And so the soldiers buried Hector breaker of horses....Finished: The Iliad (Homer)...and that was the last line of a classic book. I'm so, so glad I finally read this! I had put if off because it is so long and I wondered if it would keep my interest. It did keep my interest, and showed me at the same time why Homer was considered to be one of the greats. Of course, I was reading a translation (translated by Robert Fagles) of the original language, but it was beautifully written. :-) He kind of "had me at hello" with passages like this one that describes the hordes of the Achaean army (the Greeks) as they marched ahead to attack the Trojans:

   As a heavy surf assaults some roaring coast,
piling breaker on breaker whipped by the West Wind, 
and out on the open sea a crest first rears its head
then pounds down on the shore with hoarse, rumbling thunder
and in come more shouldering crests, arching up and breaking
against some rocky spit, exploding salt foam to the skies--
so wave on wave they came, Achaean battalions ceaseless,
surging on to war. Each captain ordered his men
and the ranks moved on in silence...
You'd never think so many troops could march 
holding their voices in their chests, all silence, 
fearing their chiefs who called out clear commands,
and the burnished blazoned armor round their bodies flared,
the formations trampling on.

That's just a taste of the descriptiveness. I could SO see the waves and breakers hitting the coast just like they do when we vacation in Oregon....perfect imagery....and then they totally translated over in my mind to become the soldiers marching on. Anyway, I really liked the book! I basically knew the story of Helen, Troy, Paris, Hector, Achilles, Patroclus, Agamemnon, Priam, etc., but  I never realized that the gods played such a roll in the war, at least in Homer's version. :-) There were Zeus, Hera, Athena, Poseidon, and Apollo, always in the mix...making spears miss, making their wounded favorites disappear in a mist before death, etc. It was truly almost more a war of the gods than one of men. Also, I'd never read the story in such lengthy detail. Some of the passages in the book did get a little gruesome in their descriptions of death, and tiresome in the endless naming of so-and-so son of so-and-so and so forth, lol. Oh, and I was really surprised that the book ended with Hector's burial and NOT the death of Achilles, especially given how much Achilles' foretold death was mentioned in the book. And, of course, that means no Trojan horse in this story either. Oh well...I'm still happy to be finished, but even more so, happy that I read and enjoyed such a classic!