Index to this series | Text of Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad
Book V of the Iliad is long and rich, with lots of characters like War and Peace, and stories within stories. The main story is of Tydeus’s son Diomedes, who with Pallas’s help is able to wound both Venus and Mars – I follow Chapman in using the Roman names.
- Mars agrees with Minerva not to interfere with the war, but she immediately breaks the agreement.
- A skilled hunter is successfully hunted down.
- An oracle is mentioned that the Trojans should not go to sea; the master builder of Paris’s ships is slain.
- A man who can read the future in dreams is bereft of the sons he let go to war.
- An old man loses his only sons, the offspring of his old age.
- Having broken the truce and shot Menelaus, Pandarus turns out to have left his horses in Lycia, because he didn’t think they would eat well in Troy.
- The story is mentioned twice of the horses of Aeneas, offspring of the horses of Jove.
- Pandarus thinks he cannot command the horses of Aeneas better than Aeneas.
- Venus is not the first deity to have been injured by a mortal, and her mother Dione advises patience.
- “He that fights with heaven hath never long to live,” or perhaps to have a faithful wife, she says.
- She can cure a wound without balm.
- “The race of gods is far above men creeping here below,” says Apollo to Diomedes.
- Sarpedon discusses justice and sets an example of it.
- “Strength is but strength of will,” says Agamemnon.
- To have self-confidence may be good, but not to tempt fate.
- Pallas has a theory of just war.
