Thought 38: Notes on The Iliad

• Warriors made poetic.
• Honour and power are everything.
• Minor correctives towards the meek such as the rights of priests and supplicants who are sacred to Zeus.
• Importance of the law of reciprocity, including histories of guest-friendship.
• The low-ranking and ugly Thersites raises similar objections against King Agamemnon as Achilles but, being unpopular and a commoner, he is punished by Odysseus for doing so, unlike Achilles who finds vindication for his resentment among the gods by way of his divine mother.
• Gods and goddesses have their favourites based on extra-moral considerations, such as the honour they have been bestowed by the mortals in question and their general prowess and courage on the battlefield.
• Gods and goddesses play tricks on mortals, as does Athena against Hector in book 22.
• Troy is finally sacked and burned, its inhabitants made prisoner and sold into slavery. 
• The sole escapee and survivor of the fall of Troy is Aeneas who will go on to found Rome, such that the Romans are, mythically speaking, the descendants of the Trojans. 
• In turn, Brutus of Troy, mythical founder of the city of London, was himself a Roman descendant of Aeneas to whom a stone is dedicated in Cannon Street outside the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation: 'So long as the stone of Brutus is safe, London will flourish.' 
• Thus, there is a mythical continution that goes: Troy → Rome → Britain