Polytropy

In Book I of the Iliad, Achilles restrains an impulse to run a sword through Agamemnon.

That may be the greatest act in the whole epic. I say so, having recently completed a reading of Njal’s Saga, which features a lot of impulsive killing. Now I am embarking on the Iliad again, a book at a time. Here I take up Book I, some comparisons with the saga, and some connections with Plato, Augustine, and Collingwood.

I wrote here about Homer’s epic, book by book, between April, 2017, and September, 2019. I was reading Chapman’s Elizabethan translation. In my account of Book I from then, there are details that do not otherwise stand out to me now, when

• I am reading mainly Murray’s translation in the Loeb Classical Library, and
• comparisons with Njal’s Saga are in mind.

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