Useless Information About ‘The Iliad’ That You May Find Interesting

 (Achilles, by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

 

An earlier installment of this ‘Did You Know?’ series mentioned that there are 666 speeches given by characters in Homer’s, The Iliad. Yet, as television salesmen would say, ‘but wait, there’s more.’ Here are a few more facts and statistics about The Iliad that will probably not cause any enlightenment whatsoever, but, nonetheless, should be entertaining.

Useless fact cluster number one:

•   The Iliad contains over 300 similes.
• There are so many similes in the epic poem that they take up around 1,100 lines of poetry. 
• The similes make up around 7% of The Iliad.  

Now we move on to war. As The Iliad is set during the Trojan War, it is not surprising that battles and bloodshed take a primary role in Homer’s multi-thousand year old epic poem. 

•   In all, around 5,500 lines of poetry are dedicated to describing war and armed conflict in The Iliad.
• There are around 300 specific armed encounters—duels, skirmishes or battles—that occur during the poem. 
• In these numerous bloody scenes, Homer mentions the deaths of around 342 people. 
• The wide majority of these are Trojans, with a grand total of 281 specifically mentioned deaths. 
• Around 170 of these Trojans were given unique names by Homer.   

Written by C. Keith Hansley

Source:

• The Iliad by Homer, translated by E. V. Rieu and edited/introduced by Peter Jones. New York: Penguin Classics, 2014.

In 1700 CE, Japan Had The Largest City In The World And Was One Of The Most Urban Countries Of Its Age

Warning: Statistics Imminent

(Cherry Blossom Time in Nakanochō of the Yoshiwara, by Utagawa Hiroshige (Japan, Edo, 1797-1858), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

In Europe, by the 1700s, the Renaissance had come and gone, eventually leading to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The Protestant Reformation had drawn a tense divide between nations who followed Catholic belief, and those who found the authority of the pope to be corrupt. Europeans had also spent more than two centuries exploring and colonizing both near and faraway lands. With all of Europe’s impressive growth and development, by 1700, Europe still was nowhere near the top of the world’s most urbanized regions on earth.

The reigning champion of urbanization in 1700 was none other than Japan. The island country likely had the largest city in the world at that time—Edo (now Tokyo) had around one million residents in 1700. Edo was not the only sizable city in Japan. Kyoto and Osaka were also around the same size as London, England and Paris, France, all estimated to house around 350,000 people in 1700. One-tenth of the Japanese population lived in communities that had over 10,000 residents. Even more impressive, was that five or six percent of Japan's population lived in cities with more than 100,000 people, like Edo, Osaka and Kyoto. In 1700, Japan had more than double the percentage of urbanization than its contemporary European peers.

Here are some tidy facts about the world in 1700:

• 5-6% of Japanese people resided in cities with populations higher than 100,000.
• 2% of Europeans lived in cities with populations greater than 100,000.
• 10% of Japan lived in communities over 10,000 in population.
• Edo, Japan, had around 1 million residents.
• Kyoto and Osaka had populations of around 350,000 people.

Written by C. Keith Hansley

Source:

• A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, by Andrew Gordon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.