April 15, 2019
by Sean Fitzpatrick
As the heroes of The Iliad are slain in blood, Homer gives each of them an epitaph in poetry, that they may die not as expendable masses, but as men with names. Even as they fall, death swirling round them, the blind poet looks for the monument of man, decrying its absence while railing at [...]
November 29, 2018
by Paul Krause
“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.” The opening words to Homer’s Odyssey are among the most famous and recognizable in Western literature. That beginning stanza captures so much of the human condition and [...]
January 10, 2017
by Tom Jay
In a post-Christian world, ancient wisdom is all the more impressive. It isn’t difficult to see why Dante referred to the ancients as “noble pagans.” Today the noble pagans have been supplanted by militant technocrats. Perhaps our touchscreen techno-culture atrophies our imaginative faculty, which C.S. Lewis believed was the seedbed of faith. We have little [...]
May 15, 2014
by Mitchell Kalpakgian
Homer’s great epic about the family as the center of civilization portrays two different types of woman: women who are pro-marriage and pro-family and women who are anti-marriage and anti-family. Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus who waited twenty years for her husband’s return from war and exile, defends her home from the suitors who [...]
