The Iliad
Twenty-four books tracing the rage of Achilles and the last weeks of the Trojan War, composed around 750 BCE. Homer invented the epic form here, and his psychology of honor and grief set the terms for all subsequent literary ambition. Every war poem written since lives in its shadow.
The middle third asks for patience. Reviewers describe “hundreds of pages of them being hacked, cleaved and skewered to death,” war-book violence that repeats without much variation. Minor soldiers arrive and die within pages of each other, so “many deaths happened to seemingly throwaway characters, barely introduced,” and the roster blurs into “pages that blend together in a stream of similar-sounding Greek men.” The Catalogue of Ships near the start is the passage most readers admit to skimming. Even fans of Lattimore's fidelity note “wholesale repetition of phrases,” the formulaic epithets that reflect Homer's oral roots but read as padding to modern eyes. Some readers report the book stretching across months rather than weeks.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
