The iliad

Tuesday

Philip Womack

Bringing Homer into the home: how the Iliad and Odyssey became widely available

From our UK edition

Homer’s ghost is particularly busy, popping up in the dreams of pretty much every poet going. In fact if you are a poet and haven’t been visited by Homer, you may find yourself wondering why you’ve been left out. The cultural reach of the two major poems that appear under Homer’s name – the Iliad and the Odyssey – is undeniable. I teach my creative writing students that there are only two stories: the siege and the journey, and there they are, right at the beginning of literary history. They’ve been read continuously for centuries. On my shelves is an edition of Alexander Pope’s Iliad which belonged to my great-great-great-grandfather, in which are still bits of paper put in by subsequent family members.

Tuesday

Stuart Jeffries

The importance of feeling shame

From our UK edition

In several homilies, the late Pope Francis spoke of the ‘grace of feeling shame’. What a strange idea! Nobody wants to feel shame. Adam and Eve, after all, first felt shame only after being expelled from the Garden of Eden. Shame was God’s punishment: they felt ashamed of what had never troubled them before, namely their nakedness and their sexual desires. But what the Pope meant, I think, is absolutely salutary for our age. Shamelessness is ubiquitous. It is the accelerant of social media that encourages us to narcissistically fire up our victimhood to a gimcrack blaze. It is why so many of us are chained to the brazen idea that we can never be wrong. It’s the seeming life strategy of the most powerful man on Earth.

Friday

Philip Womack

Two excellent books that offer new insight into The Iliad

The Iliad, Homer’s extraordinary epic poem, begins with Apollo, the god of light, zooming down from heaven “like night,” bringing plague to the Greek camp before Troy. Many days later, after the Trojan Hector’s funeral rites, the poem ends, at dawn. The light god brings darkness; dawn brings the doom of Troy. Such are the ironies that underpin the epic, revealing it as a work of supreme artistry, probably composed by one hand alone. For decades, I have lived in the light and shadow of The Iliad, reading it at first piecemeal in Greek, then in various translations, then all the way through in Greek (an experience both taxing and exhilarating). My Loeb edition, its prim English translation opposite the raw Greek, is never far from my side.

iliad

Tuesday

Dea Birkett

In search of the Iliad

A wooden horse, a fallen hero and Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. These three things transformed a hillock in Asia Minor into a legendary city. Few places can conjure up such stories of love and loss, homesickness and heroism, gallantry and grief as Troy. Over 3,000 years after Homer wrote in The Iliad of the 10-year siege of King Priam’s mighty citadel, I’m standing on an unremarkable patch of scrubland in northwestern Turkey. This unpromising site claims to be the real Troy — the very spot where Zeus’s daughter Helen fled to make love to Paris; where the mighty Hector, the Trojan general, fell at the hands of Greek warrior Achilles; and where the giant Trojan Horse entered the city concealing Greek warriors in its wooden belly.

troy

Thursday

A. E. Stallings

Singing to the gods: a millennium’s span of ancient Greek hymns, gloriously portrayed

From our UK edition

We are experiencing a boom of popular books on Greek mythology: Stephen Fry’s Mythos; Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar; Liv Albert’s Greek Mythology: The Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes Handbook, to name a few. Admittedly, Greek mythology has it all: love, sex, murder, incest, cannibalism, magical transformations, pirates, monsters, miracles. Surely some readers, though, will want to go even deeper, to tap into the ancient sources, incorrigibly plural and various. These sources include Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Hesiod’s genesis and who-begat-whom of the gods, the Theogony. (Plus a chunk of ‘Greek’ mythology which we actually get via the Roman poet Ovid.