The iliad

Because it's a history book asshole

>he didnt skim that part
you fell for an ancient shittest

Do you really think Homer had history in mind when he came up with the Iliad?

Not OP but how the FUCK am I supposed to know and remember the gods/goddesses/characters? Is there a guide I can look at that isn’t reading another whole book?

I've been using this
shell.cas.usf.edu/~demilio/2211unit1/iliadplt.htm
you can click on the names to get their info

BASED

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the homeric poems are not original works but based on preexisting oral storytelling, and yes the ancient greeks literally did consider the trojan war to be a historical event and the iliad to be a document accurate enough to base legal judgments on. herodotus randomly pauses his history of the persian wars to debate homer's account of the siege of troy on a specific detail (the location of helen) without even considering that the mythical figures might have not actually existed.

guys, you should be reaching for these classics when you naturally grow out of kid's books, not when you're still struggling with the concept of reading. there's no benefit in forcing yourself to move your eyes across pages and pages of stuff you can't even begin to parse. just stick to your harry potter and game of thrones for now and come back to this in ten years.

You don't have to know all the locations and whatnot, but you should at least know something about the gods and mythology.

eh, that's backwards to me. you should be learning the mythology FROM homer, hesiod, the dramatists etc because that's where we ultimately know it from and all you're getting from edith hamilton or whoever is a summary for schoolkids that erases all the ambiguity and mystery of it. if mythology seems confusing, self-contradictory or fragmented that's because it really is and anyone who presents it as some clean organized "canon" is misrepresenting it. don't miss your chance at encountering a genuinely alien past by viewing it through the lens of some hack's diluted fairytale adaptation of it.

Use a map when you get to the part with the ships. Livens it right up.

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>>was it absolutely necessary to list everybody whose going to troy?

shout outs

Just skip that shit, but keep it handy if you want to double check whose who later on. Also, if you are unsure about what each Hero or God is supposed to be/do just have a companion guide or Wikipedia open.

The kind of autistic effort it takes to keep track of all the names of these characters and come up with genealogies and events is the same that any nerd could commit to figuring out the lore or Game of Thrones. We know this because autists have been doing that to Homer's work for millennia.

skip the catalogue of ships if you want.
surely someones explained to you why homer listed all the names

>the same that any nerd could commit to figuring out the lore or Game of Thrones

this is a completely misguided analogy. the point of modern nerd franchises is that there is continued effort on part of the author/corporate owner to maintain he illusion that the brand offers a consistent and comprehensible parallel universe which will expand indefinitely as you buy more branded products. don't worry, boba fett survived and there's a hundred books you can buy to know what happened to him next. this promise of consumption providing access to an endless "universe" overseen by a canon-defining authority is what offers reassurance to the nerd. it is impossible to apply this mindset to greek myth because there is no authority and there is no canon. there are just some stories that frequently contradict each other and constantly make references to persons and events that are lost to time and can never be known again. if only disney could buy out this ip, wishes the nerd, and establish what the canon origin story for aphrodite really is. that's why you see so much anxiety in these threads from people used to consuming nerd media. what's the reading order, how do i make sure i get it, what's this name, what's that name, oh god do i look up a wiki? the wiki doesn't know. just read the fucking book.

>it is impossible to apply this mindset to greek myth because there is no authority and there is no canon. there are just some stories that frequently contradict each other and constantly make references to persons and events that are lost to time and can never be known again.

I'm not sure how that's different from the Boba Fett example where these same characters are subject to different and sometimes contradictory scenarios again and again because the listeners wanted to know what happened to them and poets wanted the prestige and wanted to get paid. We track Agamemnon throughout his whole life and even into his death.

Besides which, we as modern people readers of Homer can't pretend that the events described in his poems are history or an allegory for a history contemporary to his. We aren't Greeks who are trying to use the stories to figure out their own cosmology. Thus, we have to do what you describe them and treat it as an alternative history or parallel universe. The anxiety you are describing is the same you see a lot of nerds trying to get into a long running franchise for the first time.

