/lit/ - Literature

>>22242893
Just read The Aethiopis and The Little Iliad you silly goose

>>22242893
The epic cycle was originally composed of 5 books, the only 2 remaining are The Iliad and The Odyssey. If your problem with it is that the story feels incomplete that’s because it is.

Laocoön, the Trojan Horse and the taking of Troy are all related most famously in the Aeneid when Aeneas tells about them to Dido. Helen’s reunion with Menelaus is told by her in the Odysseus. As for the Achilles heel, that comes from the Achilleid, which Dante loved but is read less now

>>22242918
No, beginning the action in the middle of the story is called in media res. The story is supposed to start like that

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res

The Iliad begins with “a situation” which is explained at the outset through exposition, it isn’t continuing from a prior work by Homer. Likewise the Odyssey isn’t picking up where a work left off but starts in the middle and fills us in with flashbacks in the form of stories told by different characters including Odysseus

The Aeneid likewise does this, it starts after the characters have fled Troy, then narrates the fall of Troy later in a flashback

>>22242893
>When you find out that Illiad is not about Brad Pitt but the tragedy of Hector

>>22242940
It's a fact that Homer's poems were part of the Trojan Cycle, we only have fragments of the other poems in the cycle which contain the more iconic moments in the Trojan War like the horse and Achilles' death. But his death is still mentioned in the Iliad, it's a good part of why he spends most of the story sulking in his tent. The Aeneid was written hundreds of years after the Trojan Cycle, and Virgil most likely had some form of access to the now-lost poems in it which is why he tells of the Trojan Horse and sack of Troy at the start of the Aeneid. And that's not even getting to whether or not "Homer" was an actual person, or if the Iliad and Odyssey had different authors

>>22242893
it was common knowledge back then that this happened. the centre of the poem was the emotional journey of achiless

>>22242972
Both ancient Greeks and modern scholars agree that both the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed by the same person due to uniform continuity; the Odyssey is harmonious with the version of events in the Iliad and doesn’t retell any of them, but presumes them and retells what the Iliad doesn’t cover. This makes it clear that the Odyssey was a “sequel” to the Iliad by the same author. Neither was “written” by Homer but orally recited with a degree of improvisation, probably being written down by someone else. They are not intended to be volumes of a series, but rather have their own continuity. If they were a part of a larger cycle they would not have features the episode to decide the war by single combat, in the last year. In traditional continuity this is at the outset of the war. Homer as he was improvising decided to include it in his poem which is just a small episode of the war’s final year. If his works were in a series then he’d be retelling the same exact episode of a prior poem in the series and placing it ten years later

The Aeneid (like Homer and Greek drama) relied on popular knowledge but Virgil’s telling of the story is the one which is by far the most famous and the version which became so well known in the Christian west’s “popular culture”, which seems to be what OP has in mind and found lacking in Homer

>>22243032
>Both ancient Greeks and modern scholars agree
The hell they do. The Odyssey is such an inferior work to the Iliad that debate has raged for centuries over its authorship.
TE Lawrence, in the preface to his own translation of the Odyssey, concluded it could not have been composed by the author of the Iliad.

>>22242893
>that pic
I see that you listened to all the film reviewers who thought that Troy was an adpatation of the Iliad. They're fuckwits.

>>22242893
The siege of Troy is depicted in the Aeneid.

>>22243903
The Aeneid is fanfiction

>>22243817
Currently reading Fagel's Illiad, and plan to read his Odyssey and Aeneid. I like his more modern, simpler translation, but already thinking of reading some of the prettier translations. I'd live to get a good copy of Pope's Iliad, but would you recommend Lawrence's Odyssey?

>>22244055
I wouldn't. It's a prose translation full of inflated language. Lawrence was too obsessed with projecting himself as "a man of letters" to be a good writer.
For me, George Chapman was the best translator of Homer. He could make you believe English was Homer's preferred language.

>>22243817
The Odyssey isn’t considered an inferior work to the Iliad by anyone and anyway that would be a retarded criterion of authorship since you would be basing your idea of inferior off the plot—which Homer didn’t inventor here—rather than the style, since the Odyssey is 100% a stylistic peer of the Iliad. Each work compliments the other, Achilles and Odysseus are hero and antihero. It is very very clear across the board to scholarship that works are companion pieces. Citing one translation is a brainlet move on your part, I could cite Butler believing the Odyssey was writing by Homer’s daughter which he argues very assertively but that’s not reflective of scholarly consensus in either the ancient or modern world

>>22243032
>modern scholars agree that both the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed by the same person
This isn't true. Many think both were the product of an oral tradition without a single true author. And some, such as M. l. West, think they are the work of two separate authors.

>>22243903
Sounds kino as fuck.

>>22242893
>>22242918
read Aristotle's Poetics

>>22242893
You're a bit of a retard OP

>>22243032
That's all retarded horseshit. Just say you really really reeeally want it to be true because you're a manchild. Those "scholars" you're referring to (if they exist at all) are just doing the academic equivalent of trolling for clicks.

>>22242893
retarded nigger

>>22245676
This thesis however went out the window when actual oral epic poetry was researched by anthropologists and it was found the idea of one poem being added to gradually didn’t exist, poet would memorize almost totally faithfully, or compose. Scholars who saw them as gradual oral traditions simply didn’t know or look into how living oral poetry works

>>22246610
Just say you reaaaaally want to deepthraot nigger dick because this so called posting you’re doing right now is the 4chan equivalent to gurgling cum.

>>22242893
I don't understand how people can miss that the death and funeral of Hector is an extremely obvious foreshadowing of both the fall of Troy and Achilles' own death. When Priam begs for the body of Hector back Achilles literally sees his own father mourning over his own inevitable death before Troy. And without Hector the fall of the city is now inevitable, even the Gods agree.

>>22247967
finally a good post

>>22242893
Homer tells you what the story is going to cover right at the beginning.

>>22247967
Doesn't Zeus let it slip earlier in discussion with the other gods? Only if Achilles returns to the fight will it be the end of Hector (and earlier Hector described as the only thing holding Troy strong). Athena and Hera pick up on that and go 'We're not allowed to fight with the mortals, but we're not technically disobeying Zeus if we can pass on this knowledge to the Achaeans'.

Such a nuanced, multi leveled story. I'm reading it for the first time and It's just impressed me from verse to verse.

>>22242893
They're in the other books.

>>22242893
Someone explain menis to me pls

>>22249355
what's to explain it's wrath, fury, frenzy, it's related to the verb maínomai which means to be out of your mind, it's related to english 'maniac', etc...

>>22249782
Achilles was not stupid so not a maniac, menis also means 'wrath of gods" so not just blind rage

>>22249355
It means supernaturally intense wrath which results in great destruction. Generally applied to a deity, Wrath of God etc. some mortal examples include Captain Ahab from Moby Dick, and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights.