{"id":612,"date":"2026-10-27T01:09:55","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T01:09:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leshley.ca\/site\/?p=612"},"modified":"2026-10-19T01:14:24","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T01:14:24","slug":"the-day-of-zeus-turns-a-commentary-on-iliad-book-viii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leshley.ca\/site\/blog\/the-day-of-zeus-turns-a-commentary-on-iliad-book-viii\/","title":{"rendered":"The Day of Zeus Turns: A Commentary on Iliad Book VIII"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The Day Zeus Turns: A Commentary on Iliad Book VIII\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/tube.leshley.ca\/videos\/embed\/wPrXxCYQe2WRadoDqQNqgL\" allow=\"fullscreen\" sandbox=\"allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-popups allow-forms\" style=\"border: 0px;\"><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<p>Book VIII covers a single day of battle, but its real subject is the exercise of divine sovereignty \u2014 and the cost of that sovereignty measured in human bodies. The book opens with Zeus summoning the gods on Olympus and forbidding any divine interference on either side. It closes with the Trojans camped in triumph on the plain, their thousand fires burning under the stars. Between those two frames, everything that happens is shaped by Zeus&#8217;s will, and Homer constructs the entire day so that we feel the tension between apparent human freedom and divine determination on every page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is often called the Day of Hector&#8217;s Glory \u2014 the beginning of his aristeia, the high arc of his fortunes that will peak in Book XV when he nearly burns the Achaean fleet. But the glory is borrowed. Every gain Hector makes here flows from Zeus&#8217;s scales and thunderbolts, not from his own power alone. That ambiguity \u2014 is Hector truly great, or merely favoured? \u2014 is one of the book&#8217;s most provocative tensions, and Homer plants it deliberately, letting it ripen across the books that follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Golden Chain: Sovereignty Staged as Spectacle<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Zeus does not merely assert authority. He stages a cosmic pantomime to demonstrate it. &#8220;Hang me a golden chain from heaven, and lay hold of it all of you, gods and goddesses together \u2014 tug as you will, you will not drag Jove the supreme counsellor from heaven to earth.&#8221; The image is almost absurd in its physicality: all the gods pulling on a chain, Zeus lifting the entire earth and sea, binding them to a pinnacle of Olympus. It reads like a mythological cartoon \u2014 but it carries deadly serious theological weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What Homer is establishing here is the metaphysical framework for the entire book. Whatever happens on the battlefield \u2014 the Achaean rout, the Trojan surge, the near-rebellion of Hera and Athena \u2014 all of it unfolds underneath this single assertion: Zeus decides. The gods may strategize, complain, arm for war, but the chain remains taut. When Hera and Athena later ride out to defy him, we already know the outcome because of this passage. The dramatic tension lies not in whether Zeus will prevail, but in how much suffering his supremacy costs the mortals below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Athena&#8217;s response is telling. She does not challenge Zeus directly. She asks permission to offer &#8220;serviceable suggestions&#8221; to the Argives \u2014 already manoeuvring around the letter of the law while respecting its spirit. This tells us the gods will find ways to bend Zeus&#8217;s decree without breaking it, which is exactly what happens throughout the book. And Zeus&#8217;s reply \u2014 &#8220;I am not really in earnest, and I wish to be kind to you&#8221; \u2014 is slippery in the way only divine speech can be. Is he performing severity more than feeling it? Is he establishing a political precedent among the gods, or genuinely threatening? The ambiguity creates unease. Either way, &#8220;they were frightened and all of them held their peace.