yet more Trojans die: Dorycles, Pandocus, Lysander, Pyrasus, Pylartes, Apisaon

In Homer, Ajax has just killed a whole whack of Trojans. Then a break in which Hector (we're told) kills a whole whack of Greeks, only we aren't given any of their names. Then one last Trojan, Apisaon, is killed by a friend of Ajax, and then the Greeks run hell for leather for the ships, pursued by ravening Trojans who don't, however, apparently manage to kill any of them. There will then be a break of a few hundred lines, well into the next book, while Nestor tells us at great length about how many Eleans he killed when he was a lad and how amazed everyone was, until finally someone else with a name dies (another Trojan). One can't help but notice that although Homer is at pains to tell us over and over either how even the battle is, or even that the Trojans are winning hands down, it's the Greeks who keep killing people with actual names.

Oswald just lists the names, doesn't tell us whether they're Greek or Trojan, or who killed them. This is only the second time she's used the same simile Homer does in the same place, of a river swollen with winter rains rushing down through the plains carrying all before it, trees, mud, everything, into the sea. She's fond of the torrent imagery; this is the 3rd or 4th such simile she's used. However Homer compares Ajax to the river in flood, carrying all before him (butchering - δαίζων, literally "cleaving" - horses and men alike in his charge across the field). (Just realised - this line must be the origin of the story that he responded to Achilles' armour being given to Odysseus at the end of the war by torturing and slaughtering a lot of sheep, under the impression they were the Greek high command; or, at least, the characterization harmonizes.  Who butchers horses?)

  Oswald just lists the names of the dead, then gives us the simile without Ajax; the river is transformed into an impersonal force, the war that charges across the plain, carrying all before it, broken and tumbled, Greeks and Trojans alike.

I am struggling with a cold here and feeling uninspired.

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