The Iliad becomes much harder to read once Diomedes is drop-kicked out of the plot, because with him gone you find that you have to start caring about the characters. And this is where the true face of the Iliad is revealed, peeling away the thin chocolate coating of an action epic for the thick peanut butter center of a proto-nihilistic tragedy.
The fact that the Iliad is actually a tragedy is something that most people never even realize, and by "most people" I of course mean "film producers." It's not difficult to miss, though, for after all, the story is the first true war epic, it starred Achilles, the manliest man in the Greek mythology since Herakles skinned an invincible lion and wore it as a hat, and the plot is about him and one hundred and thirty thousand of his soldier friends strapping on their sculpted muscle breastplates and their helmets with big red rooster combs and hurling their long, hard, pointy spears at another hundred thousand men. This couldn't possibly be seen as anything less than the ultimate in masculinity.
But in the same way that a certain Brad Pitt movie stops making sense when you realize that this so-called "plausible history behind the myth" bears as much resemblance to the events in question as does the average moon landing conspiracy, the common perception of the Iliad falls apart as soon as you examine the fine details.
The most pressing and obvious detail is that every character has a name, a hometown and at least two generations worth of family history. I'm not just talking about the important characters, I'm referring to everybody. There are characters whose only role in the story is to take a spear between both arsecheeks who get more backstory than the protagonists of most action movies. Every one of these people is a real person with a life and a family and a bloody, horrific death scene.
And if a soldier really did get a spear up the brown eye, Homer would tell us about it. He'd tell us where the spear hit, how it cut through his flesh, chipped off his pelvic bone and punctured his bladder, and then how he died face-down in the dirt as enemy soldiers came to loot his armor and leave his naked body for the jackals. This is not the glorious conflict of the god-men of a bygone era, this is ten years of lives spent in vain.
The entire bloody story is the same way, and it's so far removed from the popular perception of events that it almost seems to be a deconstruction of itself. Take the age-old story of Helen, the face who launched a thousand ships. While it's true that every Greek kingdom arrived to defend her from her Trojan captors, the only reason they even showed up was because they had signed a mutual defense pact, with some - including Odysseus and Achilles among them - concocting full-blown sitcom zany schemes to get out of their obligations. The Greeks were fighting no more for the love of Helen than Kaiser Wilhelm was fighting out of his admiration for Archduke Ferdinand's spectacular mustache.
And then there's the whole reason this thing got started, the Judgement of Paris. One mortal man decides that Aphrodite has a nicer ass than Athena or Hera, and so as a reward, Aphrodite starts an international incident in his name, and Athena takes the other side because she's jealous. All of this, ten years of war, was because the gods had a disagreement. A disagreement that wasn't even strong enough for the gods to even fight each other directly, instead setting up a proxy war using just about everybody in their worship base. And this is perfectly in character for the Greek gods. It's something that was expected of them.
But what really, truly, beyond all question makes this story into a tragedy is the moral, the underlying idea that love is evil and will get you killed. Late in the story, while Achilles is too busy sulking and listening to Jimmy Eat World, Patroclus, Achilles' boyfriend, dresses up in Achilles' armor and fights in his name because so that everybody would think that Achilles was the hero of the war, and he gets killed by Hector, who's fighting to defend his little brother, Paris, even though he started the whole war because he couldn't keep it in his tunic. And then Hector gets killed by Achilles, who's fighting to avenge his lover-boy, and then he finally gets killed by Paris, who's fighting in order to keep having sex with the pretty girl he kidnapped on her wedding night instead of returning her and ending the goddamn war!
But then the selfish bastard gets killed by some C-list mythological figure anyway, so maybe the moral is that you, yes you, with the good job and the happy family life and the the cute little pet Alsatian dog, your life could end at any moment at the whims of almighty pagan nature spirits who care about your life and your hopes and dreams about as much as I care about the well-being of Professor Plum.
And then the sequel is a wacky road comedy with sexy fish ladies and a heartwarming dog.
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