Iliad 6

Visiting Scholars

Open House | Iliad 6 “War Crimes” with Joel Christensen

We were delighted to welcome back Professor Joel Christensen, of Brandeis University, to join members of the Kosmos Society for an Open House discussion on “Violence and War Crimes in Iliad 6.” As Professor Christensen writes in his Substack post noted below: The story of excessive violence in the Iliad is that of the rejection of conventions meant to make war in some way predictable and ‘acceptable’ to the combatants.… Read more

Word Study

Core Vocab: Xeniā

~A guest post by Janet M Ozsolak~ One of the Core Vocabulary terms of Hour 24 of Gregory Nagy’s The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours[1] is xenos which means, xenos [ξένος], plural xenoi [ξένοι] ‘stranger who should be treated like a guest by a host, or like a host by a guest; xeniā [ξενία] ‘reciprocal relationship between xenoi’; when the rules of xeniā do not work, a xenos risks defaulting… Read more