"[Stephen] Mitchell again and again in his introduction feels compelled to apologize for the violence and mayhem of the Iliad’s story line, as though his readers cannot handle it. But his readers? Citizens of the most belligerent nation on the globe, from waterboarding to drone flights from one presidential order to another, who can participate in violence twenty-four-seven on their television screens, and if not from reality shown on screen then in the extraordinarily prurient violence of filmed fictions." Charles Rowan Beye • Arion

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