Your Cheery Homeric Thought for the Day
Jan. 13th, 2005 02:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_pretentiousOff and on all week, I've been going to school on the Iliad in hopes of improving my battle scenes. Having immersed myself in battle scenes I especially enjoyed from George R.R. Martin, Kate Elliott, Patrick O'Brian, and Tolkien, I still felt I hadn't found anything that pointed me in the right direction for the particular sequences I'm trying to fix in my own manuscript right now. So, stylishly incorrect or not, I've gone back to the deep source. (You want epic? I got yer epic right here.)
It'll be a while before I know whether Homer is the medicine my draft needs, but meanwhile I'm feeling buoyed up by this sentiment:
Never to be cast away are the gifts of the gods, magnificent,
Which they give of their own will, no man could have them for wanting them.
(Bk III, lines 65-66, Lattimore trans.)
Well, all right, I guess this wouldn't be such a cheery thought if I were pining after some gift the gods hadn't given me, but since they've given me a damn fine book to write, I find it pretty heartening.
It'll be a while before I know whether Homer is the medicine my draft needs, but meanwhile I'm feeling buoyed up by this sentiment:
Never to be cast away are the gifts of the gods, magnificent,
Which they give of their own will, no man could have them for wanting them.
(Bk III, lines 65-66, Lattimore trans.)
Well, all right, I guess this wouldn't be such a cheery thought if I were pining after some gift the gods hadn't given me, but since they've given me a damn fine book to write, I find it pretty heartening.