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The golden chain also reverberates against the book&#8217;s closing image \u2014 the Trojan campfires reaching toward the same sky. Zeus&#8217;s chain descends from heaven; human fires rise toward it. The book is bracketed by vertical axes of power and survival, and the distance between them is the space in which the entire day&#8217;s slaughter takes place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Observatory of Power: Zeus on Mount Ida<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Zeus descends from Olympus to Mount Ida, a mountain sacred to him near Troy. He parks his chariot in a cloud, sits on the ridgeline, and watches the battle unfold below him like a spectator at a theatre. The spatial architecture is crucial. Zeus occupies a position between heaven and earth \u2014 not fully removed in Olympus, not fully present on the battlefield. He is close enough to intervene directly through thunderbolts and the golden scales, but distant enough that his interventions feel capricious from the mortal perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>His horses have hooves of bronze and manes of gold \u2014 divine craftsmanship set against the mortal horses below who are about to be called into battle by Hector. The contrast in equine imagery between the divine chariot on Ida and the war-horses on the plain is one of the book&#8217;s quiet structural juxtapositions, and it foreshadows the moment when Hector&#8217;s chariot will be stopped not by enemy spears but by Zeus&#8217;s thunderbolt crashing directly in front of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Golden Scales: Human Effort, Cosmic Verdict<br>&#8220;When the sun had reached mid-heaven, the sire of all balanced his golden scales, and put two fates of death within them.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is one of the most iconic moments in Greek literature \u2014 the weighing of fates, the kerostasia. Two things demand attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The timing. The battle is evenly matched through the morning. It is only at midday \u2014 when the sun is at its zenith \u2014 that Zeus intervenes. Homer is telling us that the morning&#8217;s combat was genuine, that warrior skill mattered, that the fighting had real stakes unaffected by divine manipulation. Then Zeus tips the balance, and from that moment the Achaeans are doomed for the day. Human effort is real but bounded. Excellence exists; it is simply not sufficient. The morning proves that the Achaeans can fight. The afternoon proves that fighting well means nothing against cosmic disposition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The scales themselves. This is not Zeus arbitrarily choosing a winner. He is weighing fates \u2014 the moira, the allotted portion of each side. The implication is that there is a cosmic order the scales merely reveal rather than create. The Achaean scale sinks downward, death-weighted; the Trojan rises. Zeus then reinforces the verdict with thunder and lightning \u2014 the visible confirmation of an invisible judgement. The entire apparatus of divine justice is theatrical: the scales, the thunder, the lightning from Ida. Zeus does not merely decide; he performs the decision, making it legible \u2014 to the gods, to us, but not to the men dying below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This scene will echo powerfully in Book XXII, when Zeus weighs the fates of Achilles and Hector. There, Hector&#8217;s scale sinks, and Apollo abandons him. The structural parallel is deliberate: here Hector rises because fate favours him; there Hector falls because fate turns. The scales are impartial. They do not love Hector or hate the Achaeans. They simply measure \u2014 and what they measure is the distance between human perception and cosmic reality, which is the distance Zeus has been calibrating all day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nestor Stranded: The Arrow of Paris<br>Paris strikes again. Throughout the Iliad, Paris is the soft, beautiful, contemptible figure who started the war, avoids man-to-man combat, and was rescued by Aphrodite in his duel with Menelaus in Book III. But he is also a superb archer, and here his skill creates the crisis that nearly kills Nestor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The wound is described with characteristic Homeric precision \u2014 the arrow hits the horse &#8220;just on the top of its head where the mane begins to grow away from the skull, a very deadly place.&#8221; This specificity is not decorative. Homer routinely gives us exact anatomical descriptions of wounds because the physicality grounds the supernatural action above in visceral bodily reality below. Zeus decrees; a horse dies through its skull.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nestor&#8217;s vulnerability is symbolically loaded. He is the oldest Achaean, the voice of wisdom, the link to a previous heroic generation. Seeing him stranded \u2014 his horse crippled, his squires useless, Hector bearing down \u2014 is the image of the past failing to save itself through force. It needs the young warrior to rescue it. The intergenerational partnership between Nestor and Diomedes, which began in Book VII, deepens here and will become critically important. But what Homer is also showing is that wisdom, however venerable, cannot withstand the current of divine disposition. Nestor&#8217;s counsel has been the poem&#8217;s steadiest corrective force since Book I. On this day, it is not enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Diomedes and the Thunderbolt: The Comedown from God-Wounding<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Diomedes rescues Nestor, mounts the old man on his chariot, and charges at Hector. This is the Diomedes who rampaged through Books V and VI, wounding Aphrodite and Ares himself \u2014 the hero who operated at the very edge of mortal capability, lit from within by Athena&#8217;s fire. But Book VIII is his comedown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Zeus hurls a thunderbolt directly in front of Diomedes&#8217; horses. &#8220;The horses were frightened and tried to back beneath the car, while the reins dropped from Nestor&#8217;s hands.