Advice for anyone reading the Iliad: read Simone Weil's essay "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force" first [1]. The essay was a profound experience on its own for me, in a way that came as a great relief in a world which seemed to lack all moral gravity. (Note, it was written in 1945.)

And it conveys better than anything why the epic was composed, why it survived to be written down (the Bronze Age Collapse and a whole dark age separated the era of the Trojan War from the era of Homer!) and why people have been reading it for almost three thousand years.

[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/simone-weil-the-ilia...