I haven't read The Iliad in over a decade, so I plopped down and finished Stephen Mitchell's translation. For those of you who don't know the plot, I'll try to be brief: There was a grand wedding with all the gods invited except for the goddess of discord Eris. Being naturally pissed off, she crashed the party and threw a golden apple with the inscription "to the fairest one." Three goddesses — the goddess of marriage Hera, the goddess of wisdom Athena, and the goddess of sex Aphrodite — wanted that title and fought for the apple. Eventually they decided a Trojan named Paris should pick, but instead of a fair fight all of them bribed him: Hera said she'd make him king of Europe and Asia, Athena said she'd make him wise, and Aphrodite said she'd make the world's most beautiful woman fall in love with him, and he chose the last. Unfortunately the world's most beautiful woman, Helen, was already married to King Menelaus of Sparta. So when he discovered Paris had run off with his wife, he chose war for such a dishonor. To add to it, before he and Helen were married, she was wooed by practically every king of Greece, so to prevent fighting they swore they would defend anyone who was chosen to be Helen's husband. Now that Menelaus was attacked, every king of Greece was required to join him in his fight with Troy.

Actually, none of that is in The Iliad proper. It was probably part of a whole group of poems describing the Trojan War including the prequel, but only two of Homer's poems survive. The Iliad fast forwards to ten years into the war. Menelaus' brother, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, had taken a Trojan priestess of Apollo to be his concubine, so Apollo was raining arrows down upon the Greek army. Consequently he was forced to give her up but was upset he was the only Greek king without a concubine so he got into a fight with Achilles and took his. Achilles, the strongest of the Greeks, was pissed and left the battles entirely, preparing his ships to sail for back home. To punish the Greeks for dishonoring Achilles, Zeus gave strength to the Trojans' most powerful warrior, Hector, who proceeded to cut up their army. The Greeks begged and bribed Achilles to return to no avail. Eventually Achilles' best friend Patroclus took on Achilles' armor, hoping that the Trojans would just run away in fear, but instead he was killed by Hector. Pissed off, Achilles rushes back into battle and kills Hector. The epic ends with Hector's dad Priam claiming his body.

This poem is twenty-four books long and has over 15,000 lines. The huge bulk of it are battle descriptions, with spears being thrown, shields being broken, arrows being launched. You can viscerally feel the pain on the battlefield, along with the pain of the civilians who have to watch their loved ones march out every day. That's why I prefer The Iliad over The Odyssey: It shows you the horrors of warfare along with the honor and bravery.

But while I was reading about all the misery and anxiety I thought to myself, "Why the fuck didn't the Trojans just give back Helen? Literally this has nothing to do with any of them. Okay, yeah, Paris is the son of the king. But not even his dad or his brothers like him. Hell, even Helen doesn't like him; she's forced by Aphrodite to be raped every night. All of this could be solved if they just fucking handed Helen over years ago. Now it's too late because the Greeks are too pissed over after a decade of fighting for anything other than total destruction of Troy, but say year two or so everyone could've just sat down and said, 'Why are we doing this? This is really dumb. Here's your woman back, sorry for the inconvenience.' It's a war over nothing."