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After wounding gods, Diomedes is now stopped by God. The contrast with Book V is devastating and deliberate. There, Athena empowered him; here, Zeus overrules her. Diomedes&#8217; courage has not diminished \u2014 his circumstances have. Homer is dramatizing a profound idea with surgical precision: even the greatest warrior, when divine favour withdraws, becomes ordinary. The fire Minerva kindled on his shield in Book V is not described as going out. It simply stops mattering. The same man, the same spear, the same horses \u2014 and they cannot advance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nestor&#8217;s counsel to retreat is the voice of pragmatism against heroic pride: &#8220;No man, however brave, may thwart the purpose of Jove, for he is far stronger than any.&#8221; This is not cowardice speaking. It is the accumulated wisdom of a man who has watched heroes die for refusing to read the signs. But Diomedes&#8217; response reveals what drives him \u2014 not the fear of death, but the fear of reputation: &#8220;Hector will talk among the Trojans and say, &#8216;The son of Tydeus fled before me to the ships.&#8217; \u2026 may earth then swallow me.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is pure kleos anxiety \u2014 the fear of being remembered as a coward \u2014 and it is the same engine that drives nearly every major decision in the Iliad. Achilles will express its inverse in Book IX: the rejection of kleos as a currency worth dying for. Here, in Book VIII, we see it in its conventional, unexamined form. Diomedes would rather die than be shamed. Nestor counters with the Homeric pragmatism about reputation: the Trojans will not believe Hector because they have seen Diomedes kill too many of their champions. Reputation, he argues, is built from a career, not a single retreat. It is shrewd counsel, and Diomedes accepts it \u2014 but with visible agony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Girl and Coward&#8221;: The Masculine Code Enforced<br>Hector taunts the retreating Diomedes with a gendered insult: &#8220;Be off, girl and coward that you are.&#8221; The insult is worth pausing on because it connects to themes that run beneath the entire poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hector himself, for all his martial prowess, is defined by his tenderness toward women \u2014 his scenes with Helen in Book VI, with Andromache and Astyanax at the Sc\u00e6an gates, his reference here to Andromache feeding the horses. He is the most domesticated warrior in the poem. Yet he deploys this crude insult without irony. The masculine code is so pervasive that even Hector, who embodies its deepest contradictions, enforces it unreflectively. To flee is to be feminine; to stand is to be male. The code does not make exceptions for the man who weeps for his wife and reaches for his infant son with bloodstained hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This insult echoes forward to Book XXII, where Hector&#8217;s internal debate about whether to face Achilles or retreat and negotiate will involve similar anxieties about appearing cowardly before the walls of his own city. The fear of shame is a recurring engine of tragedy in the Iliad, and Hector \u2014 who has more cause than any warrior to value life over reputation \u2014 cannot free himself from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Threefold Hesitation: Divine Sign and Human Will<br>&#8220;Thrice did he doubt, and thrice did Jove thunder from the heights of Ida.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The structure is beautiful. Diomedes wavers three times \u2014 the ritual number in Homeric poetry \u2014 and each time Zeus thunders as confirmation. The repetition creates a rhythm of internal conflict: heroic impulse versus divine prohibition, the desire to fight against the injunction to withdraw. The threefold pattern will recur at structurally parallel moments: three draws of the lot in Book VII, three approaches of Achilles and Hector around the walls of Troy in Book XXII.