Homer: The Iliad

The Iliad is the bedrock of Europe and its primal origin. It is its genesis. Its first seed, its source. The Iliad is Europe’s first epic poem, it is the first novel, opera, the initial spectacle, the first MTV. 
Nevertheless, The Iliad is part of all of us. Everyone knows Zeus and Hera, Athena and Ares, the fair Helen and Paris, Agamemnon and Menelaus, Achilles and Patroclus. Why, therefore, is this mega-work, this excessively long and compulsory read, so deeply embedded within European civilisation? Whence arises this fascination of contemporary man with the ancient story, wherefrom the amazement at the ostensibly long gone heroic feats, doomed love, fatal consequences?
How it is possible that this great work, of almost divine proportions, is considered a canon, a dogma, an ideal and a model for all posterity, when The Iliad is nothing but a brutal human slaughterhouse? When the basic motives of the protagonists are almost nothing but envy, greed, lust, vengeance, murderous, destructive and violent impulses? 
Which of today’s heroes could match the ancient ones? Brad Pitt as Achilles? Is our time suitable for heroes and heroism? Has not the world grown so small as to require nothing but a simple, small-scale man who does not make history, but merely life? Temporary, modest, everyday life?

Yet The Iliad is part of all of us.
Is it indeed possible for a body politic called state not to rest its foundations on blood? Not to exist at the expense of another human being? Is not every type of collectivisation dangerous?
Then again: I am never alone, neither at the theatre nor in life.