Modern Scholarship

• [Jones] Fight scenes are formulaic and fit into three patterns; A throws a spear at B, misses and kills C; A misses B and B kills them; A misses B, B hits A but it doesn't pierce the armour and A kills B
• [Jones] There are 666 speeches from 77 different people in the Iliad, showing Homer uses the characters as much as the descriptions to tell the story
• [Hauser] Heroes will be forever eternal in their glory which the gods will never achieve
• [Hauser] Gods exist as explanations of physical events or personifications of characteristics/ actions
• [Hauser] The gods exist as recipients of sacrifice
• [Hauser] The role of the gods is to show the contrast between the beautiful, deathless gods and the tired, limited-time mortals
• [Hauser]  The argument of whether the actions of the mortals in the Iliad are  free will or fate cannot be answered in the scope of the Iliad
• [Hauser] The Gods are literary devices
• [Jones] Homer sees the result of fate and free will as the same thing and attributes a persons motivation to both equally.
• [Griffin] the attention of the gods both glorifies human action (ie deserving of such an audience) and humbles it (ie men are play things, not taken seriously)
• [Jones] Epithets remind us of the lasting attributes of the characters (ie why is Achilles called swift-footed if he is sat in his hut)
• [Jones] The central theme of the Iliad is Achilles' heroic actions and their consequences, including issues of self-control, anger, power, authority and compromise
• [Owen] Hector is a pure patriot, he is fighting to save his city
• [Owen] Hector does not fight to protect his brother's (Paris's) sin, and a fatal flaw in the trojan cause
• [Owen] By focusing on lots of small battles, Homer portrays war as desperate
• [Owen] Achilles should not be condemned for his actions in book 1, but he is entirely in the wrong in book 9
• [Rieu] Homer must have been a singular poet because of the consistency of the characters motivations and actions
• [Griffin] Heroes face the fear that after death their bodies will be mutilated, left for the birds and have to be collected in a cart for a mass pyre and burial, these facts prevents war being glorified in the Iliad
• [Griffin] The trojans started the war and have a collective fatal flaw of overconfidence but there are no villains in the Iliad