Transgender

I think you're overlooking the beauty of the language. But also, while the iliad does suffer a bit from being boring, the odyssey is legit pretty good.

The structure of odysseus recounting his story after washing up ashore is pretty good, scylla and charbdis is a good metaphor that's still used for a reason, the cyclops bit is a classic trickster tale, the sirens singing all the knowledge of the world is cool, the overall motif of a morally ambiguous anti-hero suffering consequences is compelling and everyone around him suffering worse feels very true to the nature of power.

My favourite bit is when athena appears before him right at the end and he's like oh i'm just this poor sailor from krete and tells this hugely elaborate and convincing lie about who he is. But athena is like lol dude who are trying to bluff here, i'm literally athena. 😆