereading.

>>16197229
>I always read and pronounced "Odysseus" as "Odyessus" with stress on the "O" until very recently

>>16197710
no amount of rereading will justify 5 cantos of teleboy searching for papa its boring and no one cares. christ its not even necessary they explain everything again after odysseus arrives in ithaca anyway. consider forming your own opinion you absolute coward

>>16197658
Shut the fuck up retard you just copy someone else's interpretation. It's better to read it like a comic book by oneself than being a disgusting pseud

iliad needed a competent editor. why introduce a character only to have him die 1 paragraph later? why do this 50 times? Who fucking cares? Odyssey is a real story.

>>16196833
Dude Odyssey is way more popular its not even close

>>16197908
Only after the sixties. Before that the Iliad was more talked about

>>16197902

Is there any consensus that both were composed by the same guy?

>>16197955
Thanks for posting your selfie but that has nothing to do with my post.
>>16197963
who cares?

>>16197888
It's like three and a half books, maybe like 50-75 pages total and there is way more to it. Do you really want to tell me that for example the whole Menelaus scene where he speaks of wrestling a sea god was uninteresting?

>>16197896
I accept and embrace someone else's interpretation when it's reasonable, yes. Everything else would be dumb as fuck.

>>16196691
the iliad isn't a war story

I prefer reading the Iliad but I prefer having read the Odyssey

>>16198490
>I prefer having read the Odyssey
why?

>>16196713
Odysseus is Achilles humbled

>>16196549
the odyssey, by a long shot.

iliad - the original war story, classicists get to geek out at book 2, lots of very human emotions depicted fairly realistically. That said, it doesn't really have a lot of layers. it's basically war is awesome/war is hell, men fight over important things as well as trivial things, the other side is human too.

the odyssey has a LOT of layers in it, whether intended or not. there's the straightforward travelogue. then there's the recounting of soldiers returning home from war and the world having changed while they were gone. there's the tragedies of the men who's lives are cut down before they can return home, despite being victorious over the trojans (think ajax and agamemnon, both due to terrible decisions made in the war). there's the recounting of man's loneliness and longing for family/home. there's the humor and cleverness of the classic trickster genre (think of the wordplay and escape from polyphemus). there's also the restoration of the king narrative (see how that one has echoed throughout western literature over the millennia). There's also the story of a young man struggling to come to terms with adulthood but lacking a father figure and how that absence can both impede as well as impel character growth.

tl/dr: iliad is a great war story, but the odyssey has far more layers of meaning in it. both are excellent and rightly deserve their place in western canon

>>16198742
you write like a stupid woman

>>16198782
based
>>16198742
kys

>>16198782
i had no idea that a vagina could write. but seriously, this is /lit, expect some sophistication and even a cursory discussion of these themes. if you can't handle not being 12 anymore, i'd suggest you go play over at /pol/

>>16198849
refute my argument (odyssey is better because it has numerous layers of meaning) or piss off to another board

>>16198949
go back

>>16198742
Good post, unironically thanks for sharing. Fuck the faggot replying to you, no (You) for him

>>16198995
Great post thanks so much for sharing!

>>16196713
For me it Patroklos
>best bro of Achilles the most powerful warrior there ever was
>cares for his fellow greek bros like a total bro
>ask Achilles for allowance to take his place among the Myrmidones to fight back Trojans when everything seems lost
>defends the greek base with no efforts given
>Trojans need to fall back to their city
>literally tries to hunt down Hector but is cockblocked by Apollon
>still keeps fighting
>Apollon literally needs to take him down himself before he gots speared by some nigger and later stabbed by Hector himself
>Hector couldn't come up with a good one liner and totally spilled his spaghetti over Patroklos dying
>Patroklos tells Hector what a cuck he is and that Hector literally needed the help of gods to defeat him and that nobody of the Trojans would have stand a chance against him
>dies like a boss

>>16199186
>>Hector couldn't come up with a good one liner and totally spilled his spaghetti over Patroklos dying
>>Patroklos tells Hector what a cuck he is and that Hector literally needed the help of gods to defeat him and that nobody of the Trojans would have stand a chance against him
>>dies like a boss
kek

>>16197268
>implying this isn't major cope by someone who got assblasted by Hector

>>16198742
>iliad is a great war story
You shortcuted the themes of the Iliad and summarized it to be a war story while it literally begins as class struggle between an emporer and king/hero among kings who are pawns to the gods and their argument over a slave girl only affects low ranked soldiers

>>16199359
>>16198742
cringe modern inteprations from retards who don't have the first idea about greek culture

Alexander the Great preferred the Iliad.

>>16199359
>Iliad
>Class struggle
It's time to stop

>>16196691
The Iliad is a story of Achilles' rage, you complete dullard.

