A culture that fails to represent, or that misrepresents its wars in all their glory, gravity, and tragedy, is a weaker polity. Epic poetry, with its stark recording of the facts and feelings of war, can give cultures and communities access to the reality of warfare and inscribe its memory on the collective consciousness [...]
This is the ultimate message of Homer’s two epics: Where family is found, life is found; where family is found, true beauty is found; where family is found, piety is found; where family is dissolved, only death and destruction follows... The Trojan War, for our Homeric heroes, begins with marital infidelity and succumbing to temptation, [...]
Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad (326 pages, Paul Dry Books, 2002) "Reading Homer's poems is one of the purest, most inexhaustible pleasures life has to offer—a secret somewhat too well kept in our time. The aim of this book is to tell anyone who might care–first-time, second-time, or third-time [...]
Homer is universally allowed to have had the greatest invention of any writer whatever. The praise of judgment Virgil has justly contested with him, and others may have their pretensions as to particular excellences; but his invention remains yet unrivalled... Editorial Note: This essay was originally published as Alexander Pope's Preface to the Iliad of Homer. The [...]
To the extent that I am a human person, Homer’s Iliad speaks to me, but my particular circumstances are my own. As a result, a great question will help all people, including me, and so might be applicable to my peculiar place in space and time without being exhausted by it… In one week I’m [...]
A hero is someone you admire to the point of losing sleep over. A hero is one the ancients were tempted to worship, with the ardent hope that some of the strength from his dead body would seep into the ground and make their crops fertile. A hero, you admit, is better than you [...]
What we need today to re-create the beautiful city, an icon through which to see the glorious City of God, is a new Iliad, a new story that will manifest “what the many do together,” for what the many do together “rarely lacks a certain nobility, or beauty”… In his Metamorphoses of the City, [...]
Liberal arts, taught correctly, are essential in a liberal democratic republic. A liberal arts education can prepare citizens for life in a republic that cherishes its liberty… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Miguel Monjardino as he explores the necessity of a liberal education to a democratic [...]
In 1870, Heinrich Schliemann went to the Troad, the northwest corner of Asia Minor, and made up his mind, against all current scholarly opinion, that Priam’s Troy lay buried under the hill called Hissarlik… In the year 1822, a lad was born in Germany who was to turn the spade work of archeology into [...]
It is impossible to love both the victors and the vanquished, as the Iliad does, except from the place, outside the world, where God’s Wisdom dwells… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Cicero Bruce as he considers the Iliad in light of eternity. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Glenn Arbery as he contemplates the importance of poetry to a well-formed soul. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher Last year when Dr. Kevin Roberts and I first met with the senior class in a course we were co-teaching, Dr. Roberts asked [...]
The question of Homer’s existence is a little like the question of God’s. There, unquestionably, like the universe, are the Iliad and the Odyssey: But how did they come to be there? Were they composed by a single author, or were they gradually pieced together, as the classicist Richard Bentley said in 1713, from [...]
A Reflection on Three Questions Concerning the Re-telling of Sacred Stories and of Myths (An Academically Disreputable Inquiry) Questions: Are there canonical sources—gold-standards—for myths, and how would we recognize them? Should our re-visioning of sacred persons and mythical people stay true to the standard version? Should there be myth-dilations? […]
The study of mathematics here at St. John’s begins with Euclid’s Elements, the wonderfully inventive book that takes us from the simplest beginnings of geometry to the highly complicated construction of five Platonic solids. Studying Euclid engages us in an activity that brings geometrical objects into being even as we recognize them for what [...]