“Achilles in the Court of King Lycomedes“ (marble, 240). Musée du Louvre. The Greeks’ greatest warrior and a king in his own right, Achilles is the main character and antihero of Homer’s “The Iliad.” His rage at his humiliation by Agamemnon, the Greek high king and commander, during a quarrel over women as war prizes sets in motion the catastrophic events of Homer’s “The Iliad,” about a critical moment in the Trojan War.

The once and future war: Israel and 'The Iliad'

October 15, 2023

Do we believe in coincidence or predestination? Is everything happenstance or is it a case that there are no accidents (Freud) and that “God does not play dice with the universe” (Einstein)?

Is that universe sending us a message by releasing a new translation of Homer’s “The Iliad” by University of Pennsylvania classics professor Emily Wilson just as Hamas savagely attacked Israel and Israel responded with a ferocious declaration of war? It would seem so, for the ancient Greek epic has much to tell us about issues that speak to our time, not the least of which are overweening male pride and rage, power as a zero sum game and stupefyingly bad leadership.

Mourning in America: My big, fat (ancient)Greek tragedy

August 31, 2020

There they were, the first family of the United States, gussied up — with one tennis-ball green exception — in basic black, clashing with the red, white and blue backdrop and looking for all the world like a group ready for a New York cocktail party to which they’d never be invited. There’s a metaphor or two in there somewhere.

A poster to a New York Times article said they looked like a contemporary Addams Family, minus the kindness and the humor. Like Eugene O’Neill’s Electra (more on her in a bit), mourning becomes them.

By Jove! Trump as disrupter in chief

February 4, 2017

God created the world in seven days, the Bible tells us.

It took President Donald Trump only 14 to destroy it.

“Destroy” may be too strong a word. “Disturb,” “disrupt” are better choices. In one of the greatest games men play, politics, he is the lord of misrule, tweeting and executive-ordering us into a new world that may or may not be brave; terrifying the already traumatized “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and insulting world leaders – with the exception of boy crush Vladimir “Rootin’ Tootin’” Putin – in equal stead.

Australians, refugees, refugees in Australia – is there anyone who has not been blasted by Trumpet? ...

Sympathy for Achilles

April 3, 2014

“The “Iliad” may be a giant of Western literature, yet its plot hinges on a human impulse normally thought petty: spite,” Natalie Angier writes in the April 1st edition of The New York Times’ Science section.

Natalie Angier may be a brilliant science writer for The Times, yet she has a long way to go as a classicist and literary critic. In an essay on the possible benefits of spite – I say possible because I don’t think spite is good in any event – Angier goes on to explain that Achilles sulked in his tent, holding a grudge against Agamemnon in part because he took Achilles’ war prize, the woman Briseis. Oh, if it were only that simple.

In fairness to Angier – whose essay is all about the evolutionary role spite plays in fairness – she doesn’t have the time or space in the article to unspool the back-story that explains the bad blood between Agamemnon and Achilles, two of the key figures in the Trojan War.

So here we go...