N.B. Epic similes will be italicized like the version of the Iliad I should have been assigned to read, rather than the painfully unitalizied version, that I procasted from opening for three air-conditioned months, and ended up writing a very close reading of a single passage for my final essay, because I kept getting lost in the ramblings of a blind poet whose digressions -- don't get me wrong beautiful digressions, but still, digressions -- ended up, threw a curios chain of events, becoming the foundation of Western Literature as we know it.