This is part of a series. To find the Table of Contents for this series start by clicking here.
It reaches across 2,700 years and finds you where you live.
If you’re just joining this journey, I’d invite you to visit the Table of Contents linked at the top of this post.. If you have read that piece, then let’s consider what an opportunity it is when we allow ourselves to sit after completing a creative work such as Homer’s The Iliad and appreciate our experience and thoughts. Such as recognizing that Achilles is given a choice: a short life of eternal glory, or a long quiet life at home. Homer presents it as a warrior’s dilemma. But sitting with my morning coffee in the middle of winter, I realized I had faced a version of that choice myself — and that I had, over a lifetime, traveled both roads. The Iliad has a way of doing that.
Sure, as we considered in my previous post, The Catalog of Ships and unfamiliar names could have stopped us leading us to us The Iliad as a doorstop. But climbing that hill to its apex, we will find the effort is rewarding. Just as in life working through some difficulties provides us the very strength in which to receive the future rewards. Fresh understandings crash into us like a wave on the shore.
To help you understand a moment where I moved from a reader with an obligation to one with a genuine pursuit of Homer’s creative talent and prepare you to be alert for these moments in your own pursuit, allow me to open this epic poem right before Book 9. Throughout The Iliad, Homer provides descriptions of roughly 250 warriors killed, and most of these accounts include specific anatomical details of their wounds. In an era when formal knowledge of human organs and their physiological functions were virtually nonexistent, Homer demonstrates an intimate understanding of where these vital structures reside within the body. I found this to be a recurring and haunting puzzle for me. Where did Homer acquire such knowledge? His precision is deliberate, chosen to elevate his epic beyond mere storytelling. This search for anatomical truth drew a surprising parallel in my mind: another artist, separated from Homer by nearly two thousand years, pursued an identical path with the same intensity. His name was Michelangelo.
To perfect his sculptures and paintings, Michelangelo did what few artists dared: he dissected corpses. This was dangerous work—grave robbing risked severe punishment. Yet he persisted, studying cadavers in darkened rooms to understand the architecture beneath the skin. His knowledge transformed the David, that marble colossus standing in Florence, into something revolutionary. Every sinew, every muscle, every subtle tension in the stone speaks to his intimate anatomical knowledge. The David doesn’t merely look human; it reveals what it means to be human at the deepest level.
Could Homer have walked a similar path? Perhaps not through dissection—those opportunities may not have existed in Bronze Age Greece. But might he have observed battlefields with a scholar’s eye, studying the wounded and the fallen with the intensity of an anatomist? Both Homer and Michelangelo understood that true mastery of their art required mastery of the human form.
Then Book 14 carries us into a strategy meeting among the wounded. Nestor finds the leaders hurt and discouraged, scanning the battlefield and counting losses. Agamemnon even suggests packing up and going home while their men are still out there fighting, which sounds uncomfortably like the voice that whispers to us, “Just quit; it’s not worth it.” Odysseus pushes back and names that impulse for what it is—cowardly and contagious—and Diomedes offers a different vision: the wounded leaders will go back to the front, not to chase glory, but simply to stand there and steady their people.
Again, later in the poem we find Achilles confronting his two fates, and we reflect on our own days when the people we counted on step back, and we must decide who we are without them. There I found a quiet beauty in the picture of limping leadership. In this middle section we find Odysseus stepping up and suggesting that strength is not the absence of wounds; it is the choice to move, to speak, to stand—wounds and all—so others can find their footing. At my age, I felt that call keenly: not to hide the limp, but to let it become part of how I encourage those coming behind me.
Then as a reader closes in on those final pages you may find yourself where I did; I left Troy not so much conquered as exhausted. It felt less like triumph and more like two weary peoples facing the same hard truth: even the greatest heroes cannot escape loss, and every glory on the battlefield is paid for at home. I found myself looking back at how the story kept circling back to family, grief, and aging. Homer looked beyond his own time and invites readers to recognize that we share a deeply common story. When we lift our eyes—and our hearts—above our own desires and wishes, we understand we all have far more in common beneath our differences. Homer demonstrates his gift as a prescient writer in that just as then our choices—reflected in our behavior, speech, and inner thought—not only matter but require us to be accountable.
I want to encourage everyone to pick up the book, open to Book 1, and allow yourself to be a beginner, as I did. Ask yourself where our ideas of heroism and honor come from — and what still matters after victory and loss. The Iliad has insights for us all. So, start. Let yourself be a beginner. I’m already headed on to The Odyssey, but I will travel along with you as well through the Iliad if you are so inclined to have a sojourner with you.
The Curious Table 