Latest posts
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…