do not be intimidated by the homeric classics... seriously
Honestly there is no reason to be intimidated by the Homeric classics. I've just finished reading the Iliad that I started sometime in July. It's been a while because I got burnt out a bit. I was grinding through it a bit too eagerly, but I made it to the end.
Do I reccomend it? For sure.
In one moment you have beautiful prose: an ancient commentary on the inner world of these characters, sometimes godlike, sometimes mere people who happen to be caught up in an endless war. And on the tail of that, they are now having some sort of race, and one of them trips and falls, and Homer gives us a few lines describing how he literally ate shit. Then he pulls us back into some idyllic scene. Surf lapping up against the deep-sea-going ships, heavy and dark, like whales, beached, slumbering, and then suddenly it's a scene of the gods up in Ida having a cat fight about some nonsense, like a camera switch in a trashy reality TV show. Artemis gets slapped on the ears, she runs crying to Papa Zeus, Athena is like LOL, Zeus starts having a go at them, Hera is like you deserved it. Apollo is all non-chalant auramaxxing, Poseidon is pissed off, Hector meanwhile is eviscerating the Greeks, Achilles is in his tent not giving a single fuck. Great stuff.
The battle parts get a bit long, and I did get to a point where I sort of skimmed over the 100s of names of people dying in one horrific way or another. Homer does enjoy describing exactly which rib was pierced, which person got stabbed between the jaw and the ear (one of his favs), and the many ways in which bowels detangle themselves as their owner fades into the ever-slumber of Death.
It's also cool to see how the story itself references other literature which has been long lost. And also to read of characters being mentioned in passing which we have all heard of in one way or another (Hercules1, Jason, etc.) but nobody really knows how they fit in the fictional history of things.
Find yourself a good translation, and read it. It is surprisingly entertaining, and it does not take itself seriously. This is literally a keystone book for Western literature, and it sometimes feels like Homer is just shit-talking in a pub.
Zeus has some mad beef with his wife over what she did to Hercules... gaddamn!↩