Where goddesses loved and fought
The vanity of goddesses, the heroism of men, friendship and infidelity, love and loss, bravery and brutality, tricks, travails and tragedies - the Trojan War may have been influenced by divine power, but it was reflective of all things that are utterly human.
"Stripped of its plot, the Iliad is a scattering of names and biographies of ordinary soldiers: men who trip over their shields, lose their courage or miss their wives. In addition to these, there is a cast of anonymous people: farmers, walkers, mothers, neighbors who inhabit its similes," wrote the renowned British poet Alice Oswald.
Homer would probably have agreed. "Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men," the man sighed in the Iliad, in which heroes fell and then were resuscitated by divine intervention, only to fell again and forever.
