The Iliad

[Patrick Sweeney]

OK, so my tastes can get a bit strange.  And elevated.  But you really should give it a chance.  You want to see a bunch of hard-assed guys who hold a grudge?  You want to see irrational behaviour, noble decisions, blood and gore, and dogged determination?

And if you want to know what it was like for the Romans to take charge, and consider what they had to go through to wrestle control of the ancient world from the Greeks, this can give you an idea.

Read the Iliad and you'll understand why when the Romans beat Carthage they destroyed it utterly.  After all, there isn't much point in giving someone a second chance, (or in the case of Carthage, a third chance) if they're just going to try again.

(Edited by Patrick Sweeney at 8:15 am on Jan. 27, 2003)

[kellyn]

I'm with you Pat.  Western writing has been in decline since Homer and Thucydides   Check out Robert Fagles translation of the Iliad on audio.  It's long but unbelievable.   Achilles was TGO of his day.

[EricW]

...and Hannibal made his mark as history's first true gamer by crossing the Alps in winter and training elephants to stomp the Romans to a pulp.  Ahhh, those were the days.

[Patrick Sweeney]

The Fagles translation is what I'm reading.  Oh, I envy those who can read the classics in the original, but I'm not ready to do the work to join them.  I never warmed up to books on tape.

[kellyn]

Hannibal won nearly every stage but lost the match.  Luckily for us as I would not have wanted Carthage to have won.

Ancient Greek is incredibly difficult to learn.  I wish it was like the Matrix where you could just download it straight to the cortex.

[George D]

Hey Pat,

If you liked the Iliad, read the Odyssey as well. It’s the sequel – the adventures of Odysseus (or Ulysses in the Roman version) returning to Ithaca from the siege at Troy and the single-handed battle between him and those who would usurp his kingdom. Great stuff.

[ErikW]

Anybody read the fictionalized dramatization (!?) of the Spartans' stand at Thermopylae, Gates of Fire? Very cool, and one of the greatest plot twists ever.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...57727?vi=glance

[George D]

The battle at Thermopolae was Pat's "hard-assed guys" in the extreme. About 700 spartans led by King Leonidas holding off Xerxes armies, which Homer estimated to number two and a half million. And how about that Xerxes. He had all the female camp followers killed so his soldiers would be more anxious to get to Athens. In typical Spartan tradition, when betrayed they refused to surrender and died to the last man defending the body of their King.

[kellyn]

Gates of Fire is IMHO the best of the neo-Classical historical novels.  All of Steven Pressfield's books are pretty good.  Gates is the best but Tides of War is also good.  Michael Curtis Ford's The Ten Thousand is decent.

I understand that George Clooney has bought the movie rights to Gates.  Also check out anything by Victor Davis Hanson for excellent non-fiction.  As an aside Hanson wrote the best analysis of the Sept. 11 attacks that I have read.

It's sad to think that most people don't realize the sacrifice of the ancient greeks against Persia.  If the Greeks had lost the Persian Wars, there would be no democracy, market economy, detached secular thinking.  The whole western tradition would have been nipped in the bud.

I've not been to Thermopylae but I've been to Marathon where the Athenians squelched the first Persian invasion in a wild heady phalanx charge.  It is the most powerful place, I've ever been.  It makes you realize that a very few people can change the world.

[ErikW]

Not to mention literature and architecture. It really is the cradle of western civilization.

I've been keeping an eye on the Gates of Fire movie. Hope it happens.

[Patrick Sweeney]

And the source of the first hard-asses one liners;

X:  "Lay down your weapons and you will be spared."

G:  "If you wish them, come and take them."

X:  "Our arrows will darken the sky and blot out the sun."

G:  "Then we will fight in the shade."

Democracy, western culture and the western way of war all come from the Greeks.  And one liners that fit on a t-shirt.

[ErikW]

Now that is some quality smack-talkin'.

BTW, at least one of the manuals I've written has Gates of Fire character names in the screen shots. If you see a hard disk named Polynikes, that might be my doing.

[George D]

There was a movie made in 1962 call "300 Spartans" which starred Richard Egan as Leonidas. Its overall historical accuracy was quite good, despite the inaccurate title. I think that the hard-assed one liner that Patrick quoted was from this movie.

Kellyn is absolutely correct. Thermopolae was one of the most significant crossroads in world history.

[ErikW]

Sweeney quoted from Pressfield's book. Whether that's also in the 1962 movie or some other texts, I don't know.

I saw an old Thermopylae movie on TV; I don't know if it was that one. Kind of cheesey, but I dug the Persian purple and their woven shields.

[kellyn]

Close Grasshoppers but not quite. Both the movie and Pressfield quote Herodotus, the first historian ever, who ascribes the statements to the Spartans in Book 7 of his The Histories.  History itself is a Greek invention.

And my parents said an undergrad history degree would not amount to much!

[George D]

Thanks for the info on Herodotus, Kelly. One of the many things I like about this forum is the range of subjects on which informed members can comment. Did you know that Steven Pressfield also wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance?