In Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, a Greek war hero faces imposing challenges in his long journey home. After decimating the armies of Troy, King Odysseus sets out for Ithaca only to find himself wrestling against more formidable foes. For ten years the whims of gods and the winds of fate hinder his journey, while a [...]
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 [...]
An odyssey is an adventurous and searching journey, or an intellectual or spiritual quest. It is the proper name for the life of learning. One can shape one’s own odyssey into a journey that lacks neither enchantment nor definition. My title is a question: “Do you know what an odyssey is?” I am asking each [...]
Why should the sins of the guilty cause suffering to the guiltless? If God could prevent such suffering of the innocent victims of sin but refrains from doing so, isn’t he also to blame? Isn’t he in some way an accessory to the sin? In other words, how can a good God permit bad things [...]
Longing for the enchanted world underlies the poetic imagination, but it’s the light of common day that we inhabit, thus we should value realism in the imaginative realm… One of the themes of frequent discussion at Wyoming Catholic College is Charles Taylor’s idea of disenchantment—the disappearance in modern times of an “enchanted” relation to the [...]
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 what [...]
It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I [...]
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 [...]
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? […]
In the midst of the tumultuous trials of the modern age, and in a world as dangerous and unpredictable as the sea, T.S. Eliot offers in “Dry Salvages” a path of peace, and a road to redemption. As the Second World War raged around him, T.S. Eliot composed the third of his Four Quartets. Conscious [...]
We should learn to cultivate the unwillingness to tolerate the unwitting, untold lie in the soul, and the wit and wisdom to transmute the unavoidable lying of any utterance into the telling lies that reveal truth. The first lecture of the school year is, by an old tradition, dedicated to the freshmen among us. Whether you [...]
1. On Seeing Homer Epic is that kind of poetry—as distinguished from lyric and epic poetry, the poetry of the lyre and of action—which is particularly named after the word, for epos means the word as uttered in speech or song. Hence in reading the Homeric epics we certainly should, in addition to attending to the [...]
The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Joe Sachs (Paul Dry Books: Philadelphia 2014) Joe Sachs’ brief introduction to his translation begins, memorably, like this: “I’ve never met a translation of the Odyssey I didn’t like.” He is paying fair tribute to this most imaginatively intricate and compositionally sophisticated of epic poems—whoever has had the hardihood to [...]
The Odyssey of Political Theory: The Politics of Departure and Return, by Patrick J. Deneen Patrick Deneen, an assistant professor of political science at Princeton University, sets out in this book to assess the contemporary relevance of the Homeric legacy, especially the Odyssey. He wishes to avoid both mere pious praise of Homer as the [...]