Essentially, this is Robert Graves's version of Homer's Iliad, with some accent-shifting, e. g. he believes that there is a lot of dry humour, sarcasm and satire present in the original which we miss by taking it too literally - for instance, Nestor really is a bumbling old fool, and Agamemnon a pompous manager-figure, who doesn't know how to handle people. All Graves does is bring that out, changing nothing, just letting us see what is there - all we need to do is apply our own standards of judgement to the behaviour we read about, instead of regarding these characters as if they were figures in bas-reliefs. If they seem stupid, they are stupid.