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| Hermes, Athena, Zeus (seated), Hera et Ares (all named). Side A of an Attic black-figure neck-amphora, end of 6th century BC. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Carrying on through the end of Book 5 of the
Iliad, Oswald gives a simple list of the next 18 dead, in the order of the text (almost, and the one switch doesn't look significant to me. Neither do the two typos in the names.) Homer handles these a good deal less expeditiously, breaking them into groups: two Greeks die by Hector's hand, then one Trojan by Ajax'; then
Sarpedon and
Tlepolemos taunt each other, and Sarpedon kills Tlepolemos and is wounded himself; then Odysseus, angered at Tlepolemos' death, kills six Trojans; Hector rushes in to stop the carnage on his side and kills six Greeks, with
Ares assisting him; Athena and Hera discuss this, Athena has a brilliant arming scene, they discuss the matter with Zeus and rush into battle to stop Ares, whom they find on the battlefield stripping the armour from a Greek he's just killed.
Oswald skips all this. Homer listed two groups of six dead without telling us anything about them; Oswald extends that list before and after. We get only the names; no gods, no circumstances of death, no nothing. Tlepolemos son of Herakles and grandson of Zeus, killed by Sarpedon son of Zeus, is just another name on the list.
The article (below) has nothing much to do with any of this but it is SO COOL.
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