The “Iliad” is the goriest of ancient poems. Homer doesn’t sugarcoat the death of a hero, or even that of some insignificant Myrmidon. He’s an anatomist of death, a forensic pathologist of the bronze spear and the bronze sword. The Greek and Trojan warriors meet their fates in ways violent, bloody and graphic — had Greek battlefield surgeons existed, they could have used the “Iliad” as a textbook. Hollywood’s violence is merely a weak imitation of what the Greeks recited for centuries.
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