Greek Epic Poetry

Do You Know What an Odyssey Is?

My title is a question: "Do you know what an odyssey is?" I am asking each of you to ask yourself: "Do I know what an odyssey is?" In learning as in traveling and, of course,...

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”...

The World of the Poet

Man, it is often said, cannot jump over his own shadow. The poet—and by "poet" I mean a writer of imaginative works in verse or prose—leaps over the universe... Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum. I

The Theology of Socratic Piety

"One Being, the only truly wise, does not and does agree to be called Zeus." - Heraclitus This reading of the Euthyphro will grapple with the accusations of impiety leveled...

Myth and the Universal Longing

The Greeks told the tragic story of Orpheus, the son of the great god Apollo. Orpheus was the master of music, the prince of poetry, the one who gave the rites to the mortals for the...

In the Beginning: Hesiod and the First Day of Creation

Perhaps most readers are familiar with the account of the beginning of the universe found in the Bible: “1 God, at the beginning of time, created heaven and earth. 2 Earth was still an empty...

Aspects of Tragedy: Ancient and Modern

In the ancient world the perimeters of tragic vision and experience were clearly established and recognized. One could be quite clear as to the meaning of tragedy and the manifestations of tragic experience and tragic...

Hesiod’s “Works and Days”

The centuries ebb and flow on a cosmic tide between faithfulness and depravity as men commit their lives to a seemingly infinite range of virtuous and vicious acts. Though man tears himself away from the face of God in...

Do You Know What an Odyssey Is?

Odysseus with the Sirens My title is a question: "Do you know what an odyssey is?" I am asking each of you to ask yourself: "Do I know what an odyssey is?" In learning...

A Poem for Men: The Iliad by Homer

The Iliad by Homer, translated by Herbert Jordan (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008) It is noteworthy that when the freedman Livius Andronicus (c. 250 B.C.) gave the Romans their first translation of Homer...