Latest posts
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Epic Poetry After Homer: Virgil, Dante, and Milton
Homer had no model. Whoever the Greeks meant by that name inherited a tradition of oral song but no single predecessor against whom to measure himself, no…
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The Aeneid: Virgil’s Answer to Homer
Virgil began the Aeneid on a commission and died wanting it burned. Both facts matter, and the second is the more honest gloss on the first. Augustus had…
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What Nolan Has to Work With: The Odyssey as a Filmmaker’s Epic
When Christopher Nolan announced that his next film, due in 2026, would be The Odyssey, the reaction told you something about how little most people…
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The Hero’s Journey: How the Odyssey Became the Template for Every Story
Sometime in the late 1940s, a comparative-mythology professor named Joseph Campbell read his way through the world’s stories — the Buddha under the bo…
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The House of Atreus: The Curse That Became Greek Tragedy
No family in Greek myth is as thoroughly damned as the house of Atreus, and no curse in the literature does as much work. It begins with a man who tried…
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The Greek Underworld: What the Dead Taught Odysseus
Halfway through the Odyssey, the most resourceful man in Greek poetry does the one thing no living man is supposed to do: he sails to the edge of the…
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Monsters of the Odyssey: Cyclops, Sirens, and the Map of Fear
Trace Odysseus’s voyage home on a map and you get nonsense: a Mediterranean stretched into a fairy-tale ocean where an island of cannibal giants sits a…
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The Homeric Hymns: The Gods in Their Own Voices
In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the gods are supporting players in a human drama. They lean down out of the bright air to nudge a spear, save a favorite,…
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Penelope and the Women of the Odyssey
Three thousand years before the novel learned to look inside a woman’s mind, Homer built an epic whose hero spends ten years trying to get home to his…
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Helen of Troy: The Face That Launched a Thousand Arguments
“The face that launched a thousand ships” — Marlowe’s line has worn so smooth that we forget how peculiar it is. A face. Not a woman with a will, a…