Overall thoughts on the book:
So I read this book for a couple reasons. I read this book because I had read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey and I really enjoyed it. I decided that I would only read The Iliad if I enjoyed The Odyssey. Which is why I read them out of order. As many other people have reported, The Iliad is kinda boring. Not a lot happens. There’s a lot of male bravado. If you like stories about battles, you might like this book. It was fine.
The other reason that I wanted to read it is because it seems like everyone else has read Song of Achilles and I feel left out. So I’m going to start Song of Achilles soon, but I wanted to read the original before I read the retelling.
More details on the book and lots of spoilers:
This book was honestly not great. Like most of the time I didn’t know what was going on. It rambled a lot. I’m glad that I read it just to understand references made to this book and to Achilles but geez it was so boring.
As stated before, I was partially just reading this book so that I can also read Song of Achilles with this context of The Iliad but this book was so boring I would never read it again. The Odyssey was good, it rambled, but at least it was interesting. This book was boring and didn’t make any sense. It was a pointless read I think. You definitely do not need to read this before reading Song of Achilles.
I also noticed that Wilson added more lines to this book than the original has. This apparently is very normal, but one of the things that I really enjoyed about Wilson’s Odyssey was that it had the exact same number of lines as the original Greek text. I do enjoy the introduction that Wilson gives to her books. They give the book so much more context and color that the original readers would already have had.
Emily Wilson’s introduction gives a lot of information about the Ancient Greek world. It tells of the customs, of the geography, of some of the political facts. I enjoyed the introduction. If you are interested in Ancient Greece, Emily Wilson’s introductions to The Iliad and to The Odyssey are great read’s by themselves.
Final thoughts:
I wouldn’t especially recommend this book. You might enjoy it if you are a big fan of books about battle scenes and war. It wasn’t bad but I wouldn’t read it again.
Bayous and Books 