Troy, finally visited.

I finally watched Troy (2004) this week. I recently listened to a lecture by JMNMNR introducing Homer, and it got me all interested in reading The Iliad again and watching Troy.

Ok, the movie's not great. But I was impressed with what it did well. I was surprised that it stayed so faithful to most of the events in the poem, and that it didn't stretch the characters very far from their ancient source.

I also sought out Jon-Mark Olson's old blog posts on the movie, which can be found here, here, and here.

Especially useful was his Top Ten post which reminded me of events I'd completely forgotten.

I've only just started reading The Iliad again, but I'm still amazed at what a remarkable piece of literature it is. (That's a huge understatement, I know.) It's not something that was amazing for it's time but has since been surpassed; it's just under the Bible as the most important literature ever preserved.

I'm reading The Republic at the same time for a nice complement. I don't know how long that will last, but here goes!