I'm already 3 essays in and I haven't even cracked open the book yet. This is a bad sign. I promise we'll get moving, we might even make it all the way through Book 1 of 24 today. What makes a person great? Why should one person follow another? If someone has put their life... Continue Reading →

How do you keep a thousand ships worth of men on a foreign beach for a decade? How do you convince fathers, sons, and brothers to abandon their families, farms, duties, and other personal ambitions to risk their lives and lay siege to a city whose walls were reportedly built by Poseidon himself and would... Continue Reading →

As I mentioned in a prior essay I’ll do my best to neither assume knowledge of, nor import too much information from extra-textual stories about the Trojan war when discussing the primary topics of interest in this series. I think it worth a moment to make a brief catalog of things that are either explicitly... Continue Reading →

I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I made it into my 30s before I learned the truth about the Iliad. It's not the story of the Trojan war. Perhaps I wasn’t listening in the 9th grade when we read selections from the Odyssey. My recollection is that we were told that The Odyssey took place... Continue Reading →