Nine words, three sentences, and you see Ajax before you and how he is seen by thousands of Greek soldiers. And then that contemporary metaphor linking his war-gear to landing gear: eyelets like runway lights!  Zesty stuff.

See also the bestellar reviews, complete with rich quote-mosaics, of Adam Nicolson’s magnificent Why Homer Matters and Logue’s War Music, a muscular rendition of several books of the Iliad. 

‘Ajax is loved.  I mean it.  He is loved.

Not just for physical magnificence

(The eyelets on his mesh like runway lights)’

Source: Christopher Logue, War Music: An account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of Homer’s Iliad, London: Faber and Faber, 2001, p. 13