Iliad by Homer - Double Ajax Summary Book 4

Book 4 – Menelaus – I won that duel fair and square. I should be on my ship headed home with Helen, my beautiful, if not “well-traveled”, wife by my side, enjoying a cocktail and high fiving my boys. But no, the gods intervened. This time that tricky vixen Aphrodite. Where does she get off? Hold on, don’t ask. So anyway, Zeus was going to back me and let me have the victory as is, but that was not enough for his crazy wife Hera. She wanted Troy destroyed completely. So she convinces him to restart the war, which he does by asking his overachieving daughter Athena to do. Athena achieves this by convincing some young randy archer on the Trojan side to fire an arrow at me!!! The kid was a wonderful arrowsman and would have drilled me but Athena quickly flew over and deflected the arrow so that it hit me in my armor in the “hip region” penetrating the skin just enough to cause pain, blood and a reason to get back to the fighting. These gods sometimes have plans that doesn’t always seem airtight at conception but that’s how they played it. Despite me calling for calm, war breaks out and heads start to roll. They banned Ulysses, Catcher in the Rye and even Huck Finn for a while, but this book with its “he hit Leucus…gouging his groin as the man hauled off a corpse…Enraged at his friends death, Odysseus sprang in fury…plowed through the front…hurled his spear…speared him straight through one temple and out the other punched the sharp bronze point and the dark [this mean blood] cam swirling thick across his eyes.” Seems more like snuff porn to me. I had to go read me some Lolita to clear my head after that one!