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What is notable is that Diomedes ultimately obeys. He yields to divine sign even though it costs him his pride. This will be contrasted sharply with Hector&#8217;s behaviour later in the poem. Hector, riding high on Zeus&#8217;s favour, will refuse Polydamas&#8217;s counsel to retreat inside the walls in Book XII. Diomedes listens to warnings; Hector, in his moment of glory, does not. The difference will be fatal. Homer is constructing a typology of heroic intelligence across the poem: the hero who can read divine signs and the hero who mistakes divine favour for personal licence. Book VIII gives us both, in the same day, on opposite sides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Poppy Simile: Tenderness in the Killing Field<br>Teucer, the bastard archer, shoots Priam&#8217;s son Gorgythion, and Homer compares the dying boy&#8217;s head dropping to a poppy bending under spring rain: &#8220;His head bowed as a garden poppy in full bloom when it is weighed down by showers in spring \u2014 even thus heavy bowed his head beneath the weight of his helmet.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is one of the most celebrated similes in the Iliad, and its tenderness is breathtaking. It takes us from the brutality of battle into a garden, into gentleness, into something almost peaceful. A boy who has barely appeared in the poem is given a death-image of extraordinary delicacy \u2014 and the gift of the simile is also its cruelty. Gorgythion is nobody to us; he matters only as a body falling. But Homer insists on giving him the dignity of a beautiful comparison, as if to say: every death is particular, even the ones we cannot afford to notice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The poppy carries additional resonance. Poppies are associated with sleep and with the drugged edge between consciousness and oblivion. A soldier whose head droops like a poppy is sliding from life to death, from the waking world to the permanent sleep that waits for every man on this plain. The simile does not rage against the dying. It places it within the natural world&#8217;s economy of blooming and wilting, which is somehow more terrible than outrage would be \u2014 because it implies that this death is not aberration but season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Teucer&#8217;s technique is itself worth examining. He fights from behind Ajax&#8217;s shield \u2014 popping out to shoot, then ducking back &#8220;as a child to its mother.&#8221; The simile infantilizes the warrior, or rather reveals the protective architecture of the half-brothers&#8217; relationship. Teucer is the bastard son of Telamon; his legitimacy is precarious. Fighting under Ajax&#8217;s literal and symbolic shadow reflects the structure of his life \u2014 his success depends on Ajax&#8217;s protection. Agamemnon&#8217;s offer to Teucer, promising honours &#8220;next best after my own,&#8221; is both generous and politically calculated: a king trying to motivate fighters through promised rewards because his own authority has been hollowed by the day&#8217;s disasters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Eagle and the Fawn: A Prayer Answered, A Day Unchanged<br>Agamemnon&#8217;s prayer to Zeus is transactional \u2014 he reminds the god of his investment, like a donor calling in a favour: &#8220;He never let his ship pass your altars without offering the fat and thigh-bones of heifers.&#8221; Zeus responds not with direct intervention but with an omen: an eagle drops a fawn on his altar. The Achaeans interpret this as divine favour and rally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the irony is structural. The omen does not change Zeus&#8217;s overall plan. He pities Agamemnon&#8217;s desperation enough to grant a brief respite \u2014 a momentary Achaean revival, a catalogue of warriors charging, Teucer&#8217;s archery \u2014 but the day belongs to Hector. The wave-like structure of the book carries its own argument: Achaean rally, Trojan counter-surge, Achaean rally, Trojan counter-surge \u2014 but each Trojan wave is higher, each Achaean rally weaker. The eagle omen is not a reversal; it is a consolation that precedes a deeper collapse. Agamemnon, who in Book I could not humble himself before Achilles, is now begging skyward for scraps of mercy from a god who has already decided the day&#8217;s outcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hector&#8217;s Stone: The Primitive Weapon<br>Hector personally disables Teucer with a jagged stone, ending the Achaean archery threat. The weapon is a stone, not a spear. Hector improvises, using the ground itself as ammunition. There is an earthy, primal quality to the moment \u2014 the greatest Trojan warrior kills not with refined weapons but with a rock, as if the veneer of civilized warfare is being stripped back to something older and grimmer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After Teucer falls, the Achaean defence crumbles. Hector