The Iliad and Horses

Horses begin to appear on Mesopotamian cylinder seals between about 2300 and 2200 BCE, a thousand years before the conventional date of the Trojan War. The Iliad never shies away from accounts of masculine beauty, or describing a man as having the strength of a god. In terms of aestheticizing brutality, the Iliad is perhaps only matched by the prophetic books of the Old Testament in terms of sheer influence.