This article got me thinking about the Iliad

> Le Guin wrote, is ‘a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were’.

I read the Iliad my first year of college and it was unlike anything I had read before. There aren't really good guys and bad guys in the traditional sense and the story is largely things happening to people and how they react to events. There's no protagonist. There's a bunch of characters and their feelings and experiences. A lot of most beautiful parts are little asides like Glaucon and Diomedes exchanging armor, Hector leaving his wife and child, and Helen talking to the old men of Troy as they watch a battle.