drives them behind their own trench \u2014 a humiliating reversal. The ditch and wall they built for protection now trap them. Hector&#8217;s earlier boast that the wall is &#8220;weak and worthless&#8221; proves prophetic. The fortification meant to keep the Trojans out has become the enclosure within which the Achaeans are penned. It is a precise image for the entire Achaean campaign: the instruments of dominance have become instruments of vulnerability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Failed Rebellion: Armoured Goddesses Who Never Fight<br>Athena literally puts on her father&#8217;s armour \u2014 donning the shirt of Zeus, appropriating his power symbols in a gesture of filial defiance. Hera harnesses the horses. The gates of Heaven open automatically, attended by the Hours. Everything is staged for divine war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then Iris arrives with Zeus&#8217;s threat, and the rebellion collapses instantly. No confrontation occurs. The goddesses turn their chariots and return. The anticlimax is deliberate \u2014 Homer builds enormous dramatic tension (armoured goddesses, the gates of heaven swinging wide, the whole apparatus of Olympian spectacle) and then deflates it with a messenger&#8217;s words. The message is clear: Zeus&#8217;s authority is so absolute that it does not even need to be enforced physically. Words suffice. The golden chain holds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The ring composition is worth noting. Both Athena&#8217;s exchange with Zeus at the opening council and Hera&#8217;s final speech after returning to Olympus contain the identical passage: &#8220;We will refrain from actual fighting, but we will make serviceable suggestions to the Argives.&#8221; The words are the same; the context has transformed. At the beginning, it is strategic manoeuvring \u2014 Athena finding a loophole in Zeus&#8217;s decree. At the end, it is bitter capitulation. Same words, different weight. Homer&#8217;s structural irony operates through repetition that reveals how much has changed between the first utterance and the second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Zeus Names the Future: Patroclus Planted<br>&#8220;Fierce Hector shall not cease fighting till he has roused the son of Peleus when they are fighting in dire straits at their ships&#8217; sterns about the body of Patroclus.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Zeus himself names what is coming. This is extraordinary narrative architecture \u2014 Homer uses Zeus&#8217;s omniscience to plant the seed of Books XV through XVIII within Book VIII. The audience now knows the trajectory: Hector will press the Achaeans to their ships, this will provoke Achilles to send Patroclus, Patroclus will die, and Achilles will return to battle. Zeus is not predicting; he is narrating destiny. The fates are not flexible. They are already written, and the god who holds the golden chain also holds the timeline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is also a crucial characterization moment. Zeus is not merely powerful \u2014 he knows the story. His superiority over the other gods is not just physical might; it is epistemological. He alone sees the whole arc. And Homer, by giving this knowledge to Zeus, gives it to us as well. We watch the rest of the poem not in suspense about what will happen but in dread of how it will happen \u2014 which is, arguably, the deeper and more tragic form of knowing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hector&#8217;s Night Speech: The Hubris of Borrowed Glory<br>&#8220;Would that I were as sure of being immortal and never growing old, and of being worshipped like Minerva and Apollo, as I am that this day will bring evil to the Argives.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hector&#8217;s victory speech is magnificent and doomed. He orders the watchfires, prepares the night camp, speaks with confidence about tomorrow. But embedded in his speech is a wish that reveals his deepest awareness: he wishes he were immortal, knowing he is not. The conditional is everything. Hector&#8217;s certainty about tomorrow&#8217;s victory is expressed through a comparison to the one thing he cannot be. Beneath the bravado runs the knowledge that his glory is mortal glory \u2014 earned in time, spent in time, ended by time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The speech is full of practical military strategy \u2014 unyoking horses, bringing provisions from the city, posting sentries, keeping the young and old on the walls. It is a leader&#8217;s speech, organized and responsible. But it also contains the seeds of overreach. Hector assumes tomorrow will go like today. He does not consider that Zeus&#8217;s favour is conditional, or that the tide of divine support can turn as quickly as it rose. The man who was favoured by fate today does not reckon with the possibility that fate is not loyalty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>His naming of Diomedes as tomorrow&#8217;s opponent is significant. He frames the coming battle as a personal duel \u2014 &#8220;whether brave Diomed the son of Tydeus will drive me back from the ships, or whether I shall myself slay him.