Latest posts
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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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The Invention of Jesus: From Galilean Preacher to God
Somewhere around the year 30 of the common era, an itinerant Jewish preacher from the Galilean hills was executed by the Roman authorities in Jerusalem,…
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Why Dante Put His Enemies in Hell: The Politics of the Comedy
We are taught to read the Divine Comedy as a spiritual epic — the soul’s journey from the dark wood through Hell and Purgatory to the vision of God.…
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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…
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The Invention of Julius Caesar: How a Man Became a Myth
On the Ides of March, 44 BC, a balding fifty-five-year-old Roman politician was stabbed twenty-three times by a group of senators at the foot of a statue…
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Dante’s Inferno: A Traveler’s Guide to Hell
“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.” So begins the most famous…
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Achilles: The Hero Who Chose a Short, Bright Life
Achilles knew. That is the detail the popular image of him — the invincible warrior, the heel, the rage — tends to bury, and it is the detail…
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Norse Myth vs Greek Myth: Two Ways to Imagine the Gods
The Greek gods are immortal. The Norse gods are doomed. Everything else — the temperament, the humor, the moral weather, the kind of hero each world…
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Homer: The Complete Works — Why Read All of Homer in One Volume
There is a moment in the twenty-second book of the Iliad, just after Achilles has run Hector down beneath the walls of Troy, when the narrative pauses to…
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After The Odyssey: Where to Go Next in the Greek Classics
Finished the Odyssey? Here’s a roadmap through the Greek classics and beyond — the Iliad, the Trojan saga, the tragedies, Hesiod, and Dante.