The Oxford History Of The Classical World

goes against the very nature of the poems to be summarized. Yet this lengthiness is not the result of telling a long and eventfu ...

The Iliad picks a few days only out of the whole story: not the most obvious days (which might be the arrival of the Achaeans, o ...

Achilles Fights Memnon, on a vase by the Berlin Painter of about 490 B.C. At the left Achilles is encouraged by his mother Theti ...

But now, when the son of devious-devising Kronos has given me the winning of glory by the ships, to pin the Achaians on the sea, ...

There is a comparable economy of place. In fact nearly all the Iliad is set in one of four places, distinct in topography and si ...

The Dragging Of Hector's Body By Achilles. On this late-sixth-century Athenian vase the artist expresses several different aspec ...

get killed. During the Iliad the gods travel far and wide, but they always converge on Mount Olympus. There they have their home ...

(6.476-81) The urge to gain heroic glory kills both Hector and his son, for it demands a loser as well as a winner. The Iliad ne ...

The Ransom Of Hector. From the left Priam approaches with attendants bearing rich gifts. Achilles, at ease on his dining couch b ...

(22. 304-5) Hector loses, and yet he still wins immortal fame. He wins it because of the quality of his life and of his death. T ...

The frameworks of time and place may again prove a way of bringing out some of the 'thematic geology'. The handling of the time- ...

this broad geography: Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred cit ...

C. The cave appears to have housed a cult of Odysseus, which must have been inspired by the story of the hero's return home as t ...

marital bedroom which Odysseus himself made immovable around the stock of a mighty olive. 'They then gladly went together to bed ...

Odysseus (Book 23). But it is not only loyalty which is tested in the Odyssey. It is an overtly moral poem in which villainy mee ...

Homeric studies from 1795 for the next 140 years or more: the dispute between so-called 'analysts' and 'Unitarians'. In 1795 F.A ...

Odysseus And Circe. Greek artists, like the playwrights of comedy, could take a relaxed view of mythical occasions. This cup is ...

The Cyclops' Cave. A unique scene, on an Athenian vase of about 480 B.C. showing the giant Cyclops (Polyphemus) blinded by Odyss ...

means of this system Homer had at his disposal a noun-epithet combination to fit all forms of the names of all his main characte ...

himself takes charge of the guest at once; but here there is a wedding feast in progress and Telemachus is met by Menelaus' henc ...