(Hi, I'm amateur Ancient Greek enthusiast who really appreciates your posts and tweets.)
I'm sorry I can't intelligently comment on your post, but I recently read the Iliad in English for the first time cover to cover in a decade, and what leaped out to me about book 5 was the predominance of mentions of horses and chariots, which figure both in the Pandoras-Aeneas-Diomedes match up, and in the sub plot with the gods: Aphrodite asking Ares for his horses and going up in his chariot with Iris (Why does she, like Pandoras, not have a chariot?) just as Athena and Hera go down from Olympus in a chariot in a kind of unusual parallelism (while the wounded Ares returns to Olympus on his "swift feet." ) Also the horses of Laomedon come up a couple times and there's that weird part part where Athena asserts herself as Diomedes' chariot driver.
(Hi, I'm amateur Ancient Greek enthusiast who really appreciates your posts and tweets.)
I'm sorry I can't intelligently comment on your post, but I recently read the Iliad in English for the first time cover to cover in a decade, and what leaped out to me about book 5 was the predominance of mentions of horses and chariots, which figure both in the Pandoras-Aeneas-Diomedes match up, and in the sub plot with the gods: Aphrodite asking Ares for his horses and going up in his chariot with Iris (Why does she, like Pandoras, not have a chariot?) just as Athena and Hera go down from Olympus in a chariot in a kind of unusual parallelism (while the wounded Ares returns to Olympus on his "swift feet." ) Also the horses of Laomedon come up a couple times and there's that weird part part where Athena asserts herself as Diomedes' chariot driver.
I think these are intelligent comments! I hadn't thought so much about the horses, but now I will!