Apollo, Golden Bronze, (200CE) Louvre A guest post by Kevin McGrath Greetings everyone and welcome to Hour 25. What I would like to do today is to view briefly the first sixty-seven lines of Scroll 1 of the Homeric Iliad and then, prompted by you, to reread some of those lines and images more closely. As you well know the first word of the poem, mēnis, indicates ‘anger’, as both… Read more
A guest post by Bill Moulton It is odd, that a culture that seems to personify every river, creek, lake, spring, meadow, vale, city, region, and sea with a deity shows so little knowledge of the gods of the mountain peaks. The Hesiodic Theogony lists none of the mountains by name and expends only one line of poetry addressing this. By contrast, it names forty-one of the three thousand Oceanides in… Read more
~ A guest post by Myrmidon ~ Fatal Attraction in that Michael Douglas-Glenn Close movie I understand. But fatal attraction in the Iliad? Frankly, I’ve found the idea hard to grasp, and some of the explanations in The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours[1] prompt me to ask some additional questions. What is fatal attraction? How do we know it exists? What kind of attraction? And why would anyone be… Read more
~ A guest post by Myrmidon ~ Apollo and Achilles are ritual antagonists. So how do we explain the strategic alliance Achilles forms with the god early in Iliad Scroll 1? The hero does this through Kalkhas, the seer who received his prophetic powers from Apollo. Achilles further aligns himself with the god when he “swears by Apollo” to protect the seer from Agamemnon. Clearly, in these two events Achilles… Read more