absolutely loving the iliad

I've never really been interested in the ancient classics, largely because at the time when I was looking into them (at least a decade ago), I had no patience with reading verse. However... two or so years ago, as the "What's your Roman Empire?" meme was popping off I accidentally became transfixed with the topic. I started watching a bunch of documentaries on Rome after having a thought in the car that highways are somewhat distant descendants of those old routes. Of course, the Romans did not invent roads, but it seems to me like roads were a big deal for the Roman view of a connected Imperium. That single documentary sent me down a rabbit hole, and now I'm at my dining table trying to work through Lingva Latina Per Se Illvstrata. Long story short, I'm now extremely interested in how the ancient days figure in our current understanding of reality, and how the West still hangs1 on to concepts that were being born deep into the BC era. So I have started reading Homer's Iliad, the…