Tag: the Odyssey

Unknown artist and date, The Pilgrimage to Canterbury

4,059 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

There’s an old story within a story told by a pilgrim knight about ancient Thebes and two Theban cousins named Arcite and Palamon.^[1] According to everyone who knew them, no two warriors were more perfect. (more…)

6,299 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Dante’s Inferno

Dante Alighieri’s conceptual map of Hell also lay at the intersection where biblical and classical ideas about the afterlife crossed. Virgil, fellow Italian poet and ancient Roman author of the Æneid, accompanied him during much of his journey, for Virgil was someone who had imagined his own hero Aeneas successfully navigating the underworld. (more…)

5,071 words

“And there was the Odyssey, whose vigorously sonorous, measured numbers gave an intimation of a vanished, clearly articulated and joyous life.” – Hermann Hesse[1]

“An easily forgotten fact of cultural history [is] the radical, white-to-black, up-and-then-down variations in the periodic estimates of men and works. . . . To the Renaissance, Cicero was the supreme man of letters; today he has been banished even from the classroom.“ — Jacques Barzun[2] (more…)

Detail, Arnold Böcklin, Odysseus boasting to Polyphemus, 1896.

1,772 words

Anyone with a decent education knows that the Iliad and Odyssey concern the fall of Troy and the struggle of Odysseus against a series of eldritch terrors on his voyage homeward. The timeless appeal is clear; the style is quite gripping, which especially comes out if one has a good translation or happens to know Greek. (more…)