Iliad

Warfare in Epic Poetry

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...

Homer’s Epic of the Family

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...

Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the “Odyssey” & “Iliad”

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...

Preface to the “Iliad” of Homer

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...

The First Question and The Illiad

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...

Deep Knowledge in a Flat World

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...

Poetic Knowledge of the City

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”...

A Liberal Education

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...

The Man Who Discovered Troy?

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...

Reading the “Illiad” in the Light of Eternity

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

The Poetic Renewal of the World

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...

Celebrating Homer: A Divine Shining

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...

Myth, Sacred Story & Epic: Imagination and Making Fictions

A Reflection on Three Questions Concerning the Re-telling of Sacred Stories and of Myths (An Academically Disreputable Inquiry) Questions:

The Elements: The Key to Understanding the Cosmos

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...