Furthermore, the whole apples and oranges thing is retarded. I prefer apples much more than oranges, I happily return to apples more than oranges, and therefore I deem apples better than oranges. Thus, the Iliad being an apple and the Odyssey an orange does not mean that I cannot prefer one over the other.

I had a lot of fun reading the Iliad, even if the battle scenes felt repititious with all those Trojans, Greeks, et alii getting slaughtered and killed in bloody battle. I respect the way Homer managed to compose thousands of lines of prose about that one particular scene at Ilium without ever feeling like I was stuck in the same spot for too long (except the catalogue of ships). There were many breaks from the main battle, like the building of the wall, the fighting of the river and Achilles, the funeral games, the conversation between Achilles and King Priam, or those several hundred lines that described the shield Hephaestus made for Achilles. I feel like Homer explored deeply themes of courage, cowardice, anger, spite, mortality, forgiveness in the Iliad, which is what makes it so great.

The Odyssey was great too, and its qualities that outshone the Iliad were how varied the scenery was, and that the characters seemed to have more depth to them. It also explored many themes, such as patience, perseverance, temperance, fidelity, cunning, as well as those explored in the Iliad. It definitely felt more refined/concise than the Iliad, but it leaned more on fantasy because of the mythological creatures, and I'm not particularly a fan of fantasy, though I didn't mind the Odyssey much because it wasn't fantastical creatures every 2 seconds, and many acted as metaphors, like the Sirens. It is ultimately a sequel, and even if you don't need to read the Iliad to enjoy it, I know that I would not have enjoyed it as much if I read it first.

Therefore, I conclude that in my subjective (superior) opinion, the Iliad is better.

theres so much reddit in this fucking thread just shut it down already sage

>>16199524
he was bent though, he probably coomed over Achilles and Patroclus

>>16196713
I like Hector.

>>16196713
Odysseus. He is the first bro in all of literature. Enkido and Gilgamesh would be bros but they were shitskins lol.

>>16198490
Classic

>>16196549
Both are essential. That’s why they’ve been paired for thousands of years.
The Iliad is an epic drama about human war and forgiveness. It has death, triumph, politics. The action gives you an adrenaline rush, the book is very masculine (why it has higher appeal here), but I think it’s strongest moments are the subtle ones. The humanization of the gods makes the absurdity of the world seem a bit more humorous and manageable. Hector’s final stand conjures a unique sort of pity for me, seeing the hero-villain dropped so low. Achilles final forgiveness is the highlight of the story.
The Odyssey is the birth of the modern story. It leaps ahead of the archaic-ness of the Iliad. It has a more complex structure, an unreliable narrator in Odysseus (who is more compelling than any character in the Iliad), varies settings, and weaves mythology and folklore right into the story. We get a fuller look at humanity through Penelope and Telemachus. We even get cheeky cameos from other epic cycle heroes. Odysseus’s travel tales are awesome and the foundation of most modern hero stories, it’s a more important story in regard to our current western civilization. I also love the Odyssey as a story of a soldier returning to civilian life, or of any adventurers return; the burden of carrying the oar until the people you meet don’t even know what it is, don’t understand the trials and sacrifices you made. Life goes on, It’s existential
Both these poems are a monument to the human experience and hopefully can be a large part of the epitaph when it’s all said and done. I love them

Yea

>>16201007
the odyssey does not have a more complex structure

>>16196866
this

>>16199186
>dies like a boss
dyings a hard cringe for me bro

>>16201082
It was his fate. Zeus literally needed him dead to enrage Achilleus and made him reject Achilleus advice

>>16198292
The Iliad is a war story

>>16198742

Bruh, the Iliad has plenty of layers. It talks about mortality and the contrast between Gods and men.

>>16197299
Idk I like that fact. It's interesting if you read the story he gave to the swineherd as the "real journey" - where Odysseus seeks fame and fortune and only chooses to return to his kingdom upon losing everything

>>16201585
the swineherd was a prince before being captured,by the time odysseus comes back his father would have died making him a king if he could just get back home,

>>16201659
Telemachus also calls him father

>>16197268
literally just taunting hektor, who is also a badass

>>16196549
Haha, guys, imagine if there was another book and it was like:

Homer
>picture
Simpson

haha

in what order shall I read the Greeks after completing Homer?

>>16202023
The athenian playwrights wrote some sequels. What happens with Agamemnon and his line. Aristophanes is very good. You might also get into Hesiod’s Histories, and Thucydides. Xenophon
Might get into philosophy, in which case you start with a collection on the pre-socratics
Or these podcasts
https://historyofphilosophy.net/

>>16201489
It's a story about Achilleus' rage. It's literally in the first line.

