ABSTRACT
If some epics like the Iliad feel crammed with characters in a manner practically list-like, that may be because those characters had to be amassed and consolidated, regardless of any imprecision in the overlap of their actual time fighting in or around the Trojan War. Perhaps the closest way for the people personally to contemporarily experience the frisson that might have been inherent in lists would be to inventory whatever group of people comprise their particular interests or obsessions, whether these be Hollywood stars, or musicians, or Fortnight skins, or a panoply of poets and artists, or philosophers, or bodhisattvas, or sportspeople, or those on Time’s “100 most influential people” list. While publishers understandably want to entice the people with the richest, most dramatic, most philosophically, thematically, and ideologically pertinent portions of the Iliad, what they also do is disengage or unfasten the narrative from some of its more recognizably oral attributes.