I don't think this comparison is a bad thing, it just simplifies it for modern nerdy readers. Instead of thinking its some kind of chore because they reading some heady, high art work they are literally just doing the same thing they would do with any other show or comic: slowly figuring out who is who and how it's connected.

It's not that important you can skip it if you really want to. It's only half a dozen pages or something
you'll pick it up as you go along. You should already have some familiarity with the gods, and there aren't a great number of character anyway

This is completely inverted. The Modern pop culture obsession with canon and expanded universes is directly related to the death of faith in religion. People can no longer recognise a canon of their own reality so they substitute it with a canon of a make believe reality. The Illiad, the Bible, Hindu texts, these are the Ur-mythos.

Based.

>was it absolutely necessary to list everybody whose going to troy?
Yes. Everyone listening to Homer would clap and throw their popcorn at his feet when their ancestors got mentioned.

>The Modern pop culture obsession with canon and expanded universes is directly related to the death of faith in religion.

this is sorta true, but the cause of the 'death of faith' has been occurring since the expansion of modernity and capital. as the legitimacy of god diminished in light of scientific evidence and capital's appropriation of it canonicity became inconsistent. After WW2 even our faith in scientific progress became unstable and now we're left with capital by itself. now we're stuck in this situation in which capital gives us anything that satisfies and then expects us to fill it with a social value. The social value, however, is only valuable in that it provokes interest, to manufacture the debt in our satisfaction. so, paradoxically the social value continually depreciates at a rapid rate unless their is another crisis of satisfaction in which to manufacture a new debt, and so on. how this relates to canonicity, is that the nerd is uttlerly predicated by this, and their faith in consistency and coherence, but the system of capital needs a fractal to produce debt.

>I'm not sure how that's different from the Boba Fett example

the difference is that there is this authority that can be appealed to to resolve all contradictions and answer all lingering questions. of course the actual "star wars" business venture is a collection of disparate artifacts like video games, comic books and cereal boxes but there is a corporation overseeing it all and resolving it all into one illusory "universe" - for example, by taking the name of a planet from the comic book and a planet from the video game and putting them on the same galaxy map which they will print on the cereal box. that's what "canon" is in the nerd sense, the efforts of a franchise owner to resolve the tension between the marketing fantasy of a "universe" and the business reality of selling random junk.

without this authority, efforts to treat greek myth like a nerd franchise will fail: yes, you can get a reading order, but where the reading order for some x-men comic book crossover is a reassuringly complete shopping list ("read the whole epic saga!"), the reading order for greek myth is an arbitrary collection of scraps that you will soon realize represent a minuscule fraction of the output of a dead culture, the rest of which is forever lost. looking things up on a wiki will not produce definitive answers but more ambiguity and modern speculation, or perhaps simply nothing - because the question you had is not answered in any surviving text and so will never be answered.

the way to escape all this nonsense is to forget all this parallel universe shit and just treat stories like stories, which is what they were in the first place. aeschylus wasn't looking to fill out biographical details of the atreidae so that the athenians could have a more complete myth wiki - the oresteia in fact contradicts the preexisting homeric account of the same events - he was writing a politically charged story about the origins of law while using a setting and cast already familiar to his audience but redefining who the characters are and what the events mean.

So their fucking names are passed down to fucking posterity, you .

i could believe that if the imaginary worlds served the same kind of function as religion but they clearly don't. the religious stories were valued for their meaning and explanatory power, defining the origin and purpose of suffering etc. whereas what the nerd demands of his fiction is actually perfect meaninglessness. the nerd parallel universe is just a virtual space, like a video game, filled with rational agents pursuing their goals in an endless soap opera of twists and developments. the only thing that angers the nerd more than any perceived inconsistency/inefficiency ("why do the scientists in prometheus take off their helmets?!") is the suggestion that their entertainment says anything about themselves or the world ("video games are just fun and don't mean anything", he said while moving his tom of finland-esque avatar through an idealized vision of feudalism inside a software toy designed to generate false feelings of accomplishment).

based
odyssey is way better, read that instead

the odysseys for girls