>>16202023
>not reading all extant Greek literature in chronological order

>>16196713
Hector. Achilles a shit.

>>16202307
And he goes to war.

>>16196691
>>16196703
So this is how it's like to have two moms on a household kek

>>16197156
>>16197299
Plebs, the Telegony is one of the best parts.

>>16202501
Telemachy I mean

>>16202471
That guy is a douchbag anon.
And I’m nobody’s mom.

>>16201737
No he wasn't retard, he literally refused to fight until Athena came to tell him to fucking get back

>>16201029
That's what you learn in classics 101 anon, let the kids be

>>16202351
Extremely based

>>16198742
>the odyssey has a LOT of layers in it
fuck off pseud

>>16202466
that's exactly what achilles doesn't do though

>>16202987
he had just been rebuked for trying to wound Apollo, and the literal God of War had descended onto the battlefield
he then proceeds to put a hole through Ares' midsection with the help of Athene

>>16196691
>>16196703
>there are people going around disguised as Butterlover and saying the dumbest shit they can possibly imagine
>nobody can tell what is the real landwhale

>>16196549
I would like Odyssey more if there were more of his journeys and myths and less of the "I must plot to kill all these suitors while dressed as a hermit"

>>16203235
BASED

>>16198742
i think your argument here comes in on the side of the iliad more than the odyssey.
if you have no literary judgement, no ability to see a work of art as it really is, you spend your time groping for guidelines like what reviewers have said or might say about it, what movement it seems to fall into, where it seems to be aiming, whether its style strikes you as normal or not, above all whether it can be called important or not - which is far easier to decide than whether the thing is any good or not.

I think either answer is valid.
Iliad may be more appealing if you like warstories and history about war mixed with legend.
Odyssey might be more appealing to conventional fiction readers, people who like poetry and imaginative settings and stories.
There's some overlap between the two, but I don't think one is objectively better than the other.

>>16203635
Why bother posting or coming here at all if you're this retarded? Why not just hang out on Reddit?

>>16196691
do you not have a job or anything? any school you attend to? why are you here 24/7?

>>16203644
>make braindead shitpost
>"why bother posting if you're retarded"
You tell me?

>>16203644
You should be over 18 to post here.

>>16203654
a lot of people are « Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » now, i don't know if the real ones still about

>>16203635
the shattered iliad makes a masterpiece, while the odyssey by its ease and interest remains the oldest book worth reading for its story. "gay, fine and vivid it is, never huge or terrible."

>if you like war you'll prefer the iliad
>if you prefer adventures you'll enjoy the odyssey
How to spot someone who has read neither

I don't give a shit about either war or adventures and I loved both

>>16197278
fucking this
such shitty opinions coming from people who calim to be e/lit/e

Why didn't Great Ajax just kill Hector then and there? Makes no sense

>>16203981
hector had apollo's favour

>>16204118
But Great Ajax didn't know that. Apollo just pulled him slightly cause he was getting rekt and they were gonna continue clashing with Ajax doing well but Acheans agreed to stop and then get marauded by Hector the next days.

>>16198742
>She angered them because she told the truth

you can tell that most posters have read an inferior translation, because they name Aias as Ajax, Achilleus as Achilles, and Hektor as Hector

>>16204641
Based Fitzgerald reader

>>16204641
Fagles is the only good translation and I read several

>>16203270
He didn’t stay at home

>>16203981
What was that point of that duel? Just to add some back-and-forth tension cause Hector was supposed to win then Hector was about to lose then they just went to sleep?

>>16204641
Cringe. If you want to feign intellectual high-ground, the only correct answers are Αἴας, Ἀχιλλεύς, and Ἕκτωρ

>>16204786
he stayed in his tent b

>>16204791
to end that battle

>>16203635
>people who like poetry
Those like Illiad's verse.

>>16204894
So just a plot device to advance the action? Why did Apollo even want to prolong the war another night if he admitted to Athena that he knows the Trojans will eventually lose?

>>16197268
athena helped diomedes to victory in the iliad.

>>16204716
close, you're actually speaking to a lattimore chad
fitzgerald is on a similar level, though

>>16204842
sorry, we're talking about translations to English, not whatever mutant script "Ἀχιλλεύς" is from

>>16204979
it also allows for the exchanging of gifts & a moment of balance. but as far as i can see apollo's options were allow athene give the greeks an unfair advantage (after refusing the trojans' plea for mercy) or end the battle early without turning the tide.

>>16203981
Because Hector was fated to be killed by Achilles. The gods made sure to keep Ajax and Diomedes away from Hector.

>>16204994
>t. can't follow a discussion

>>16204641
>Achilleus
It's Akhileus