This is why I like the Iliad so much. (Perhaps my aversion to the Odyssey has a tinge of the reference to steelmaking in it). I enjoy Bernard Cornwell's stories, his Arthurian ones and am looking forward to the one about Alfred the Great. Harry Turtledove's "Between the Two Rivers" is very underappreciated, I think, and I was set off on this whole post by rereading "Prince of the North", which is the first of the Gerin the Fox books I bought.
Anybody else feel at all the same way?