Hmmmmm...should the blood gush, or merely trickle?

In the course of writing my fantasy novel-in-progress, I've found myself waffling on the extent to which I describe violence in the battles. Not that I'm squeamish, really, but there's a balance to be struck in that kind of thing. But after reading about one-fourth of The Iliad, I've got a lot of new perspective. That work is chock full of passages like this:

"With that he [Diogenes] hurled and Athena drove the shaft
and it split the archer's nose between the eyes - -
it cracked his glistening teeth, the tough bronze
cut off his tongue at the roots, smashed his jaw
and the point came ripping out beneath his chin."

And that's one of the more tame bits of violent description. It makes me partly wonder if all the hand-wringing about violence in our media might not be, just a teeny-tiny bit, a lot of sound and fury over nothing. The Iliad is one of the central works in all of Western Literature, and a lot of it is blood, guts and gore.

(Translation of The Iliad by Robert Fagles.)