Iliad (Version 2)

This great and terrifying poem about the final weeks of a long war fought between the Greeks and the Trojans before the city of Troy (here rendered into prose by Samuel Butler, himself a major nineteenth century English novelist) is at once violently graphic, emotionally searing and strikingly contemporary in its understanding of the extremities to which rage may drive men, even as they understand full well that they are pursuing their own doom. Nearly three thousand years before the advent of cinema, the author(s) of The Iliad had already mastered many of the tropes the Hollywood blockbuster would later adopt, and so much of the form of this ancient masterpiece already feels oddly familiar. However, the depictions of physical and emotional violence at its heart retain their full power to shock us with their bleak, deeply disturbing truthfulness. (Summary by Peter Dann)