Illiad was in our curriculum, too. But I think the worst I gave a shot to were the few works from my country's literature several centuries old that literally over half had to be translated to the modern language for us to understand. It was exhausting to read.

Lol, thanks for reminding me of something with the Achilles bit. We have state exams at the end of 12 year education that are also a requirement for college admittance. There are (were?) two levels of difficulty. I took the higher one. But the lower one had an especially egregious question. It was so controversial, it ended in newspapers, was debated among teachers and politicians alike. The question was which color a certain character's ring was from a book we had as required reading at some point in school. Something, as you can imagine, absolutely irrelevant to test in the final state exams (which test knowledge of the four high school years on multiple subjects).

School systems nowadays suck so much for so many reasons.