The Iliad

So after reading about a thousand different definitions for an epic, my concluding definition would be, a story/poem that was told a long time ago and survived long enough to be written. Also, most of the time it's a heroic story. An epic has many characteristics that make it an epic. For example, many can start in medias res which means it starts in the middle of the the story instead of the beginning. An example of this would be the Iliad, which starts with Chryses praying to Apollo saying, "Son of Atreus and Greek heroes all..." which is on line 24 of the poem. Another characteristic of a typical epic is, it uses patronymics. In other words, it calls the son by his father's name. This is also used in the story the Iliad. A good example of this is when we are introduced to Calchas on line 78 as "Calchas, son of Thestor." One of the things I noticed the story kept doing was quoting long speeches by characters that are important in the story. That seems to last pretty much the whole story. In one part of the story, Achilles was crying to his mother, imploring, coming to her for help. On line 379 he tells her what his problem was in a long detailed speech. "You already know. Why do I have to tell you?" He responds to her when she asks him what was wrong. I didn't really find this story confusing, just that you kind of have to follow along with annotations to really understand what's going on.
The story was about Greek gods and I think that this picture would fit the story because it has Greek gods on the cover and because the woman in the middle sort of reminds me of the part in the story where Achilles' mom is watching over him and then she goes to him and asks him why he's sad. That was also my favorite part because it shows Achilles' soft side and and it proves that even gods can be loving and are able to cry. I found that cute.