Start reading the Illiad

It's good overall, the monologues are great but the lists and fight scenes are boring

>catalogue of ships is STILL filtering plebs almost 3000 years later

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what do you mean four times, do you think if you put it down and come back the book is gonna change?

I just skipped the catalogue of ships, fight me.
It's an oral poem, anyone who is important to the plot will be mentioned again with a bunch of adjectives that describe his elders, where he came from and what he did.

The OG pleb filter

Skim it? Skip it? How do you get defeated by it

Unironically exhilarating

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>He didn't cry when Alcibiades, son of Theophonius, who owned a hundred acres of land on the ragged shores of Ithaca, fell lifeless to the ground as shadows filled his eyes.

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>100,00 troops in a distant expedition
>population of Greece was less than 800,000
armies +50K prior to Early Modern Period are pure fantasy, even if you could field such force, there is no way to feed it for more than a few weeks.
Realistically it probably was 10,000 men and 120 ships.

Are you supposed to remember all their names? I thought I should simply read it for entertainment and not worry about remembering all of their names, since they are so many and anyone important to the plot is being named often enough to remember them anyway.

You're meant to memorise the entire thing you filthy barbarian.

They imply that if they get killed then it's the end for the Achaean nation, so probably most of the men went to the battle.

KEK

Are there any famous instances of people being pleb filtered by the catalog of ships? I'd love to know if there's some diary entry from, like, Regency England of some dude complaining about it.

>tfw the first Iliad version I read when kid didn't have the catalogue

Kek

How can anyone even stop reading because a passage isn't very interesting? Anyone who stopped reading it completely just because of the catalogue, wouldn't have read the book anyway even without it.

fpbp except for the suicide talk

catalogue of ships can be skipped, if you're a puny man. even the chapter about achilles shield may be skimmed. get to the good stuff and actually read the book on easy mode once before staying a brainlet forever.

>Are you supposed to remember all their names?
if you were learning to sing the epic, yes. if you're reading it from a book like a mere mortal, no.

honor to you, and to your house

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>There are two deaths. The first is when you die. The second is when someone speaks you name for the last time.
Some quote I can't find the exact origin of.

These dudes avoided the second death.

That's like dropping Moby Dick once the cetology starts. It's a pleb filter

>mfw I read the Samuel Butler prose translation of the Odyssey and nobody could stop me
Seriously, though, OP, don't listen to Yea Forums and join the Odyssey chads, it's way better than the Iliad.

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Tell me lads: Is there a god or goddess more worthy of exaltation and bountiful sacrifice than bright-eyed Pallas Athena bar the royal Zeus, son of Kronos?

>Not cheering when your polis gets mentionated
Barbarian

Why not simply read if after the Iliad like you're supposed to?

>Skipping the forging of the shield
>Skipping the the most beautiful descriptions in western lit because I can't focus without someone dying every other page
ISHYGDDT

And miss out on the better verse? The grandeur befitting an epic?

the catalog of ships is just there to show how existential the threat is to the greeks of destruction at troy, you can skip it if you desire

(you do not need to read the illiad in order either, you can read it by book much like the Aeneid, only some of the books further the story)

Tfw rwhen I read Iliad and skipped everything except the catalogue of ships

Even if you only have 400,000 men for half the population, since age expectancy was around 30-35 back then, at least half of that would be of able-bodied age, 17/18 and older, meaning you'd have at least 200,000 men that could be enlisted as soldiers. so 100,000 men isn't inconceivable.

based

Jesus Christ

I resist the urge to insult you. I repeat, there is no way to supply such field army, but even if you could, the economy wouldn't support such no matter what is the age expectancy, even the Nazies only succeeded in mobilizing 33% of their population, Napoleon's ability to muster 10% of was revolutionary. Even medieval arrière-ban (that technically summoned every freeman) was only successful in securing people who lived half-day walk from the battlefield.

We're talking about something that happened over 3,000 years ago. You can't apply modern or near-modern sensibilities about warfare to how things were done back then. Read a book on ancient warfare before you start comparing apples and oranges.

>not enjoying the catalogue of ships
I'm going to actually get a notebook and write down the names of characters listed there that reappear later the next time I read it

this is unbelievable inbecility

100k/800k = 12.5% though, which is comparable to napoleon's number

>This. A million times this. QFT young scholar

At least try to refute my argument, if you even can, instead of resorting to using words you clearly can't even spell right.

Mate, the Battle of Gaugamela and the Battle of Thermopylae modern force size estimates are around or over 100,000 for the Persians. Was looking around on Wikipedia for counterexamples to your claim, and there's two for you.

>pseudo-historical
>author

lmao, please read up on how oral tradition works

Based and kleos-pilled. May the eternal glory of the Iliad teach you and your offspring proper heroic conduct for all time.16

Brill’s Companion to Military Defeat in Ancient Mediterranean Society (p. 78) gives an estimate for Issus and Gaugamela of 50,000–60,000 Persians
Brittanica gives the lowest estimate for Thermopylae 70,000. So, maybe 70K is the better cap. But it should be noted that the lowest population estimate for Achaemenid Empire was 17M, meaning 70K wouldn't even be 0.5% of its population, which can be seen from how Darius III was quickly able to muster another great army after the disaster in Issus.

>since age expectancy was around 30-35 back then, at least half of that would be of able-bodied age, 17/18 and older
It's not that simple and it always bothered me that people always think that. The average age of death was around 35 yes. The thing is, back then, child mortality was off the fucking charts. Children just kept dying all the time. But when somebody survived childhood, they didn't die at 35. You'd get to 60 and up.

But if you make the average, with all the 0-5 years old kids dying, yeah, it makes some weird numbers.

seriously BRO
This is a bait thread or OP is retarded. If OP is retarded then you're retarded for replying because wasting time on retards is retarded. NO, I AM NOT A RETARD for replying as well as there are already a million replies so I'm not so much replying to OP as the everyone in this thread and the board as a whole.

unrelated but didn't some roman campaigns In England have like 100k Britons? probably easier on home soil to field such a number but still impressive.