the most gruesome death in the iliad
So I recently came across an infographic which inspired me to look up people's opinions on what the most gruesome death in the Iliad was. And to my utter shock and surprise, my top answer to this question was not everyone's top answer to this question. I believe I saw it mentioned and I could see where a couple of the others were coming from, but overall my reaction was 'HUH?! What do you mean MOST GRUESOME?! That's so tame!' Because I had read through the entire Iliad and if I, me, the person who is so utterly bad with blood and gore that I do get queasy reading about it sometimes, did not write something like 'yikes,' 'yuck,' or 'oh god' in the margins, as a reaction to this death, it is not that bad.
So what in my opinion is the most gruesome death in the Iliad? So something about the eyeballs really just get me, and thinking about it, I may have mentioned this death when talking about eyeballs in a post, but it is Ilioneus' death in Book 14, which as translated by Fitzgerald, reads as follows:
Peneleos drove his spearhead
into the eye-socket underneath the brow,
thrusting the eyeball out. The spearhead ran
straight through the socket and the skull behind,
and throwing out both hands he sat down backward.
Peneleos, drawing a long sword, chopped through
the nape and set the severed helmeted head
and trunk apart on the field. The spear
remained in the eye-socket. Lifting up
the head by it as one would lift a poppy,
he cried out to the Trojans, gloating grimly
And my reaction to that was 'oh gross.'
~nan