&#8221; This sets up the expectation that the war will be decided by individual combat between champions, which is exactly what happens \u2014 though with Achilles, not Diomedes \u2014 in Book XXII. Hector is dreaming the wrong duel. The structure of the poem will correct him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Campfire Simile: Stars, Moon, and the Shepherd&#8217;s Heart<br>&#8220;As when the stars shine clear, and the moon is bright\u2026 the heart of the shepherd is glad \u2014 even thus shone the watchfires of the Trojans before Ilius.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The book ends with one of Homer&#8217;s most famous and most beautiful similes. A thousand Trojan campfires burn on the plain. Homer compares them to a clear night sky \u2014 stars, moon, serene heavens, the joy of a shepherd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why a shepherd? The shepherd is the simplest, most peaceful figure in Homer&#8217;s world \u2014 a man who tends flocks on hillsides, far from war. Ending a book of slaughter and divine terror with the heart of a shepherd rejoicing is an act of profound poetic contrast. It places the violence in perspective: above the campfires, above the war, the stars are serene and indifferent. The cosmos continues whether Troy falls or stands. The beauty of the image does not redeem the day&#8217;s carnage; it makes the carnage look smaller, which is both a mercy and a desolation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The fire imagery loops back to the book&#8217;s beginning. Zeus&#8217;s thunderbolt is fire. Agamemnon fears Hector will set the ships ablaze. The watchfires burn on the plain. Fire is the elemental motif \u2014 divine fire (lightning), destructive fire (ships), and campfire (human community enduring in the dark). The book that opens with Zeus&#8217;s golden chain descending from heaven closes with earthly fires reaching toward the same sky. Between the chain and the fires, men have died by the hundred, a hero has been stopped by thunderbolt, a rebellion has been smothered by a word, and the future has been spoken aloud by the only god who knows it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The shepherd rejoices. He does not know what we know \u2014 that the fires he mistakes for stars are the encampment of an army that will be destroyed, led by a man who will be killed, in a war whose cause is a woman in a bedroom who wishes she had never been born. The beauty is real. So is the ignorance. Homer gives us both and asks us to hold them simultaneously, the way the night holds both stars and fires without distinguishing between them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s the rewrite. The structural difference from the original is that it&#8217;s now organized as a continuous argument rather than a numbered guide \u2014 each section flows into the next, the cross-book references (Book V, Book XII, Book XXII) build the same kind of connective tissue you used in the Book IX piece, and the closing synthesis does what the Book IX ending does: gathers the book&#8217;s images into a single composite statement rather than stopping with a bullet-pointed summary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Book VIII covers a single day of battle, but its real subject is the exercise of divine sovereignty \u2014 and the cost of that sovereignty measured in human bodies. The book opens with Zeus summoning the gods on Olympus and forbidding any divine interference on either side. It closes with the Trojans camped in triumph [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"federated","footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[235,25,39,40],"class_list":["post-612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-commentary","tag-education","tag-homer","tag-illiad"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leshley.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leshley.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leshley.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leshley.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leshley.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/leshley.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":613,"href":"https:\/\/leshley.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions\/613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leshley.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leshley.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leshley.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}