My four ideas with the Iliad these days (have read through book 18):
— I’m looking at the parallelism of the two duels (between Paris and Menelaos and Hector and Aias), and that of the fights over the corpses of Sarpedon and Patroclus (which prefigure the concerns over Hector’s body) and wondering how many other such parallelisms there are that I’m missing and wondering in general what these parallelisms are about.
— I’m also thinking about how different gods seem to dominate different portions of the narrative: Athena the first third, Poseidon the second, now Apollo seems to be making an appearance.
— I’m looking at the theme of fire. Is it my imagination or is it the case that ever since Hector lit fire to the ships, more and more of the similes involve the idea of fire? as if the literal has become the figurative — the literal has become the emotional.
— Finally, the idea of taunting. There seem to be one or two books, I can’t remember which, in which it suddenly became a common behavior for warriors to taunt their killed, defeated adversaries. Why?
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 